Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

By: Patty McCord

Narrated by: Patty McCord, Alex Hyde White

When it comes to recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams, Patty McCord says most companies have it all wrong. McCord helped create the unique and high-performing culture at Netflix, where she was chief talent officer. In her new book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, she shares what she learned there and elsewhere in Silicon Valley.

McCord advocates practicing radical honesty in the workplace, saying good-bye to employees who don’t fit the company’s emerging needs, and motivating with challenging work, not promises, perks, and bonus plans. McCord argues that the old standbys of corporate HR—annual performance reviews, retention plans, employee empowerment and engagement programs—often end up being a colossal waste of time and resources. Her road-tested advice, offered with humor and irreverence, provides readers a different path for creating a culture of high performance and profitability.

Powerful will change how you think about work and the way a business should be run.

©2017 Patty McCord (P)2017 Missionday

A lot of good takeaways

A good book for me is one where several key ideas really stick with me. I have trotted out several snippets to my co-workers.
- Treat folks like adults and model the behavior you expect
- Sometimes you hire folks to do a job and they do it. There's no shame if either side needs to move on after that.
- You need to look ahead and build the team you need in 6 months. The team you have might not have all the right skills.
- If you need to let someone go for poor performance, that should not be a surprise to person because both sides should be working on the problem ahead of time.

I enjoyed Patty's tone - no nonsense and cuts right through the typical corp/HR babble.

And it was fun to learn about some of Netflix's history along the way.

Sr. IT Project Manager Joining the Revolution

I'm ready to join the revolution Patty. Very validating & inspiring! Thank you so much!

Interesting insights into the Netflix HR world

Interesting insights into the HR world of an innovative company in a constantly (fast) changing environment.

If you manage people listen to this book!

Thank you, Patty, for calling out the world's need to hand hold employees! One of the best books, I have listened to in a long time. I have implemented several of the suggestion in my company.

Inspiring but not very insightful on practices

The book is very inspiring and also suiting as you understand that building a high productive culture is a process with lots of mistakes. Still, she does not give much of concrete advice on how to build your own culture but more guidelines. Still, I find it though provoking and useful.

Excellent book about culture and high growth companies

I really enjoyed listening to this book. Patty shares openly about the many things she’s learnt and applied at Netflix. What I like is how she takes some traditional ideas and turns them on their head. A powerful book - a fitting title!

Great read!

Quick read that is easy to follow. It will encourage to take risks and create the culture you need to grow.

Thought provoking!

Quite an insightful book and also thought provoking.

The author challenges ways in which we think about HR and put most principles to the test to find out if they holdup.

Great book for who doesn't like conventional HR

Very happy to see that small company agile hr is possible in big companies. Thanks Patty!

Good listen

Nice to see how a successful organizations get things done. Current information which could help any organization make changes to improve the HR function.