On August 1, 2009, the founder and CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, published a PowerPoint presentation on SlideShare, a hosting website for slide decks. The presentation was a kind of manifesto, created by Hastings and his director of HR, Patty McCord, which explained, in 128 slides, the corporate culture of Netflix. Hastings and McCord figured the slide deck might serve as a recruiting tool. Instead, it changed the nature of work in Silicon Valley and shaped the way tech companies have treated their employees ever since.
One of Netflix’s big ideas, and the one that has become the most famous, is contained in this line: “We’re a team, not a family.” With that line, Netflix ripped up decades of conventional wisdom about how to treat employees. The notion of company-as-family has become so widely accepted that it is almost trite. Treating workers like family might seem hokey, but it was the essence of the “HP Way,” the culture developed at Hewlett-Packard, which for decades had been the Silicon Valley gold standard.
But here was Netflix, poster child for the Internet revolution, saying to hell with that. We’re not your family. We’re not your friends. We’re a team. We bring in the best players we can get. If you get cut, too bad. The meaning of “team, not a family” is completely brutal: at Netflix you have no job security. Your boss can fire you at any time. You can be fired even if the company is doing well—and even if you’re doing a great job.
The only thing worse than a diminishing paycheck is none at all. But this is the second of the four factors—insecurity. It’s the new notion, part of the new compact, which decrees that no matter where you work, and no matter how well you’re doing, your job is never secure. You might get fired because the company doesn’t need what you do anymore and can’t be bothered to train you to do something else. You might get fired because your boss thinks you are a bad fit with the culture. One way to be a bad fit is to “value job security and stability over performance,” the Netflix code says. People who cherish job security “feel fearful at Netflix,” and the company engages in a process of “helping [them] realize we are not right for them.” In other words, the more you fear losing your job, the more likely you are to lose your job.
When you do get fired you’re not supposed to get upset. In an interview on NPR, McCord recalled being flabbergasted when a woman she was firing burst into tears. “You’re crying?” she scoffed at the woman. To McCord and to others who share her vision, a job transition, even an involuntary one, is simply a fact of life—a transaction, like switching banks, or changing from Verizon to Comcast for your cable TV.
Of course that is hopelessly unrealistic. The inconvenient truth is that most people, no matter how accomplished or how resilient, find it incredibly painful to get fired. Shrinks say that when we get fired we experience emotions similar to the ones we feel after the death of a friend or a loved one.
You know what’s even worse? The fear that you might lose your job. People who live with the uncertainty and dread of losing a job end up suffering even more psychological harm than people who just get fired. Low job security correlates with all sorts of problems, including higher rates of depression and suicidal thoughts. Unfortunately, nearly half of us now live with that gut-wrenching, depression-causing, anxiety-inducing fear, according to Conference Board, a research group, which has been tracking workers since 1987 and found job insecurity on the rise over that period of time.
McCord and others like her would like to crank the stress up even more. Essentially they have created a real-life experiment in organizational behavior: what happens to the human lab rats if you make them live with constant fear?
The “team, not a family” notion is not McCord’s only appalling innovation. In 2018 she published a book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, that elaborated on her vision. In her book, McCord explains that employees should no longer expect their managers or anyone at the company to help them with career development or acquiring new skills. The company doesn’t have time for that. “Managers should not be expected to be career planners. In today’s fast-moving business environment, trying to play that role can be dangerous,” she writes.
A company also should not bother putting a struggling employee on a performance improvement plan and giving them a chance to get better. Instead, just fire them right away, McCord says. McCord also advises HR managers not to worry so much about documenting workers’ shortcomings before firing them. Just get rid of them! They won’t dare to file a lawsuit. McCord explains this in a section of the book with this very reassuring title: “People Very Rarely Sue.” Good to know. McCord also devotes a chapter to “The Art of Good Good-byes.”
In McCord’s version of reality, people are not supposed to mind getting fired. You can fire someone, tip their life (and the lives of their spouses and children) upside down, and yet there should be no tears. Everyone should remain friends. She actually seems to believe this happens. In her book, McCord describes running into a designer whom she once fired and recalls how they had “a great catch-up” that ended with a big hug. “I loved her then and still do!” McCord writes. She seems to assume that the jilted designer feels the same way about her. I’d give that one a little more thought.
