I spent my entire working life surrounded by technology and innovation when I was at Netflix I got to spend many years creating and living a culture that's admired around the world it's a place where brilliant people thrive and create it's a culture I'm happy to tell you is alive and well and they're still pushing the boundaries of how we think about work so when I love Netflix I sort of went on this world journey to discover what the world of modern day work looked like the world outside of my backyard outside of the Silicon Valley
so now I travel and I meet with startups and corporations business schools and CEOs that startup world it's every cliche you imagined and more I have seen at work hammocks swings cats and bartenders I've been to lovely buildings of large companies with gourmet restaurants and art collections I get to debate venture capitalists and professors it's a terrific journey but here's the really weird thing we still pretty much all of us do the people stuff the way we always have I was at a conference on women and technology at Twitter not too long ago Twitter and
the room was full of bright business women and engineers and the subject of pay equality came up because it always does and one of these days maybe I won't have to talk about that on stage anymore but someone in the audience raised their hand and said how does a woman ask for a raise and I said seriously have you been binge watching Mad Men again it is not the 1950s that's not how it works anymore we change that stuff up in the 60s most companies have complex compensation systems with salary bands merit increased budgets bell-curve
distributions and if you join a firm and you're paid 20% below what you're worth in the open market for talent you will never catch up the math of a six and a half percent merit increase budget simply doesn't work in your favor horrified she said are you telling me I have to leave my company to get paid what I'm worth yes because unless your company realizes that it's beyond food or fun or foosball but simply paying you fairly might be the good way to start keeping you it's your career I told her own it it's
shocking really how little has changed out there it's like we never question anything we just pile more stuff on we want to feel our car employees are contributing like they feel like a part of a team like they're engaged so we do an employment engagement survey it's a form that you fill out anonymously of course and then we take the results of that engagement survey and we turn it into global corporate initiatives and then we set out to empower you you know empowerment where I touch you with the magic wand and I sprinkle you with
corporate fairy dust and I declare you're empowered do you know why we have to empower people at work now because we spent decades taking it away from them with rules and process and handbooks and procedures we think we have to teach people now how to find at work what they walk in the door with every day power the power to be great you know I've found that if you expect mediocre tea that's precisely what you'll get but if you expect excellence you'll be surprised what you get even from mediocre people what if instead we gave
people the context to operate like business owners maybe they'd start acting like business owners we could teach them how to read a profit and loss statement how to read a business and they could understand the machine and what their part is in it what if we had imagined we had teams of powerful independent people at work they understand the business and what success looks like you picked them because they do believe in them they picked you because they believe in what you're doing what if then we said we're expecting you to come into work every
day and contribute with your hearts and your minds and your creativity when did we begin to fear and suspect the people that work for us what happened to the trust between us maybe we killed it off slowly with the annual performance review you know that horrible contrived process that we've all come to believe is the best the only way to give people feedback about their performance at work and determine their pay hands up everybody who loves the annual performance review yeah that'd be nobody because everybody hates it the givers the getters the administrators we don't
even measure whether or not it improves anybody's performance or the performance of our businesses but we all do it pretty much the same way seriously can't we do better than that I mean don't get me wrong feedback about performance is really important it matters a lot it helps us be better it helps us get better it's really effective when it's real and it's in the moment what it includes telling you what you do right not just what you do wrong there's got to be a better way to do that so at one of my startups
we're practicing with a new way of doing it they're requiring they're mandating that people have one-on-ones with their manager every week and every fourth one-on-one is about performance from the manager to the employee and the employee to the manager and sometimes they include other team members it allows them to make corrections in the moment and reward impact it's real and it's alive now I know you're all thinking that's really cute but it's too simplistic and that'll never work in our corporation but isn't there some place somewhere some dark corner you can let somebody experiment with
it and come up with a better way when I was at Netflix we tried really hard to create an environment where people could do their best work where innovators could innovate I remember when Steve Jobs called Reed Hastings our CEO and asked if we could create a video streaming application for what he referred to as the transformational device we now know it as the iPad we had tough deadlines but we made it and it was a terrific product and everybody was using it so I came flying into our product meeting one morning I was full
of excitement touch technology it's amazing it's so primal it's so human to point your finger at something and have it begin to play last night I was at a restaurant in the two-year-old sitting next to me was streaming Sponge Bob in his highchair I can't wait until I walk into my media room and I swiped my wall and something begins to play and around the room they started riffing like jazz musicians musicians oh we won't make you get up no another one said you'll reach in your pocket you'll pull out your smartphone yeah and on
the phone will be an app the mood ohmmeter and you'll put your thumb on that app and it will say Oh patty are you sad and instantly a romantic comedy starring all my favorite and actresses and actresses will begin to play and I'll feel better and I looked around that room and I realized that I was surrounded by the kind of people that if you came up with a great idea and you put the right team together you could make almost anything happen and I started to think about them you know in a Raiders are
different they approach work differently they never look back they look forward and imagine what might be they don't try and make anything a little bit better they make mistakes they move fast they break stuff they get rid of stuff that gets in their way and I realized I had become one of them I no longer spoke HR I didn't care about best practices or initiatives or engagement I cared about the pride that comes from being part of an amazing team that accomplishes amazing stuff that's what makes people happy at work and I'm here in front
of you today to start a revolution because it's time because we have to the very nature of work has changed we can't predict the future things move fast our computers are in our pockets we're on the go why don't we start by telling each other the truth job security is over retaining people is a measure that might not even matter we have to learn to question all the layers of process and approvals and compliance we have to remove the obstacles that stand in our way and slow us down and take away our spirits we have
to begin to think of our careers as journeys the places we want to go the things we want to learn we should each of us think about where do we want to go and how do we want to travel I want you to start your innovation journey today by going back and questioning the why of what we do at work and finally and most importantly have the courage to throw away the stuff we do that simply doesn't matter I'm serious this is my revolution you should join me thank you
