It’s No Fun To Be Netflix

How the Mighty Can Fall

Eleven short months ago, the CEO of Netflix was featured on the cover of Fortune magazine as their CEO of 2010.

The trait they praised him most highly for was his ability to make quick decisions in a marketplace that was changing all the time.

Now the business press (and 800,000 of his customers who quit the service) are vilifying him for…making a quick decision. The quick decision they didn’t like was to break apart the mailing of DVDs to people’s homes, from the service of streaming content from the internet.  Netflix has since gone back to the old way, but a lot of damage has been done. (You can read more about the story here).

Making mistakes in business is unavoidable–we are human, after all.  What’s interesting to me is how mistakes get made. This mistake, in my opinion, demonstrates “type blindness.”

What’s Type Blindness?

I don’t know the CEO of Netflix, but based on his decisions, I’m guessing he’s a Thinking type and Judging type on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. (Thinking vs. Feeling and Judging vs. Perceiving are two of the four axes measured by the test).

Judging types  like to have their decisions made and done. We’re not big fans of gathering a lot of information–it makes us antsy. We feel more comfortable once the decision is finalized (I am also this type). 

Thinking types make decisions on rational criteria. Given the same set of facts, a Thinking type will make the same decision regardless of the people involved.

You can see how a Thinking-Judging type could have decided to split the DVD service from the streaming service, and decided to do it quickly. The facts support making a decision like this, and the pace of change in this business pressure everyone to decide, and decide quickly.

But the feeling side (how would the customers feel about the decision?), and the perceiving side (did we do enough research about this before we implemented it?) weren’t taken into account. This is type blindness.

Business Rewards Nimble, Quick Decision Making

Except when it doesn’t.

Each type has its blindness. If the Netflix CEO were a Feeling-Perceiving type, he might be too concerned with how people would feel about his decisions, and might also want to delay decisions to gather more information, which causes a whole other set of problems.

So if you’re a Judging type, you need someone around you who’s a Perceiving type to slow you down. And if you’re a Thinking type, you need input from Feeling types so you don’t miss that side of the equation. And vice versa.

Read More About This

This is the part where I plug my book, Your Marketing Personality. You can read about how to find out your own Myers-Briggs type, how to use it in marketing your own business, and how you can be aware of your own type blindness. If it can happen to Netflix, it can happen to you.