What the Hell Was Reed Hastings Thinking? Part 1 of 2

Posted by mhiggs in Blog, Entrepreneurship, Ideas, Landscaping, SoftwareRoundTable | 0 comments

These days I’m gathering a crap load of information and speaking to a crap load of  landscapersNice lovely, helpful and informative landscapers, I might add.. This is just the beginning and it’s going to take a crap load of thinking.

Some friends say I think too much. And you know what…I think they’re right.

But I also think  ’thinking‘specifically productive thinking, unfortunately is a dying art form. Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix did productive thinking right. That’s how he starting shipping 1.5 million DVD titles a day to over 6.5 million subscribers in 2007. But more on that a bit later.

Let’s talk about productive thinking, to do that we need to also talk about reproductive thinking.

Here’s the difference between the two.

Reproductive thinking has three ‘levels’.

Reproductive thinking is needed, but unfortunately it’s often confused with innovation. You see, with reproductive thinking you can make a nice rotary phone betterIf you're born after 1990, ask your parents.; the dial glides smoother, it has an elastic spiral cord, it fits fingers better. But only productive thinking can ever give you an iPhone.

Productive thinking looks for divergent solutions.  It says, “There’s more then one way to skin a cat.”Why would you ever want to skin a cat? That's a horrible thing to do.  That kind of thinking leads to breakthroughs or new product ideas. It  changes not only what we do, but also how we see the world. How to cope with change, while causing change.

Enter Reed Hasting.  1997 he founded a Netflix with the simple idea.  People rent videos on the Netflix website, then the videos are delivered in the mail.  Same retail model as the mom-and-pop shops, he just saved on the overhead of owning a physical store.  Then in 1999…BAM! Productive thinking kicked in an Hastings did something radical.  Rather then renting movies, he rented ‘the ability to watch movies’ (say whaaa…?).

You know how Netflix use to workSince then they've changed their business model again!.  Subscribers would make a movie cue online.  A new disk would ship out when the subscriber returned the last one.  No late fees, No individual rental fees, no postage.

Notice, it wasn’t a big change, it was just a new way to look at Netflix’s customers relationship.

Because of Netflix’s success, many imitators popped up and the whole video rental industry shifted.  All because of productive thinking.

Here’s your take away, productive thinking is a skill.  Which means you can learn it and you can develop it.  I’ll dive more into that in the second part of this series “Do you want more productive thinking?“You know you do, everybody does..

If you interested in this kind of stuff, I would recommend Tim Hurson’s book  Think Better.  I know it has helped me think better.

A quote from EinsteinBecause it gives you credibility when you quote from one hell of a smart guy, right? then I’m out. He said,

Now let’s get back to solving landscapers problems, and the problems of the world (mmuhahahahh…).

~m.

Photo Credit: CarbonNYC