Reed Hastings is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Netflix.
Reed Hastings co-founded Netflix with Marc Randolph in 1998. He wanted to create an entertainment company but in a way that it would not lose its entrepreneurial spirit along the way.
Netflix grew rapidly and its new management techniques got a lot of attention. The employees were paid higher salaries than in the market. Hastings, in his book No Rules Rules, explains introduced many new policies that were previously not implemented anywhere else.
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
In his first book: No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, in which Reed reveals for the first time the unorthodox culture behind one of the world's most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current Netflix employees and never-before-told stories from his own career, Hastings elaborates on these controversial principles at the heart of the Netflix psyche, which has generated results that are the envy of the business world.
“The key is embracing managing on the edge of chaos,” Hastings says. “That’s the message of the book.”
It’s hard to find fault with that approach: Netflix had 193 million streaming customers as of the end of June last year, nearly tripling the base in the past five years.
We take a look at his leadership style in his own words, with quotes from Reed Hastings
“Don’t be afraid to change the model” - Reed Hastings
“Be big, fast, and flexible” - Reed Hastings
“Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is to high” - Reed Hastings
“Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they’ll turn out to be right” - Reed Hastings
“At Netflix, we think you have to build a sense of responsibility where people care about the enterprise. Hard work, like long hours at the office, doesn’t matter as much to us. We care about great work” — Reed Hastings
“The best managers figure out how to get great outcomes by setting the appropriate context, rather than by trying to control their people” - Reed Hastings
“Tomorrow when you come to work, if it doesn’t make the customer happy, move the business forward, and save. us money - don’t do it” - Reed Hastings
