Small Business ShowsThe Small Business ShowHow embracing company culture can propel entrepreneurs to greater success – Patty McCord

How embracing company culture can propel entrepreneurs to greater success – Patty McCord

For entrepreneurs, a strong company culture sets the tone for the entire organization. Patty McCord, keynote speaker, author, and executive coach, joins us on the latest episode of The Small Business Show. McCord is known for her co-authorship of the Netflix Culture Deck, a document on Netflix’s corporate culture approach, and it serves as a guide for numerous organizations. McCord has been featured on Harvard Business Review, NPR, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal. 

A culture deck serves as a means of summarizing a company’s mission, core values, and ideal operating procedures. It’s something that many businesses contemplate when they get serious about culture and want to produce artifacts that help their employees understand it.

Key Takeaways

1. As a culture pioneer, McCord and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings developed Netflix’s company culture deck as an onboarding statement outlining the company’s ideal workplace from 1998 to 2012.

2. McCord encourages early-stage companies to write down the behaviors they want to see within each other that they believe are the proper ways to operate. 

3. McCord asserts the key to creating a thriving company culture is first to consider what kind of values you want to develop and then determine how to get there. 

4. “Culture isn’t what you say; it’s about what you do,” believes McCord. “You have to be very careful because it boils down to the participation and collaboration between everyone in the company,” McCord continues. 

5. Furthermore, McCord understands that if you work in the entrepreneurial space, you will encounter different cultures in every area, but that doesn’t imply that they are good or harmful. 

6. The most crucial thing McCord wants business owners to understand is that their company culture and values will evolve. “If you’re trying to be successful, you must change.” 

“The most important message I can leave is not to fall in love with who you are right now when everything is going well. But, be aware of the smoke of nostalgia." – Patty McCord

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Jaelyn Campbell
Jaelyn Campbell
Jaelyn Campbell is a staff writer/reporter for ASBN. She is a recent honors cum laude graduate with a BFA in Mass Media from Valdosta State University. Jaelyn is an enthusiastic creator with more than four years of experience in corporate communications, editing, broadcasting, and writing. Her articles in The Spectator, her hometown newspaper, changed how people perceive virtual reality. She connects her readers to the facts while providing them a voice to understand the challenges of being an entrepreneur in the digital world.

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