Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

Netflix started out by disrupting the traditional video rental model by shipping DVDs through the mail. But even as the company began to corner that market, its cofounder and CEO, Reed Hastings, remained vigilant.40 As I discussed in an earlier chapter, we can reframe questions to generate better answers by focusing on strategy instead of tactics. Applying this principle, Netflix realized it wasn’t in the DVD-delivery business. That was a tactic. Rather, it was in the movie-delivery business. That was its strategy. Delivering DVDs through the mail was simply one tactic among many others—including streaming media—in service of that strategy. “My greatest fear at Netflix,” Hastings said, “has been that we wouldn’t make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming.”41 Hastings saw the writing on the wall—DVDs would soon become obsolete—and tried to stay ahead of the melt on the ice-cream