McCord peppers Powerful with stories about firing people and takes pride in how well she performed—the executioner recounting how skillfully she swung the sword, how quickly and cleanly she lopped off the head. There were “hundreds,” she once told an interviewer, adding that she doesn’t like the word fired and prefers to talk about people “moving on.” Many of the people she “moved on” were doing good work. Netflix just no longer needed them. McCord didn’t understand why some of them got so weepy about it. Why couldn’t they just move on?
It’s hard to overestimate how influential the Netflix culture deck has become. Since 2009, it has been viewed nearly eighteen million times. Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, once said McCord’s code “may well be the most important document ever to come out of the Valley.” According to TechCrunch, a Silicon Valley news blog, the Netflix code has become “a cultural manifesto for the Internet’s economic epicenter” and a “crystal ball into the future of daily life” in the modern workplace.
Yet the whole “team, not a family” thing is obviously stupid and even more obviously a lie designed to dress up an appalling corporate policy—we’re cruel assholes who treat our workers poorly—as something desirable. Netflix claims to be operating a “high-performance culture,” with standards so high that many people simply can’t measure up. According to the culture code, Netflix is “like a pro sports team,” which needs to “have stars in every position.” In recent years Netflix started saying that while a lot of people get fired at Netflix, “there’s no shame in being cut from an Olympic team.”
Good. Fucking. Grief. Where to begin with such overweening self-regard? First of all, this is Netflix. They make some TV shows and provide streaming movies over the Internet. They’re not putting a man on the moon or tinkering with the human genome to find a cure for cancer. Second, the company has nearly five thousand employees, and many are customer support call center reps, some of whom make as little as $14 an hour. These are not professional basketballers earning millions of dollars a year or members of the Olympic ice hockey team.
For the record, professional sports teams do not, in fact, have stars in every position. Moreover, the best pro sports teams succeed exactly because the players feel like a family. Listen to members of the legendary Boston Red Sox squad that won the 2004 World Series: “The group of guys, the family, it wasn’t just a team,” says one. “We’re a family, and you go to battle with your brothers,” says another. Here’s Tom Brady of the New England Patriots: “So many of the guys I’ve shared that locker room [with] are really my family.” In fact, “Lots of great sports teams really do feel like families,” says Sam Walker, an expert on sports and leadership and author of The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams. Walker says the “family feeling” might not be necessary, but that “Most of the elite teams I studied were close. Teams that tend to overcome huge odds are usually really tight-knit.”
Hastings and McCord may think their culture is great, but Netflix workers don’t exactly share their opinion. On Glassdoor, a website where employees anonymously rate employers, Netflix garners a score of 3.7 out of 5. That’s lower than Google, Apple, and Facebook, even lower than Ford Motor Company, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and ExxonMobil.
The desk jockeys at Netflix complain about a bruising environment with high turnover and rapid burnout. One call center worker wrote on Glassdoor: “Everything, from the time you spent in the restroom, to the time you spent on a certain type of call, is broken down to the second and charted. Honestly the most hostile environment I’ve ever been in.” To be sure, some happy Netflix employees rave about the company. But the gripes like these stand out: “The amount of people who got fired for the FIRST THREE WEEKS I was there was unbelievable.” “The culture document is really a PR document.”
One thing that Netflix doesn’t seem to value is diversity. Only 4 percent of Netflix employees are black, and only 6 percent are Hispanic, while 49 percent are white, according to Netflix’s most recent annual diversity report. (Another 24 percent are Asian, 4 percent are “other/multiple,” and 13 percent are listed as “unidentified.”) In Netflix’s “tech jobs” category—meaning the coveted engineering positions, which tend to pay better—only 2 percent of workers are black, and 4 percent are Hispanic. In the top ranks it’s even worse. Seven of the company’s eight top execs are men, and all are white. Netflix may be a “team, not a family,” but if so, the team looks like the Brooklyn Dodgers before they signed Jackie Robinson.
