Building a culture of information sharing

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 60, No. 8, October 2018, Pages 390-391 Letters
By: Zafar Essak, MD

I recently read an interesting article on the business culture at Netflix in WIRED (www.wired.com/story/reed-hastings-at-ted). In the article, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings spoke about a talk he had given at the TED conference in Vancouver in April 2018, where he had said that “he purposely built Netflix to have a culture of open information sharing after his first company, Pure Software, struggled because it was too obsessed with creating processes to prevent mistakes from happening. ‘We were trying to dummy-proof the system, and eventually only dummies wanted to work there.’”

He went on to say that “The Netflix culture of information sharing builds a sense of responsibility. . . . We’re like the anti-Apple. They compartmentalize, we do the opposite. Everyone gets all the information.”

“That’s why Hastings promotes courage as a fundamental value at the company. We want people to speak the truth, and we say, ‘To disagree silently is disloyal.’. . . It’s not ok to let a decision go through without saying your piece. We’re very focused on trying to get to good decisions with a good debate.”

Is such a cultural change needed at Doctors of BC?

Is the failure to make the cultural change contributing to why Doctors of BC is having difficulty engaging members and other nonmember doctors?

Maybe it’s time not to turn away and watch Netflix but time to listen to what Netflix is doing for success.
—Zafar Essak, MD
New Westminster

Zafar Essak, MD. Building a culture of information sharing. BCMJ, Vol. 60, No. 8, October, 2018, Page(s) 390-391 - Letters.


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