Reed Hastings of Netflix is a co-moderator on the Aspen Global Leadership Network of which I am a fellow and moderator. When I first met him years ago, Netflix at that time was already pretty brilliant and I was gobsmacked when he told us the story. He had spent a fortune in fines on late video shop returns (who hasn't?) and he began to wonder why. So he and his business partners figured that we don't always finish watching movies in a single sitting, that we may change our minds about when we want to watch them and that we may even take more than a day to finish. The convenience economy was in its infancy and Hastings clicked - perhaps he even helped define the world in which elites can use technology to get things to deliver to them. So, Netflix started mailing movies on DVDs (then a revolutionary format) and let lenders have a few days to watch them before returning them to then conveniently placed depots. Roll on a decade or two and now Netflix has taken that knowledge of how hu...
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