Context

You're seeing it when a board reacts to a single quarter's numbers without considering the competitive landscape, seasonal patterns, or deliberate investment trade-offs. They're reading data without context and drawing the wrong conclusions.

You're seeing it when a manager applies the same feedback style to every team member regardless of experience, personality, or situation. The feedback itself isn't wrong — the context it's delivered in makes it ineffective.

When sharing decisions with your team, lead with context. Explain the constraints, trade-offs, and information landscape that shaped the choice. Teams that understand the "why" behind decisions can adapt intelligently when circumstances shift.

Hastings made "context, not control" the organising principle of Netflix's management philosophy. Instead of telling employees what to do, he invested heavily in ensuring they understood the full context — strategy, competitive landscape, financial constraints, customer data — and then trusted them to make good decisions. This wasn't abdication; it was a bet that well-informed people with context outperform tightly controlled people without it. The Netflix Culture Deck codified this: leaders provide context, individuals make decisions. For founders, the lesson is that control doesn't scale but context does. The more context your team has, the less you need to manage every decision yourself.