Let me ask you a profoundly offensive question.
If you suddenly disappeared from your company tomorrow for a month—no checking WeChat, no approving expenses, no weekly meetings—what would happen to your department? If you suddenly went completely hands-off at home for a month—no urging them to do homework, no checking their mistakes, no enforcing bedtimes—what would happen to your child?
If your answer is, “It would be absolute chaos; the sky would fall.” Then congratulations, you have successfully proven one thing: You are not the engine of this team or family. You are its biggest bottleneck.
Cuts close to the bone, doesn’t it? You might feel aggrieved: “I work from dawn to dusk, personally monitor progress, and even fix their PPT formatting. I’m doing this for everyone’s good!”
But this is precisely your greatest tragedy. You think you are “managing,” but you are merely feeding your own “insecurity.”
Treat Employees Like Children, and They Will Never Grow Up
In the book No Rules Rules, Netflix founder Reed Hastings proposed a highly counter-intuitive, almost anti-human management philosophy: “Context, not Control.”
At Netflix, there are no time clocks, no strict travel expense approvals, and no mandatory company-wide KPIs. This sounds like an anarchic utopia, right? It is not. The underlying reality of Netflix’s “extreme freedom” is “extreme ruthlessness.”
They operate on a core principle: “We only hire adults.” What is an adult? Someone who does not need a whip cracked behind them to know where to run and how to self-evolve.
If you recruit a pack of top-tier wolves, and then you hand-feed them dog food every day, or even personally teach them how to run and how to bite, this is not only redundant; it is fundamentally an insult to top-tier professional competence.
When you micromanage at work, reviewing your subordinates’ emails word by word before they are sent; When you run a 24/7 surveillance state at home, dictating whether your child should do math or language homework first.
The subtext you are actually conveying is simply this: “I think you are an idiot, and you are entirely incapable without me.”
Treat them like idiots, and they will genuinely turn into a spinning top that only moves when you strike it. Ultimately, they stop thinking about “how to do the job well” and instead think about only one thing every day: “how to satisfy you.” Then you look at these soulless marionettes, sigh, and say: “Alas, each generation is worse than the last. I guess I really do have to supervise everything personally.”
This is nothing short of a perfect Stockholm loop.
Organizational Keiko: Instinct Forged Through Training
So, without obsessing over processes or demanding densely packed daily reports, how does Netflix ensure these “adults” don’t run amok?
This brings us to a core concept in Kendo: Keiko. It refers to extremely grueling, highly repetitive daily muscle training. Ten thousand Suburi (practice swings), three thousand Kirikaeshi (striking practice), training every day until the blisters on your hands turn white and the soles of your feet crack.
Why perform such tedious mechanical movements? To forge the correct actions into subconscious instinct. In life-and-death combat, your body does not need your cerebral cortex to issue layers of approval commands; it will independently unleash the optimal defense and counterattack.
The essence of Netflix lies precisely here. Top-tier teams are never aligned by thick “management policies”; they are aligned by the “professional muscle memory” formed after ruthless selection.
The “freedom” from attendance tracking and approvals is built upon the foundation that everyone has undergone the industry’s most rigorous “Keiko” and possesses incredibly formidable individual combat capabilities.
CEO Reed Hastings would absolutely never tell a subordinate product manager “whether this button should be placed on the left or the right.” What he actually does is obsessively instill “Context.”
He tells the entire company hundreds of times: regardless of what methods you use, this is where we are now, this is who our mortal enemy is, and this is the hill we ultimately need to take. After providing this Context, he shuts up completely, handing concrete tactical Control entirely over to the employees’ instincts.
This is a powerful self-organizing system. As long as the direction is correct, without needing layer upon layer of approvals from the central nervous system, this machine can independently unleash a terrifying degree of lethality.
Put Down the Whip Named “Control”
The desire for control is the most addictive poison in this world. It provides mediocre parents and anxious managers with a false sense of security, while silently killing the creativity and vitality of everyone else in the system.
If your team’s operation requires you to scan every blind spot like a radar every day, routing all complex computations through you as a single node, then the ceiling of this company is the physical limit of your personal brain capacity. Can you, alone, outsmart a group of top-tier adults?
Therefore, loosen the restraints on yourself and those around you.
Stop fetishizing trivial approval processes and surveillance software. If you lack even the courage to let go, if missing a subordinate’s daily report for just one day leaves you breathless with panic,
You not only do not deserve a top-tier team or an independent, confident child; You will ultimately just work yourself to death trying to hold together a pile of loose sand.
