My Uber driver last Friday was from Brazil, and we got talking about work culture. He said something that stuck with me: “In my country, if your boss gives you total freedom, people think something is wrong.” That one sentence sent me straight back to the research I have been doing on Netflix – the Keeper Test, the culture deck, the freedom and responsibility principles – because it perfectly explains what happened when they tried to export that culture to the rest of the world. The story I found is far more interesting than the original one.
Netflix’s culture almost broke. Not because of technology or competition, but because the company assumed that what worked in California would work in Tokyo, São Paulo, and Amsterdam. It did not.
Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos, California.
The Tile Question
Reed Hastings learned this lesson decades before Netflix went global. In 1983, as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching math in Swaziland (now Eswatini), he posed a straightforward problem to his students: “A room measures 2 meters by 3 meters. How many 50-centimeter tiles does it take to cover the floor?”
Not one student could answer. Then a boy named Thabo raised his hand.
“Mr. Hastings, sir, please, what is a tile?” — Thabo, Hastings’ student in Swaziland, as recounted in No Rules Rules (2020)
The students lived in round huts with mud or concrete floors. They had never seen a rectangular tile. The math was not the problem. The assumption was. Hastings was trying to transfer his own frame of reference onto a culture where it did not fit.
As he later reflected: “I couldn’t directly transfer my own way of life to the culture of another place.” That lesson, learned at 22 years old in a classroom in southern Africa, would become one of the most important insights of his career. I wrote more about how those two years shaped Hastings’ entire leadership philosophy in this piece on his Peace Corps experience.
A school in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), where Hastings taught math as a Peace Corps volunteer.
130 Countries in One Day
The international expansion happened in stages, and then all at once. Netflix launched in Canada in 2010, then Latin America in 2011, then steadily across Europe and Asia Pacific between 2012 and 2015, opening offices in Tokyo, Singapore, Amsterdam, and São Paulo. Then, in January 2016, Reed Hastings stood on a stage at CES and announced Netflix was launching in 130 new countries in a single day.
The numbers tell the scale of what followed. Non-US subscribers jumped from 40 million to 88 million in just three years. Netflix was no longer an American company with international customers. It was a global operation.
But scaling a product is not the same as scaling a culture. And Netflix’s culture — radical candor, no rules, freedom and responsibility — was deeply American. More specifically, it was deeply Californian.
The Brazilian Director Who Ate Lunch Alone
Leonardo Sampaio, a business development director for Latin America, joined Netflix in October 2015. He flew to Silicon Valley for a full day of interviews. Everything seemed to go well. Then came lunch.
“In Brazil, lunch is a time to build friendships. I was surprised that lunch was scheduled for only thirty minutes.” — Leonardo Sampaio, Netflix business development director, in No Rules Rules
A woman brought him a bag with salads, a sandwich, and some fruit. She left. Leonardo sat there alone, eating his lunch in silence. His future boss did not come to chat with him. No one did.
“To a Brazilian, to be left alone eating lunch was shocking. I thought, ‘Isn’t this the guy who will be my boss? He can’t come chat with me?… I guess this is what Netflix means when they say we are a team, not a family.’” — Leonardo Sampaio, in No Rules Rules
That phrase — “we are a team, not a family” — is one of the most famous lines in Netflix’s culture deck. In Los Gatos, it communicates professional excellence and high performance. In São Paulo, it communicated something colder: we do not care about you as a person.
Brazil is a relationship-based trust culture. People build professional relationships through personal connection — meals together, conversations about family, time spent getting to know each other as human beings before getting down to business. Netflix’s task-focused, efficiency-first approach felt alienating.
To Netflix’s credit, when they heard this story, they changed. The company now invests more time getting to know Brazilian colleagues personally. They did not abandon their culture. They adapted it.
The Dutch Who Overruled Their Bosses
When Netflix opened its Amsterdam office, they expected the Dutch employees to appreciate the company’s egalitarian, speak-your-mind culture. After all, the Netherlands is one of the most direct cultures in the world. Dutch employees give feedback that would make most Americans uncomfortable.
