I recently got laid off. We actually got shit done, but the whole place was a mess. Marketing wanted one thing, product wanted another, finance was off doing its own thing. Everyone had their own KPIs and nobody was aligned. Leadership kept saying we were ‘collaborating’ but it felt like nobody was steering the ship. When did leadership just stop existing in this industry?”
— Reader from Seattle
Before I tackle this, I’ve gotten plenty of notes asking where I’ve been. I’ve been off the grid the past few weeks because my company is deep in the middle of a potentially big deal. It’s been nonstop.
Big thanks to Evan, Alan, Kirby, and The Streaming Madman for filling in while I was out. Different styles, same diagnosis. The industry’s cracked, and everyone’s calling it out from a slightly different angle. Loved seeing it.
Now let’s talk about what actually broke.
I’ve been in those rooms. I know what it’s like when the pressure is high, the margins are thin, and everyone’s looking at you to fix it. I have sympathy for the folks wearing the big titles.
But let’s not get it twisted. A lot of people in leadership positions aren’t good leaders. I hope many think I am. I still have a job, so that’s good.
The marching orders used to be messy, but simple enough: chase growth, copy Netflix, build scale. If you were a legacy media exec, your main job was figuring out how to stay relevant in a world where your best content was making someone else rich. So you built your own streamer. Signed splashy talent deals. Talked disruption on earnings calls.
Then came the Netflix subscriber loss in April 2022 that cracked the myth. One earnings report. Billions in market cap gone. And just like that, the rules changed.
Wall Street didn’t want stories anymore. It wanted math. It wanted margin.
Suddenly the job wasn’t “build the future.” It was “prove you’re not bleeding out.”
And that’s when most leaders flinched.
Instead of picking a lane, they picked everything. Raise prices. Cut content. Launch bundles. Build ad tiers. Pull titles. License again. Spin out the cable nets. Re-org. Re-org again. Whatever kept the stock from dropping another five points that quarter.
And while the C-suite chased safety, the rest of the org turned into little kingdoms.
Marketing is optimizing for reach. Product is building for retention. Ad sales is chasing revenue per minute. Content is chasing prestige. Finance is chasing runway. And all of them think they’re driving the strategy.
Nobody’s rowing in the same direction because nobody’s telling them which direction matters. Leadership keeps calling it collaboration. But it feels a hell of a lot more like abdication.
You want to know what that does to a company? It kills speed. It kills trust. It kills focus.
You’ve seen this in other industries. Yahoo, which tried to be everything and died doing nothing. GE, which let every division run wild until the whole thing collapsed under its own complexity.
When departments chase their own KPIs without alignment, they build a system that eats itself. They make decisions that look good in isolation but break the business in aggregate. It’s how you end up launching a bundle that undercuts your own product roadmap. Or selling your most-watched shows while trying to boost retention. Or cutting teams that were actually performing, just not loudly enough.
You didn’t get laid off because you failed. You got laid off because the people above you never agreed on what winning even meant. And when nobody’s accountable for the big picture, the cuts always start with the people doing the actual work.
So yeah, I have some empathy. This industry’s in triage mode. But I’ve been around long enough to know this: real leadership shows up in the fog. Not when things are clear—when they’re hard.
And right now? Most executives are just trying to make it to the next quarter with their job intact. Which means you’re not wrong. It really does feel like no one’s steering the ship.
Because in a lot of places, no one is.
Skip Says
- The Netflix playbook collapsed. So did the illusion of leadership.
- No alignment, no strategy. Just departments fending for themselves.
- Bad org structure isn’t an accident. It’s a cover for fear.
- You didn’t fail. You got caught in someone else’s confusion.
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