Manual Labor's Netflix Moment

At a recent reunion of Netflixer's, it was glaringly obvious that my path had strayed a bit from most of my ex-colleagues. At this point, I've grown accustomed to the ribbing that accompanies giving up Hollywood for tomato farms. Fair, but Netflix's story has more in common with Tendrel than one might assume at first glance.

 

I'd joined Netflix a decade ago, when the company was better known for its ubiquitous red envelopes than streaming or Stranger Things. I saw firsthand as they went from a rented office in Beverly Hills to taking over multiple blocks of Hollywood. How they did it warrants a feature film of its own, but a few highlights:

 

 

Netflix shifted us from DVDs and cable boxes (remember those nightmares?) to a world where we have entertainment at our fingertips, 24/7. Gone were the wait lists, late fees, and queues in favor of bits and bytes streaming over the internet, to whatever devices we so chose.

 

Our frontline industries are on the cusp of a similar tipping point. Every site I visit, there are troves of information, but scattered across clipboards, whiteboards, storage boxes, and spreadsheets. Shifting all of this into a unified platform unlocks the next era for manual work; read on...

 

Herein lays the power of digitization; beyond the convenience, simplicity, and cost-savings, it's the latent data that's captured that can supercharge your decision making. Despite competitors that had a hundred year headstart, Netflix used its mountain of data to determine what territories to launch, shows to make, and IP to acquire, digging a deep moat in the process.

 

Now imagine having real-time intelligence on workers, processes, assets, bottlenecks: shifting from a best guess to a calculated decision, matching the right person to the right job at the right time. Data points in isolation are not impactful; connecting the dots is when patterns start to emerge, turning visibility into actionability.

Netflix put the power of choice into the hands of consumers, each with an experience tailored just for them. Netflix never adhered to traditional demographic slicing (e.g. male, age 18-34) but looked for patterns in clusters of data: how one's past decisions and preferences inform what they'll want next. Said another way, what makes you, you?

 

With the right data, we can do the same for our frontline workforces. There's a misconception that manual work is the same as unskilled work. But these jobs, and the people doing them, have layers of nuance. As we better quantify each individual's skillsets, operators can shift from brute force to targeted proficiency, and in doing so empower one person to do the work of many.

 

Netflix freed its users from the constraints of scheduling; no longer did viewers need to wait for a TV show’s airtime or be stuck with only what’s on at the moment. More profoundly, the company also unlocked whole sectors of the entertainment industry that had been overlooked because it could see patterns no one else could.

 

This is where the future of work starts to get interesting. Once you've mapped the baseline, you can identify where to fortify. Maybe it's retraining your workforce or retooling the process or reallocating production. Over time, this ground truth data will spotlight where (and when) to layer on automation, sensors, AI... with specificity and intent and a clear ROI.

 

One of Netflix’s greatest strengths was its ability to scale. Whether it's one person watching in your living room or millions tuning in simultaneously, the experience remains smooth. Netflix’s infrastructure was built for scale from the beginning, allowing it to grow intentionally and exponentially. Nearly ten years ago, they went from a handful of countries to 200+, overnight, with the flip of a switch. 

 

So why haven't we seen that same revolution for manual work? Because there's no middle ground: either spend on an expensive, disruptive, rigid LMS or get relegated pen & paper. To scale efficiently, you need to be able to start as big or small as necessary, from one single process to a site's operations to a network of facilities across the supply chain.

 

Netflix's market cap recently crossed $300 billion, more than all of its Hollywood competitors combined. But that's is a drop in the ocean compared to the trillions of dollars that gets pumped through our frontline industries every year. Just imagine what those companies could look like with the data, analytics, and algorithms of a Netflix -- now that's a world worth building for.

 

Ex-Netflixer & Current Tendy,

Akash