But in just a short period, their methods led to unparalleled speed and boldness, as Netflix quickly became one of the most loved brands in the world.

When Hastings and his team first devised these unorthodox principles, the implications were unknown and untested. At Netflix, employees don’t need approval, and the company pays top of market. At Netflix, you don’t try to please your boss, you give candid feedback instead. At Netflix, adequate performance gets a generous severance, and hard work is irrel-evant. At Netflix, there are no vacation or expense policies. Hastings set new standards, valuing people over process, emphasizing innovation over efficiency, and giving employees context, not controls. Hastings rejected the conventional wisdom under which other companies operate and defied tradition to instead build a culture focused on freedom and responsibility, one that has allowed Netflix to adapt and innovate as the needs of its members and the world have simultaneously transformed. This type of unprecedented flexibility would have been impossible without the counterintuitive and radical management principles that cofounder Reed Hastings established from the very beginning.

But to reach these great heights, Netflix, which launched in 1998 as an online DVD rental service, has had to reinvent itself over and over again. It has led nothing short of a revolution in the entertainment industries, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue while capturing the imaginations of hundreds of millions of people in over 190 countries. There has never before been a company like Netflix.

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