 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference brought to you by Girls in Tech. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at Bespoke. It's at the top of the Westfield Mall. Come on by sometime if you're doing some shopping but we're here at Girls in Tech Catalyst. Really cool convention. We were in Phoenix a couple of years ago, about 700 women, girls, some students that came in and a few men as well. Really talking about great inspirational stories. Unbelievable lineup of leaders telling their stories, how they got to where they were and sharing the information. And we're excited to have our first guest, she's Patty McCord. She's an author of this great book, Powerful. And she used to be the head of HR, chief talent officer in Netflix. Patty, great to see you. Nice to meet you too. Absolutely. So you're going to be speaking in a little bit. So what is your topic on today? The future of work, but mostly I'm going to talk about my experience with work over the last 30 years and that the future of work is right now. We just don't operate that way. So Patty, what do people get right about culture? What do they get wrong about culture? What they get wrong about is they think it's a document. They think if you write it down, you're done. And what they get wrong about it is they don't walk the walk, right? I mean, I know that's simple and cliched, but I can't tell you how many startup CEOs I meet that say, I want to be this and I want to be this and I want to be efficient, right? I want to be straightforward. Well, is there information that you hide from employees and do you show up to meetings on time? Right. And it's also about the stories that you tell what becomes legend and people love those positive legend stories and they forget that like when you screw up we'll tell that story for 10 years, right? And the third thing I think is people get nostalgic and they think they can keep it, especially in little companies. Let's keep the culture the way it is. Right, right. And you cannot do that if you are successful. It's so bizarre that people don't get to kind of do what I say versus do what I do. I mean, this is like one-on-one and it's such a slap in the face when a leader says one thing and then comes like immediately does something different. And you wonder like, how did they end up to be this way when they're saying is break things. Right, right. Well, failing up is a whole different conversation. Oh, God. That will save for another day. But let's take failing up, right? I talked to a CEO who told me, I give everybody who makes a mistake a bottle of champagne to celebrate failure. I'm like, well, that's stupid. But, you know, it only matters if you fail up, if you learn something from it. And that's the demonstrable stories that you tell that become part of your culture rather than you get rewarded with champagne if you screw up. Oh, then the other thing we were talking about before we turned the cameras on are some of just these kind of arcane, old processes that people just put them in. Well, let's start with the fundamentals. I'm going to hire you and you'll have a career for the rest of your life in our company. Big, fat lie has been for decades and we still tell it, right? Second one, we're- Yeah, people still tell that story. They still do tell that story. I've been in Silicon Valley too long. Yeah, me too. But I mean, I travel all over the world now and I hear that story all the time. The second one, which I'll talk about in a minute is we're family. You're not, right? Right, no. It's not family, it's work. It's two different things. You pay me to come every day. That's right. So yeah, so it's not just the processes that are arcane. Like you and I talked about the annual performance review, which is we don't step back like we do with every other part of the business and say, why do we do that? What's its purpose? Is it still effective, right? If it is a process to give people feedback so they'll improve their performance, you do it once a year. Right, right, right. That's really going to make it big and back. And then I'm going to figure out how to pay you based on what you did or didn't do last year. It's just, and particularly for women, I mean, particularly for women, the compensation systems that we have, equal pay, those are issues that we, they're just writing checks. Right, right. Right, how hard can this be? Right, right. To figure this stuff out. And when you do it, it's actually not that much money. So, you know, I'm advocating, I'm kind of on my bully pulpit here, saying people in my organizations in HR, we need to fix the stuff that's broken, own the fact that we broke it and stop talking about it in a language nobody understands. Is there some just like historical legal compliance issues and stuff that keeps things like the annual performance review going or is it just minutia? It's, you know, there's sort of this inward naval gazing thing we do where we go, you know, well, it's best practices because everybody does it. I mean, I talk to people who say, well, it's a legal requirement. Like, no, it's not, right? We don't even ask. Right, right. If there's a law, I, you know, I coach people. You haven't seen it yet. Well, I coach people all the time. Like, when your lawyer says you can't do it, you say, why? And they say, well, it's against the law. And you say, can I see the statute? They're written in English, right? It's not Sanskrit, right? So look at it and say, well, this doesn't, that's not what I read it to say. Well, if you didn't do it, you'd get sued. What's the most recent lawsuit? What was the settlement? How many people sue for this sort of thing? So there's a- Such a business-minded and analytical approach to these questions, right? As opposed to just accepting the status quo. You just said you've been in Silicon Valley all your life. Me, too. And I love innovation and I love being inventive. And I don't want to be on the outside of all this fun. So, you know, it's like, if somebody, like when I was at Netflix, if we could invent a new way of consuming entertainment, then why couldn't I invent a new way of working? Right. Interesting. So I want to take on another kind of hot trend right now, especially with the younger kids coming up, is mission, and mission-driven companies, mission-driven opportunities. And I think, rightly or wrongly, it's kind of like that we're going to have you forever. You know, it's a more and more important reason why people are choosing to go to certain companies. And it's so competitive here, say, in the Bay Area specifically, whereas you're an employer, how do people, how should they look at this? How real is it? Well, first of all, before you blame them, right? Before we blame them, we have to realize that these are the children of burnt out, corporate citizens, right? And they've watched their parents toil and come home, you know, burnt out and upset and empty after careers in the companies that they belonged in that didn't give them back what they promised, right? So I think we all want mission. I don't think it's unusual for them. I think they're just asking for it. We felt like we've had to wait until later in our career to ask for stuff that mattered to us. So I, and the other thing is, I think the companies we're building now are more capable of delivering that. And I don't think that by mission, they're talking about world peace. They just want to know, how do I matter, right? And so for me, that's teaching people how businesses work and what the complexities are and what the opportunities and the challenges are and being part of that, right? So that's what they're asking for. They're not asking for every single day to go home and feel like they've changed the world, you know, for curing, not that curing cancer's a bad thing, I think we should do that too. But we can still feel mission driven by just connecting with our customers and our products and the work that we do every day. All right, Pat, I know you gotta go get mic'd up for your big presentation. So thanks for taking a few minutes of your time. And I look forward to jumping into the book and getting into the deck. Great, okay. All right, Chief Patty, I'm Jeff. We're at Girls in Tech, the Catalyst Conference at Bespoke in San Francisco. Thanks for watching.