We all know NetFlix.  They started out small here in California in 1997, and their domination of the online video rental space in less than 10 years forced longtime market leader Blockbuster into the defensive position of throwing "everything but the kitchen sink" at the company.

I've been a NetFlix customer off and on since the early 2000s.  I'm currently with them, and plan to stay with them because they recently came out with an extremely cool value-add for owners of the Nintendo Wii like me: they have available, free of charge, a Wii disc that allows NetFlix customers to instantly stream both new and older movies to your TV.  This is a great feature for customers who also subscribe to cable TV services that charge extra for on-demand movies, as many of them can be viewed through the Wii under the same, basic $10-per-month NetFlix membership fee.

Customer-centric innovations like this come about in part because of the productive workplace culture NetFlix has built and sustained.  Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder and CEO of successful software company HubSpot, shared on his OnStartups blog yesterday 23 insights from NetFlix's workplace culture deck.  These include such Winning Workplaces-approved tenets as:

• Values defined by who gets rewarded and who is asked to leave.
• Treating people with trust, respect, and fairness.
• Creating mechanisms to solicit and act upon employees' best ideas.
• "Fast failure": recognize mistakes and quickly move on.
• Emphasis on building teams in the workplace.
• Employee leadership development to encourage people at all levels to "behave like an owner."
• Flat hierarchy in which titles don't matter as much.
• Employees in charge of their career development.

A commenter to Shah's post, Matt, shared the link to the slides of NetFlix's culture deck, which I pass along here.  Enjoy!