Netflix Founder and Executive Chairman Reed Hastings recently revealed the tactic that made his company worth $240 billion. He was speaking to entrepreneur Tim Ferriss on the podcast, “The Tim Ferriss Show.” Mr Hastings said that he has a three-word term for the practice which is known as “farming for dissent,” as per a report in CNBC.
“If you’re a leader, it’s important to farm for dissent, because it’s not normal to disagree with your boss, right? (Normally) we learn deference,” Mr Hastings said. However, he continued, employees must occasionally be “willing to argue” with their supervisors because businesses frequently require novel concepts and innovative approaches to expand.
“Because it’s difficult, emotionally, in most companies to disagree with your manager, we call it farming for dissent,” he added. The Netflix founder said, “We have managers do things like [ask]: ‘What are three things you would do differently if you were in my job?'”
Before taking on the role of chairman at Netflix last year, Mr Hastings led the company as CEO for more than 20 years. He stated that he would once a year ask “50 top executives” to “write down what would be different” if they were in charge of the company. He experimented with several business tactics using their comments, and some of them were successful and the ones that did not work served as learnings.
Mr Hastings claimed that the worst time of the company, when they attempted to rename its DVD-by-mail service as a distinct business named Qwickster, in 2011, inspired him to ask for critical feedback. Labelling the disaster as his “favourite failure” of his career, he said that he learnt the importance of seeking more input and ideas before making a huge decision.
“We didn’t do much farming for dissent in those days. I was messianic, convinced this is the right move … and, it turned out that lots of people had severe doubts, but they didn’t know the other executives had doubts,” the Netflix Founder said.
According to Mr Hastings, he established a procedure wherein he solicited honest feedback on any “big decisions” the firm was considering from dozens of Netflix managers and executives. “We make everyone (submit a rating), 10 to -10, whether they think it’s a smart idea. If we had done that at the time with (Qwickster), we would’ve seen tons of -7, -6, -8, and that would’ve been shocking,” he said. He added that doing this was a “very positive step” that will help Netflix make better judgements in the future.