What Netflix did not anticipate was that the Dutch were more direct than Netflix. On the Culture Map — a framework developed by INSEAD professor Erin Meyer that maps national cultures across dimensions like communication style, feedback, leadership, and decision-making — the Netherlands scores as extremely direct in giving negative feedback, highly egalitarian in leadership, and strongly consensual in decision-making.
The result? Dutch employees had absolutely no problem overruling their bosses. In fact, they did it with an enthusiasm that surprised even Netflix. The company’s “anyone can disagree with anyone” principle was not radical in Amsterdam. It was Tuesday.
The Japanese Employees Who Could Not Contradict the Boss
Japan was the opposite challenge. On Meyer’s Culture Map, Japan scores as highly indirect in giving negative feedback and hierarchical in leadership style. The idea that a junior employee should openly contradict a senior leader — something Netflix considers essential — was deeply uncomfortable in a Japanese business context.
Japanese employees at Netflix did not push back against bad ideas in meetings. They did not offer the candid, direct feedback that the culture demanded. This was not because they lacked opinions or courage. It was because their entire professional upbringing had taught them that contradicting a superior in public is disrespectful.
Singapore presented a similar challenge. In a hierarchical culture, employees needed active encouragement to make autonomous decisions — the kind of decisions that Netflix employees in Los Gatos made without thinking twice.
The Culture Map Framework
Meyer’s Culture Map gave Netflix a vocabulary for understanding what was happening. The framework maps cultures across seven dimensions: Communicating (low-context to high-context), Evaluating (direct to indirect negative feedback), Leading (egalitarian to hierarchical), Deciding (consensual to top-down), Trusting (task-based to relationship-based), Disagreeing (confrontational to avoids confrontation), and Scheduling (linear-time to flexible-time).
When Meyer delivered a keynote to 400 Netflix managers in Cuba in 2016, she saw the culture in action. She asked for questions. Hands flew up. She called on the first person who raised a hand — standard practice.
An American woman interrupted her: “The way you are facilitating the discussion from the stage is undermining your message about cultural diversity. When you ask for comments and call on the first person who raises a hand, you’re setting just the type of trap your book tells us to avoid — because only Americans raise their hands.”
Meyer was taken aback. But she adjusted on the fly, asking for comments from representatives of each country instead. As she later reflected:
“There’s no way I would have used this technique at that moment without that feedback.” — Erin Meyer, INSEAD professor and co-author of No Rules Rules
That moment captured something important. Netflix’s culture of candid feedback was not just a slogan. A mid-level employee publicly corrected a keynote speaker — and the speaker became better for it.
The Choice Netflix Made
When Netflix went global, the leadership team studied two models. Google’s approach: hire for cultural fit everywhere, seeking out “Googlers” regardless of nationality. And Schlumberger, a French multinational oil services company, which imported its corporate culture wholesale into every country where it operated.
Netflix chose a third path: both. Hire people who genuinely align with Netflix’s core values — freedom, responsibility, candor, high performance — but adapt how those values are expressed to respect local cultural norms. Direct feedback in the Netherlands might mean blunt criticism in a group meeting. Direct feedback in Japan might mean a private conversation after the meeting, with careful attention to hierarchy and face-saving.
The core did not change. The expression did.
What Netflix Gained
This is the part of the story that I find most compelling. Netflix’s culture did not just survive the collision with global cultural differences. It got stronger. The Brazilian experience taught them that relationship-building is not a waste of time — it is how trust works in most of the world. The Japanese experience taught them that candor does not require public confrontation. The Dutch experience taught them that their supposedly radical egalitarianism was not actually that radical.
Non-US subscribers went from 40 million to 88 million. Today, Netflix operates in over 190 countries. The company that almost failed because it assumed California was the whole world became genuinely global by listening, adapting, and treating cultural difference as information rather than an obstacle.
Reed Hastings learned this in a classroom in Swaziland in 1983. It just took Netflix thirty years to apply the lesson at scale.
Sources
- Hastings, Reed and Erin Meyer. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. Penguin Press, 2020. Chapter 10: “Bring It All to the World!”
- Meyer, Erin. The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. PublicAffairs, 2014.
- Netflix CES keynote, January 6, 2016. Reed Hastings announces global expansion to 130 countries.
- Netflix quarterly earnings reports, 2016–2019. Non-US subscriber growth data.
