A great book with one very big caveat.

15 years ago I read a book called "Freedom From Command And Control" by John Seddon. It was about the application of lean manufacturing principles to service industries and back office functions. In the book he coined the term "management factory" to describe what a lot of corporate back office functions such as Human Resources too often do. He explained how most HR departments are staffed with people whose entire careers have been spent in HR departments. They've learned HR "best practices" from other HR professionals in their business, on courses and at conferences. Over time this conventional wisdom has taken on a life of its own within the HR culture and may actually add little value to the end customer. He says that what these "factories" make is "management": policies, procedures and standards; controls, forms and data requests. These consume time but it is questionable how much they really help people to thrive.

This idea resonated with me strongly and now in "Powerful", Patty McCord, the former Chief Talent Officer of Netflix, and co-creator of their famous Culture Deck, describes a way to do HR completely differently. She learned her skills exactly as Seddon describes in the HR departments of Sun Microsystems and Borland Software. But when she joined her first start up, Pure Software, working for Reed Hastings who later co-founded Netflix, she began to doubt the conventional wisdom. So when Hastings asked her to lead HR at Netflix she decided to do things completely differently. Netflix wanted to grow very quickly and as McCord says:

"Policies and structures can't anticipate needs and opportunities".

The challenge McCord and Hastings faced was how to scale up rapidly without smothering the innovative, freewheeling culture of the organisation with bureaucracy. They set out to foster a "culture of freedom and responsibility" which would enable people at all levels to make the right decisions without turning to a rule book for direction. Her first four chapter headings describe very well the features of that culture:

• The greatest motivation is contributing to success: treat people like adults;
• Every single employee should understand the business: communicate constantly about the challenge;
• Humans hate being lied to and being spun: practice radical honesty;
• Debate vigorously: cultivate strong opinions and argue about them only on the facts.

In developing this culture they constantly experimented and evolved. They deliberately removed processes to see what would go wrong and only put them back in if things went seriously awry. They constantly encouraged feedback and ideas from everyone in the organisation. The practice of radical honesty - encouraging everybody to give feedback about issues upwards, sideways and downwards in a very timely fashion - was difficult to implement, required considerable work to enable people to do it constructively and didn't suit some later new joiners who quit because they found it too intense. But the people who stayed came to truly embrace it.

The did away with annual performance reviews, performance based bonuses, expenses and travel policies and even vacation policies. They also did without many of the conventional HR policies designed to foster employee empowerment. They reasoned these were only needed when other policies had taken away individual power so the key was to remove the disempowering practices not add empowering ones to mitigate what was wrong.

And it all worked. People didn't abuse the system. Teams operated nimbly and collaboratively. They responded quickly and innovatively to rapidly changing market and technology developments. People were highly motivated and really enjoyed doing great work.

However the second half of the book brings me to my big caveat. These four chapters are about Netflix' relentless focus on attracting and hiring the very best talent to do the job that was needed. And also letting those people go very quickly as needs changed. The former became easy as Netflix' reputation grew as a great place for top talent to work. And the latter was easy since talented people could always find new jobs and having Netflix on the CV made them even more marketable. The question in my mind though is that given not every organisation can employ the very best, and therefore most of us have to lead and manage people with a wide range of abilities, talents and personalities, to what degree did the success of this culture depend on what McCord describes as Netflix' "very high talent-density"? Did the culture of freedom and responsibility only work because Netflix employees are universally talented, self-confident, self-motivated people?

My own intuition is that much of this culture would actually help get the best out of all kinds of people, but only provided that managers and leaders are carefully selected and trained on how to lead, inspire and support individuals with a broader range of skills, a greater degree of self-doubt and less innate drive. But I have no evidence of this either way. McCord has spoken about only hiring "fully formed adults". Some might find this a rather patronising phrase. But if we accept the implied hypothesis that there are many individuals in the job market who do not meet that description how can we lead and what kind of culture will enable those people to become "fully formed"?

I would be very interested to read in the comments any examples readers have of these ideas being tried in organisations with a much more typical "talent density" and the degree to which they succeeded.

Despite my caveat I highly recommend this book. It is a thrill to read and shows what the courage to throw away the conventional wisdom can achieve. I don't know if variants of the Netflix culture are the best way to enable all kinds of people to thrive at work. But I am very confident that current HR "best practice" is most definitely not the best that is possible. So we should welcome this challenge.