Despites its obvious shortcomings, McCord’s culture deck has spawned a host of imitators, with dozens of companies creating “culture codes” that borrow Netflix’s ideas—as well as its hubris and self-regard. Cambridge-based HubSpot, where I worked, created a culture code that plucked parts of the Netflix deck verbatim, including the “team, not a family” line. Spotify’s code includes a photo of McCord and a quote from her—“Culture enables success, but it does not cause success.” Spotify’s version of “team, not a family” is a claim that to protect the company’s culture, “firing is also crucial.” Patreon’s culture deck echoes McCord’s language about “high performance” and says only “world-class talent” gets retained. Financial start-up eShares claims the company is “managed like a professional sports team,” with groups that are “loosely coupled, highly aligned,” a phrase from McCord.
Culture codes have become a thing, and it’s an icky, stupid, pointless thing. As Tom Peters once told me, “As soon as you put it down in writing and put it up on a wall, you’re screwed. That’s not culture.” Harvard psychologist and author of Presence Amy Cuddy talks about “insta-culture”—the notion that a company can make up a code, go buy a Ping-Pong table, and voilà—they’ve got a culture. Real culture takes time.
You can peruse dozens of corporate culture decks online. If you are going to read through them, you should consider putting on a raincoat and a face shield, like people in the front row at a Gallagher show, because you’re about to get splattered with buckets of sanctimonious new-economy corporate goo. They all say a lot of the same things. They’re a team, and managers are coaches. They like ethics, honesty, empathy, transparency. They are remarkable, adaptable, passionate, curious, and fearless. They are the best of the best, yet they are “ego-less” and humble. They celebrate success and learn from failure. They like freedom and hate rules. Oh, and finally: they’re all unique. Every one of them. There’s a name for this kind of earnest but mindless marketing guff: I call it meaningfullessness. The people who write culture codes have mastered it.
A problem with “team, not a family” is that when companies embrace this notion they sometimes start to take a perverse pride in firing people. Firing someone used to be (and still should be) a rare, unfortunate occurrence, a measure of last resort that both the employer and employee would prefer to avoid. But now at some companies firing people has become a badge of honor, even something to brag about.
Contrary to what McCord would like to believe, some people suffer terribly when they get fired. Trust me, I spent months reading letters from people who had read Disrupted and wanted to tell me their stories. No one, not a single person, felt sanguine about getting fired. They were hurt. They were bitter. They took it personally. Steve Jobs once said in a commencement speech that no one wants to die, and that “Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.” Similarly, even people who had been miserable in their jobs and wanted to find better work still felt angry and hurt about being fired. The termination might have come as a relief, but it also felt like a final insult.
And the pain can last a long time. People don’t just bounce back and get over it. Twenty-something Xavier (not his real name) got booted after only seven months from a company with a Netflix-inspired culture code. He hadn’t done anything wrong. It’s just that the company hired a new vice president, and the new guy wanted to free up some headcount. “I have no clue why they hired you in the first place,” the VP told Xavier. The VP probably never gave this another thought, but Xavier says the experience “was a crushing blow for me, not just professionally, but personally. It sent me into an unbearable depression I had never experienced before. For a year, I was reeling.”
A woman I’ll call Renata was fired from the same company after only five months. It was her first job out of college, and she had been hired to work as a recruiter. Ambitious and eager to get ahead, she asked for extra assignments and thought things were going well. But one day, without warning, her twenty-something boss called her into a meeting and fired her. The reason? “You just don’t seem excited enough,” the boss said.
Renata had no idea what this meant. The boss didn’t offer to give her a second chance, or to help her do better, or to find her a different role in the company. “She told me that she was doing me a favor, because recruiting was not my life passion, and now she was giving me an opportunity to explore a different field instead,” Renata recalls.
Her boss told her to leave straightaway, without even clearing her desk. The company would mail her belongings to her. She should just take her coat and go. She stumbled out of the building, wondering what had just happened. “I was confused, and panicked,” she says. “In the short term I was worried about how I was going to pay my bills. But I was also panicked for the long term.” She worried about how the five-month job would look on her résumé and how she would explain what had happened to future employers. She feared that maybe she was not cut out for corporate life. “I felt like a total failure.” Months later, even after she found a new job, the experience of being fired and the way her boss had carried out the execution still haunted her.
This Isn’t a Career; It’s a Tour of Duty
One big and influential fan of the Netflix “team, not a family” model is LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, one of the billionaire oligarchs of Silicon Valley. In 2014, when Hoffman was touting his book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, he even borrowed McCord’s language when he published an article in the Harvard Business Review titled “Your Company Is Not a Family.”
