Reed Hastings of Netflix is a "2-in-1" leader worth study
Paul Nunes and Tim Breene share insight on what they call 2-in-1 leadership:
They not only grow their current business but simultaneously develop the next one that, ultimately, will enable a graceful transition from the first. It is one thing for great leaders to successfully confront great challenges. It is quite another for them to rapidly scale a successful business and conceive, grow and manage another at the same time — especially when they know the new venture may cannibalize its parent. We call this change from one successful core business to another "jumping the S-curve" and we're betting that we'll be seeing a lot more leaders like Hastings doing it.
The Hastings they're referring to here is Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix. Hastings is at the center of a quiet media empire, doing his part to shake the foundation of distribution with little red envelopes. But he didn't make "Businessperson of the Year" for the disc by mail program. He made the list for doing everything he can to destroy it.
In the last two years, Hastings has executed the Netflix streaming service across mobile phones and set-top boxes around the world. This new product category directly competes with the core mail-order model that the company is built on. But Hastings had the foresight and guts to take the risk. Whether he knew he'd be at the helm of the ship steering the industry or not, he's doing yeoman's work as a role model for the audacity required for great leadership in the face of great risk.
Nunes and Breene offer some truly interesting thinking in today's post -- absolutely worth reading today.
