YouSaid · the spoken record

Patty McCord

lines on the record: 143
first: 2018-01-08
most recent: 2018-01-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I think the pendulum swung, so we're in the middle of another crazy swing, but particularly around here before all of this blew up, remember the mantra was happy, happy employees, right? And so, you know, if they didn't have seven kinds of craft beer, then they might leave for a company that had eight. God only knows we would lose our, I remember an HR person telling me, you know, they're going to walk out the door and they're going to go to a company with a better bartender and more money. Seriously?”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, y Right. And so why does that happen? Why do people, because people like rules, or is it just, you're saying a lot of that's the way we do it? And I think very strong people say, well, why do we do it that way? Like, why is it done this way? Why do we pick this choice? And people just tend to rely on, well, because everybody does.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, when you pay attention, you will realize, right? And so there's two parts to it. One of them is you've got to be an adult moral. In order to surround yourself with other people like that. Right. You just have to do that. And then Other people on the team, not just HR, but other people on the team, must have a role where they say, I need to tell you what I see Right. And so the Netflix culture, that thing about radical honesty was really about Reid and I a lot in the beginning, teaching other people how to say no. Right. Yeah. You know, that's not okay to behave that way. And, you know, the consequences are you're going to have to work somewhere else.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, you know, I really kind of want to go with that. I'm a diva part. But the truth is, we both have the same gift. And it's called pattern recognition. And you do it with numerals and I do it with people.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's funny, one of my executives said to me one time, well, you know, you have this gift. You have this incredible intuition. You have this, you're a diva in that way. And I mean, I really wanted to just leave it at that because he didn't say anything nice about me in like a thousand years. And he goes, you know, I just don't know how you do it, but you'll find somebody in an interview and say, this isn't going to work out. You're the boss. You hire them. But I'm just telling you, and he said, you know, 100% of the time you're right.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he goes, What do you think the biggest problem I have? I said, You're a healthy adult person. I said, That's your problem. You don't see toxicity because you don't behave that way. And so it doesn't occur to you that others are like that. And so you'll be surprised almost constantly. And later he said, oh my God, I was like, you don't, I always see toxicity. Like I always see.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so there are some rules then. So, what are they? I mean, because one of the things I only focus on because there's the most, it's the quintessence of this kind of behavior, which is getting corrected. But when Dara, the CEO, came in, and we had dinner, he called me as an adult. He called me immediately and said, let's have dinner because I obviously had written a lot about it, which I thought was smart and smart to kiss up to the press. There's all kinds of reasons why you call me.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what I mean? And you said your children have no teeth. And you said, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow growth at all, cost growth at all, cost growth at all costs. And when there's no... Consequence to anything and the funds are endless, then you have a license to do whatever it quote whatever it takes. Right.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here too, I think. Enablers is my favorite word of the people. I mean, some of the people who now are sort of horrified with gambling was going on there. I'm like, you gave them the money. Yeah. You know what I mean? And you said your children have no teeth. And you said, grow.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I mean, you write somebody a billion dollar check and they figure they're pretty goddamn awesome, right? And so the people that are writing the checks have some culpability here too, right? I think”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People can't be what they can't see. And if they see their leadership acting like drunken frat boys, Then everybody men and women are going to say, oh, okay, I get that culture. It's called Drunken Frat Boy, right? And so they have to see adult behavior and not just HR teams. HR teams should hold leadership and themselves accountable for living their truth. Right. Right. And so HR people are in the unique position of saying this person is not doing it. It's not going to work out. They have to go. And figuring out a way to make that happen. And it's very often the people that get away with the worst behavior can be someone who is a very high performer.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to see what the right behavior is. It's one of the things that I find, you know, I've been gone six years. So I spent a lot of time, I used to tell somebody, you know, Brandon's my street, I don't work other than Brandon, but now I've expanded.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I remember how shocked I was. I mean, I've been doing this forever. I mean, I was affirmative action officer at Sun Microsystems in the 80s, and we celebrated our diversity up one side and down the other. And when I read Leanne, I was just dumbfounded. I mean, because I knew the data, right, right, right. And it was worse.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People understood her, they didn't at all, right? Or they would say, This sounds crazy. Do you mean I never can take a vacation? And what do you mean? It sounds so cruel and heartless. You know, give me an example of how you guys actually operate. And it changed my role a lot. I still interviewed everybody at that point. I mean, a lot of times in my interview, I would say, you know, Kara, I don't think we're the right place for you. Be a lot happier at Apple. Right, right.