Like McCord, Hoffman has positioned himself as a management oracle who can teach non-techies how to mimic the success of Silicon Valley. He takes the Netflix code and pushes it further, imagining a new compact in which companies can hire and fire at will, and where there are no “careers,” only short-term gigs.
Some tech start-ups use job insecurity and the fear of being fired as a management tool. In this effort they have enlisted a powerful weapon: stock options. Most workers forgo part of their salaries in order to get stock options. Pick the right company, and your options might one day be worth millions. But you need to survive for four years in order to get your full option grant. Most of us dread getting fired, because it means losing a paycheck. Get fired from a hot tech start-up, and you lose more than a paycheck. You might be giving up a paper fortune. That pot of gold becomes a powerful incentive.
As the dollars get bigger, so does the stress, especially when employers take advantage of the leverage they’ve gained. In the hands of a bad employer those options can make people incredibly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. That is reportedly what happened at Uber. For several years after its founding in 2009, Uber was the hottest tech unicorn in the world. Getting a job at the San Francisco ride-sharing company was like winning a golden ticket. But Uber’s managers took full advantage of that. Uber became a toxic, stressful place to work, with bullying, allegations of sexual harassment, and a notoriously cruel culture.
“It’s a money cult” is how a former worker described Uber to BuzzFeed in 2017. “People are putting up with massive amounts of abuse, mental abuse.” Workers tolerated the punishing grind because they didn’t want to lose their stock options. “The equity, people see that as their future, their retirement, the reason they moved to America, or why they moved across the country,” one former employee said.
In Uber’s culture of fear, employees were overloaded with work, forced to come in during the middle of the night to handle emergencies, and sometimes humiliated by managers in front of their peers. Some suffered panic attacks. A few were hospitalized, BuzzFeed reported.
For Joseph Thomas the pressure was too much. Thomas was a thirty-three-year-old African American software engineer who got recruited into Uber. Thomas thought he’d arrived in the promised land, but within months became so stressed out that he committed suicide. He left behind two young sons and a wife, who blamed his suicide on the stress of his job. “Joe was shutting down,” Zecole Thomas recalled in USA Today. “He was broken. He would say, ‘I feel stupid, they’re all laughing at me.’”
Zecole Thomas hired a lawyer and filed a complaint, blaming the company for her husband’s death. When newspapers wrote about the lawsuit, Uber issued a statement saying that “no family should go through the unspeakable heartbreak the Thomas family has experienced.” It’s unclear whether the lawsuit has been resolved. Thomas and her attorneys would not comment when I contacted them.
Uber execs might have felt bad about the Joseph Thomas suicide, but the company did not announce any plans to ease up on its stressed-out workers. In an interview six months after Thomas shot himself, Uber’s chief technical officer compared working at Uber to the way diamonds are formed, by being “compressed with heat and pressure for thousands of years. Those who can actually survive and thrive from it come out as diamonds.”
Good grief. No one in their right mind believes this is a healthy way to run a company.
Job Insecurity and Your Brain
Anim Aweh sees the victims of these Silicon Valley sweatshops in her practice as a therapist in the Bay Area. “Some people here are making a ton of money, but their work is demanding,” says Aweh, a twenty-seven-year-old social worker who counsels young tech workers. She works a lot with people of color, who face unique challenges in notoriously undiverse Silicon Valley. “They’re told to work long hours. They’re competing against one another. It’s a rat race. One woman I work with said, ‘The expectation is that you should just work hard, not work smart. Just do, do, do, do—until you can’t do anymore.’”
Somehow a myth has arisen that Millennials don’t mind job insecurity, that they enjoy hopping to new jobs and even prefer the “team, not a family” arrangement. Well, no. In fact, a “family feeling” is something people, Millennials included, say they crave at work. In a 2015 survey of 2,200 employees, most said they wanted to work for a company “with a family feel, held together by loyalty and tradition,” though only 26 percent said they felt that way in their current positions. The desire for a family feeling wasn’t just the old folks but was “a consistent choice among all age groups,” according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, a UK-based professional organization for HR people, which conducted the survey.
