Once, in a high school baseball game, Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph was playing second base. When the ball was hit toward the first baseman, Randolph did what he practiced every day and backed him up. The ball eluded the first baseman, so Randolph snagged it and threw the runner out at second. When he returned to the dugout, he was surprised to be met with an enthusiastic round of “atta boys” and pats on the back.
Randolph remembers his exact response to all the praise. “I’m there every play.”
No, Randolph wasn’t bragging to his teammates, he was just being literal-minded. Backing up the first baseman was exactly what he practiced doing time and time again until it became second nature. But he was also trying to relate the lesson he learned on that exciting play. “No one ever sees all the times you do something until the one time you do it and find yourself in the right place at the right time,” Randolph said in a recent interview.
Being prepared for the moment when our biggest challenges and opportunities arise has been a constant theme in Randolph’s life and leadership. As a teenager, he became heavily involved in the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), where he learned that failing to pack for any eventuality might result in a cold night spent in a wet sleeping bag. The point of rigorous nights in the backcountry wasn’t to make you tougher, it was to make you more responsible and better prepared.
“Fundamentally, NOLS is a leadership school that uses the wilderness as a classroom to teach leadership,” Randolph explained. “And it does so in an experiential way. Each time you go out, you’re learning to make real decisions with real consequences and seeing the impact of your decision and your leadership style almost immediately.”
When he co-founded Netflix and became the company’s first CEO, Randolph applied NOLS-style leadership, with its emphasis on semper paratus (always ready), to Netflix, where he established a company-wide policy that any NOLS instructor could appreciate: “Use your best judgment.”
Really? That’s the leadership philosophy and practice behind the company that grew to more than 250 million subscribers and fundamentally altered how the world experienced media? Well, there’s more to it, of course. In the interview with Randolph, who also served on the Netflix board of Directors, and since retiring from the company in 2003, founded or co-founded six other successful startups and mentored hundreds of early stage entrepreneurs, focused the conversation on building a corporate culture that supports strong, well-prepared decision makers. Here are some of the lessons he shared:
Like the well-prepared second baseman and NOLS alum he is, Randolph didn’t leave the construction of this virtuous loop of good decision making to chance. “The most important thing is being surrounded by other people who are of high thoughtfulness and judgment,” he averred. “You can’t take one person and have them surrounded by a bunch of bozos. What people love the most is being a team where everybody is playing at the top of their game.”
