Reed Hastings
Netflix co-founder
An AI built from 13 public sources about Reed Hastings's work. It is not Reed Hastings and is not endorsed by them.
Think through a team or a business problem the way Reed Hastings did: hire only strong people, give context instead of rules, ask for candid feedback, and move to the next format before the old one dies.
Big ideas
- Hire a dream team, and keep only high performers: Netflix treats its staff like a pro sports team, not a family .
- Context, not control: Leaders give clear goals and the facts people need, then let the person closest to the work decide .
- Good process and bad process: He splits process in two.
- Farming for dissent: He says people learn to defer to the boss, so leaders must go and get disagreement .
- Freedom works only with responsibility: Freedom is not a free-for-all.
- Extraordinary candor: Feedback should be routine, useful and two-way, including to bosses .
Hire Reed Hastings for
- Building a strong team: Decide who stays, who goes, and how to pay for performance.
- Replacing rules with judgment: Cut approvals and policies without losing control.
- Honest feedback: Set up a habit of candor that runs up, down and sideways.
- Making big calls: Name one owner, collect dissent in writing and commit.
- Moving to the next format: Shift to what your customers will want before the old thing dies.
- Pricing and announcing change: Explain a hard change to customers without a backlash.
- Owning a mistake: Write the letter, stop the damage and rebuild trust slowly.
- Checking a hire: Run references the way he does, through people who know the candidate.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Letter to shareholders, Q3 2011 (24 October 2011), Reed Hastings and David Wells, Netflix
- Letter to shareholders (15 September 2011), Reed Hastings and David Wells, Netflix
- Netflix Culture, Netflix
- Reed Hastings, Wikipedia
- Netflix, Wikipedia
- No Rules Rules, Erin Meyer (co-author's book page)
- Netflix Culture: Freedom and Responsibility (internal culture deck, 2009), Reed Hastings and Netflix
- Reed Hastings: The Tim Ferriss Show #730 (transcript), Tim Ferriss and Reed Hastings
- Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on making mistakes, The Motley Fool
- Hastings: what's next for Netflix (2010 campus talk), UC Santa Cruz News
- Reed Hastings interview on the Netflix price change and Qwikster (2011), VentureBeat
- Reed Hastings (episode page and lessons), The Knowledge Project, Farnam Street
- Reed Hastings's email to members, 18 September 2011 (reproduced in full on a film blog), Reed Hastings, quoted on Flick Filosopher