Data suggests that younger workers do not “accept the new psychological contract,” and that job insecurity “appears to be a significant stressor” for Millennials, Washington State University organizational psychologist Tahira Probst found. “Newer workforce entrants still desire job security, despite a decline in the amount of job security offered by organizations.”
A 2013 Pew Research Center report found Millennials value job security and stability even more than Baby Boomers do. Nearly 90 percent said they would stay in a job for ten years if they knew they would get annual raises and the chance to be promoted. Nearly 80 percent said they would take a pay cut in exchange for greater security and stability, according to research by Qualtrics and Accel Ventures.
Job insecurity has always existed, but for most people it was a temporary phenomenon. Your company was going through a rough patch or had merged with another company, and there were rumors of “downsizing,” and for a while you worried about losing your job. In the era of “team, not a family,” however, job insecurity looms over employees at all times.
You may have worked for a boss who used fear as a management technique, presumably in the belief that a certain amount of insecurity keeps people on their toes and boosts productivity. That’s rubbish, according to Tinne Vander Elst, an organizational psychologist at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, who has studied job insecurity for the past decade. Her research shows job insecurity correlates with diminished creativity, lower overall performance and productivity, and higher levels of workplace bullying. Workers who experience job insecurity demonstrate worse health, higher rates of emotional exhaustion, and depression that can last for years. They are more prone to accidents and injury, and more likely to have ethical lapses. They will put in less effort, say bad things about the company, and spend their time looking for a job someplace else.
What’s more, scientists say chronic, low-grade stress may be worse than stress that is more intense but doesn’t last long. Our brains are wired to deal with stress that is intense but brief, like escaping from a predator or fleeing from a burning building. We’re not wired to handle chronic, ongoing stress, even if it is relatively mild. Yet that’s what we get in the “team, not a family” workplace. It’s a human version of the unpredictable chronic mild stress protocol that researchers use on rats, the one mentioned in Chapter 5.
Some pretty alarming things happen to our brains when we live with an elevated fear response over longer periods of time. The fear impedes our memory and can even damage parts of the brain. Two brain scans done at Mayo Clinic show the difference between a healthy brain and a brain during a period of stress and depression. The healthy brain glows with activity, represented by big patches of bright yellow and orange. The stressed-out brain looks shut down, with vast regions of deep blue and dead black, with only a few scattered spots of yellow.
What happens when brains shut down? In Pune, India, a twenty-five-year-old software engineer killed himself and left behind a note that said, “In IT there is no job security. I’m worried a lot about my family.” In 2016, in Seattle, a stressed-out white-collar worker at Amazon leapt off a building, driven to attempt suicide by fear of losing his job. He’d asked for a transfer to a different department, and instead his boss had put him on a performance improvement plan, or PIP, which usually leads to getting fired. After that incident, grieving Amazon employees took to an anonymous app to vent about the stress of living with job insecurity. “I have cried, worked all nighters and have had health issues because I was scared I will be put in PIP,” one wrote.
What Goes Around Comes Around
In a strange but satisfying twist, Patty McCord, the Netflix HR chief, became the victim of the code she created. In 2012, Hastings booted McCord, who had devoted fourteen years of her life to the company and did not want to leave. She barely mentions the episode in her book and doesn’t explain what happened. “It was time for me to go” is all she offers.
I thought her own firing might have been an epiphany and caused her to rethink the “team, not a family” approach. Well, no. McCord admits that when she got fired, “I found the thought of leaving painful,” and “I was not immune to the emotion of the situation.” But the experience didn’t shake her faith. She now runs a consulting practice, helping companies get that Netflix mojo. She has worked with J. Walter Thompson, a giant advertising agency; BlackRock, a giant asset management company; Warby Parker, online seller of hip eyewear; and HubSpot, the software company where I once worked and where I first encountered the “We’re a team, not a family” philosophy.
The funny thing is that even though McCord and Hoffman espouse the idea that people should jump to new jobs a lot, neither of them has been eager to bounce around very much. Hoffman founded LinkedIn in 2002 and remained involved until the company was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. In 2009 he joined Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm, and has remained there ever since. McCord worked at four tech companies over the course of thirteen years, then settled in for a fourteen-year run at Netflix, where presumably she would still be working today had she not been fired.