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was just to give you a chance to prepare for coming to talk to us and be realistic with you about what life was going to be like when you got there. And it changed the way we interviewed like almost instantly. And the interviews got Instantly better Right now”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's wrong with God? It was our onboarding tool, right? We went through it reading. I would sit down with people and go through it. And I said, well, first of all, I mean, it's just hideous looking graphically, you know, the little arrows and the fonts aren't even the same and not even written in the same voice. And second of all,”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“True story of the day. We're driving into work, and Reed says, Hey, I met this woman last night who's CEO of this really cool company that's putting PowerPoint slides online. Said, well, that's a great idea. Wonder what somebody's going to put out there? And he said, I put the dick out this morning. You do.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You had to, in order to have high performance employees, you had to figure out a way to find them. Right? And then you had to figure out a way when you hired a high performance employee to do an amazing job on a particular problem and then they solve it. What do you do? This I tell HR people, I'm like, you know how you hire somebody to do a job and then they do it, and then it's done.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, you just kept adding it on. Yeah, first of all, now when I go into a company, they slap down the deck and say, We want to do this. And I say, well, roll up your sleeves and let's get started because that's 10 years worth of work. Right, right, right, right. You have to do this.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How about you do some of the things what Netflix is shift the idea, the responsibility to the person, like you are responsible for your job and if you get it done, you can get it done any way you want. I remember talking to Reed about this early on, and I agreed with him completely. I used to say to a lot of my employees, I'm not your mommy. Oh, yeah. I got kids. Yeah. And I'm not even that strict that way either. But it was an interesting concept because then it can be more morphed into a really bad thing like at Uber, like when you don't have adults. That's right.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you take away the rule or the process that says don't let me do the thinking for you. And say, I'm hired you because you were a smart, grown up person who's interested in the problem we're trying to solve. How about you do some of the things?”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I started to realize that's why I named my book Powerful, is that all this stuff about empowering people now, the reason we have to do it is because we took it all away. People have power”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, upon reflection, since I've been gone a while, we already had a culture of adults. I wanted to create a culture where people acted like that.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah. Well, although we'll talk about the downsides to that too. But so you were trying to create a culture of adults, really. That's what you're talking about. People that have responsibility for themselves.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. What I do with my other child. You know, Kara's so funny because when I first did this, all the reporters that came and interviewed me were thinking they were going to get the big new Google scoop. And I remember one guy, I said to him, I'm like, you've been hanging out with me all day. Like, how do they know where you are? You could be at the beach He goes, Well, I'm like, because you're going to write your story and it's going to be on time and it's going to be the right amount of words and it's going to be edited well. And that's how it's the same thing. Yeah, yeah. And I said to him, I said, do you ever go into the offices of the San Jose Mercury News? And he turns bright red and he goes.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the real HR person in me says, Have I ever really fired anybody for being tardy or absent at quarter a million dollar salary a year? You know, sometimes”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And people could take off when they want, but in order to do that, so the addiction for me about how I changed my job was I had to figure out, wow, that's a great idea intellectually and conceptually. How is it really going to work? So then I had to change the focus of the management role from keeping track of when people were at work. To keeping track of was stuff getting done.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know So I couldn't find in California a statute and said you had to be paid time off exempt in place already in place So we discussed just not having it.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, Of course, you do. Everybody's got paid time off. I mean, you know, I am an HRIS at that time, right? That person is on my right shoulder going, of course you have to. It's best practices. And then the person that hang around with him for eight or ten years at this point, I said, you mean legally?”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We get audited, right? We're public. We get audited. KPMG comes down there like, don't like your travel policy. We don't like your time off policy because it's an honor system and it all falls to the bottom line and we're basically paying people 13 months a year. We don't like that. The Sox people came in and said, this is unacceptable. Here are five examples of acceptable vacation policies you can have. And I had like flexible time off because I don't care why you take it off. So then Reed came in one day and he said, and I was mad about that. He said. Do you have to have paid time off”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't want to do that. That's what companies do. The whole point was that was my mission, right? Let's do what we say we're going to do. Let's talk about behaviors. So then that was a conversation that lasted. Quite a while. Our executive staff about, well, of course, you have to have vacation policies. I mean, everybody does. And that sort of started the seed of my rebel HR world. So like when”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's time for some of those rules, it's time for those processes. I mean, I remember our CEFO sent me, oh, by the way, you know, here's our travel policy. Attaches a travel policy and the expense policy. I'm going to send it out this afternoon. Reed told me you had to look at it. Now, this was after we had written the part about high performance employees and freedom, you know, so that was when I was like, wait a minute, if I have adults who are really smart and really capable and we want them to operate, you know, in a high performance way, why do they have to go ask somebody in finance? If they spend it foolishly, well, no, right? Why do they have to go through a third party to book travel to LA?”