Also, it’s not clear that the ”“new compact” can create a successful, sustainable business. Hoffman’s company, LinkedIn, grew quickly for a few years but eventually began hemorrhaging money and was acquired by Microsoft. Netflix’s revenues grew 30 percent in 2017, and the company turned a profit, but Netflix also burns more cash than it generates. The company has obligations of more than $28 billion, some of it debt raised by selling junk bonds, a risky strategy that “recalls the dot-com era,” as Crain’s New York Business put it in a May 2018 article. Uber, despite its claims about a culture that produces “diamonds,” stumbled in 2017, specifically because of its culture. After a string of scandals, the board fired Travis Kalanick, the company’s CEO and founder.
The Old Guys
Not so long ago it was considered admirable for CEOs to care about the welfare of their employees and their families. CEOs bragged about providing employees with steady, secure employment. Some companies paid employees more than they needed to, and gave people a chance to move up inside the organization. They created bonus plans and profit sharing, and offered medical benefits and pensions. Firing someone was a last resort. Layoffs were tragedies, and companies tried to avoid them.
I did a quick survey of books by CEOs from the last century. Their views on management and hiring would be virtually unthinkable today. In his 1984 autobiography, Lee Iacocca describes the shame and anger he felt when he was fired from a top job at Ford, and the even greater agony he experienced when, as CEO of Chrysler, he had to lay off thousands of workers to save the company from bankruptcy. The move came at “enormous personal expense for a great many human beings,” he wrote.
Henry Ford, in his 1928 autobiography, My Life and Work, declares that creating jobs and providing as many people as possible with the chance to make a good living was the whole point of building his company. It wasn’t about money, and it wasn’t even about cars—it was about people. Ford built a trade school where kids apprenticed at Ford and got jobs there when they graduated, and he ran a hospital whose mission was to provide good care to working-class people.
Ford once had his executives make up a list of jobs that could be done by disabled people, so that he could create work for them. What jobs could be done by a blind person? By a person with only one arm? “My ambition is to employ more and more men and to spread…the benefits of the industrial system. We want to build lives and homes,” he writes.
Thomas J. Watson Jr., the CEO of IBM, believed the company’s highest priority was its “job security” policy, and boasts that for twenty-five years “no one has lost an hour’s time in layoffs.” If you screwed up at one job, IBM would find you something else to do, Watson declares in his 1963 memoir, A Business and Its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Shape IBM. “We go to great lengths to develop our people, to retrain them when job requirements change, and to give them another chance if we find them experiencing difficulties in the jobs they are in.”
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard served food at the annual company picnic for HP employees and their families. They were proud of the “family atmosphere” at HP. They bought land near the company’s various offices for employees and their families to use for recreation—woods for camping in California, a lake in Scotland with good fishing, an area in Germany that was “suitable for skiing,” as Packard recalls in The HP Way, published in 1995. In that book Packard publishes a speech he gave to managers in 1960, which shows the stark contrast between his view of the workplace and that of people like McCord and Hoffman. Here’s an excerpt (I’ve added the italics):
We have always considered that we have a responsibility to our employees to plan our work so we can assure job continuity. We do not intend to have a “Hire ’em and fire ’em” operation. At times it seems the most efficient way is to hire a group of people, work them as hard as possible, and when the job is finished, send them home. Well, even if this is the most efficient way, we have never operated in this manner. We feel it is our responsibility to provide opportunity and job security to the best of our ability.
Today’s Internet oligarchs might say that the world has changed since those books were written, that the digital age demands different rules of engagement. I think that’s rubbish, invented by people who for the most part have no idea what they’re doing. The tools we use have changed, but human beings haven’t. Dignity, respect, stability, and security still matter. The things those old-time CEOs understood about business and about people are as relevant today as they were in the last century.
Just look at the results. In their heyday, Henry Ford, Dave Packard, and Thomas Watson ran companies that were much bigger and more important than Netflix and LinkedIn are today. Even now, long after Ford, Packard, and Watson have passed away, those companies endure—and in fact make more profit than Netflix does.
Maybe those old guys were onto something. And maybe, if you’re trying to build a company that can last a long time, they are the ones you should listen to. Instead of telling workers, “We’re a team, not a family,” you might consider being a team and a family.