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, over time, right, once we realized the business was viable, that we might actually make it and that we were starting to see scale, And we got a team in of professional executives. We're starting to feel that pain and pressure that all startups feel about while we're a public company, we're going to have to grow up.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of roll things through and say, What do you think about this? Is it true? And the biggest Thing that we did that was different this time was we wrote it down. So that chapter on the behaviors that we value, we rewrote six times when I was there. And I'm sure they're still working on Reed's rewritten whole thing as more of a booklet form now. But so we just wrote stuff down and then we started”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the first thing he said was let's do a values exercise. Let's take the executive team off and talk about our values. And at that point, we were up to our ears and work, and we didn't have any money. And I'm like, this is just an utter waste of time. And I don't want to do it as the middle of the Enron scandal, right? I don't want to write down integrity and not act that way. You know what I'll do? Let's write down if we see it what it is, behaviors, not values, not aspirational goals. So that was the first chapter, quotes, air quotes, of the Netflix culture deck. Right. It happened to be a slide deck because that's how Reed liked to communicate at that point. And it would typically happen where he'd come up with a bunch of slides. He and I would argue over them at one-on-ones. Then we'd bring it back to our executive team and we'd edit and we'd mess with it. And then we'd take it back to the rest of the.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wasn't into it. I wasn't going back to do that again. And then he said, tell me one compelling reason why I should do this with you. And he said, let's make the company we always dreamed of.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's no gray, right? So, and I had to lose the HR speak to get any respect from them. So when we sold the company, it was a fine company and just wasn't a great company. We weren't that sad about it. So when Reed called me to join Netflix, I said, I thought that was a really terrible idea and I didn't want to do it. I'd already done a startup with him and I was consulting, so I had time. I knew what he was asking me to do, right? So I said, you call somebody that doesn't know what you're talking about here. I thought that the idea of DVDs in the mail was just incredibly stupid. DVD players cost $800. You know, he's the only guy I knew that had one besides Mark Grandoff, the co-founder. And I just didn't.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's who I was working with every day. And in order to survive, I had to become one of them, right? I had to learn that their world is digital. It's good or bad. It's right or wrong. It's black or white. It's zero or one. And any nuance is bullshit.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We made software development tools for other software engineers, like Snapon tools for geeks. So I was pretty deeply involved in the technology. The other thing that happened for me there was it was just engineers. I mean, that's...”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We took, I would take their employee handbook and our employee handbook, and I'd mush them together and figure out however many policies I could put out that would piss off the fewest amount of people. And that was like my role. And when we sold the company, it was a fine Silicon Valley company. It wasn't any different than any other.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I just did a talk yesterday about what recruitment is and recruitment isn't the act of finding somebody who fits a job description. It's the deeper, what I'm interested in is the deeper ability to put together great teams that get something important done. And it's not the job of HR anymore to be good at it. It's the job of everybody in management. You know, I always say managers only have one job put together great teams that do amazing work on time with quality done. Right. Yeah. So easy. It's so easy. So that's my background. That's how I came into it. And Reid and I worked together at Pearsoftware, which became, which was acquired by Rational, which was acquired by IBM. And we were together about five years and we did four mergers and acquisitions at that time. And so every time we acquired a company, we doubled.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't care about your feelings. It's really, I don't want to counsel you about. You know, I always say, tell your mom, tell your pets. Those are both good listeners. I probably want you to get back to work. So when you're a recruiter, you matchmake, right? And you have this deep need to put together great teams that do amazing work. And so as a recruiter, you don't get all wigged out when somebody leaves because it's an opportunity to find somebody new, right? And you're really interested in the work that people do because you have to understand it to find great people. So that's kind of who I am. And that's how I approach the job. That's how I met Reed. Reed was a CEO of a small startup, Pure Software when I met him. And he hired me, he told me later only because I had the only skill that he thought mattered.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in terms of my background, I think what's relevant is I came at a recruiting. So I'm not on the psychological side of human resources. I mean, people often say to me, you know, no one's ever called me touchy or feely. I don't really care about these days.”
2018-01-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Patty McCord author of "Powerful" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT