MASTER'S MINDSET

It’s hard to believe Netflix is 20 years old. When Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded Netflix (formerly known as Kibble) in 1997, the company appeared to be little more than an upstart DVD rental business whose only real value proposition was the mail-order element of its operation. Fast forward two decades and Netflix has become one of the biggest TV and movie studios in the world, with more subscribers than all the cable TV channels in America combined. How did Netflix go from renting movies to making them in just 20 years? By consistently doing the obvious. For Netflix, however, doing the obvious rarely meant taking the easy way out. It meant making business decisions that were so difficult and so ambitious, few people could even see them, let alone understand them. Netflix has innovated in several key ways. They started with a frictionless DVD rental business facilitated by the internet, developed an entirely new streaming business from scratch, and finally invested in origina...

September 16, 1985 and 1997: Twice on this day, Steve Jobs makes significant moves with regard to his career at Apple. In 1985, he quits the company he co-founded. Then, a decade and a half later, he officially rejoins Apple as its new interim CEO. In terms of the emotions associated with those historic occasions, it’s hard to think of two more polarizing days in Jobs’ life. Steve Jobs leaves Apple in 1985 The story behind Jobs’ 1985 departure is, by now, well-known. After losing a boardroom battle with John Sculley — a CEO Jobs recruited from Pepsi a couple years earlier — Jobs decided to leave Apple, feeling forced out of the company he started. After weeks of rumors that Jobs would quit and set up his own rival company — prompted by a flurry of sales of his AAPL stock holdings, totaling $21.43 million — he officially departed on September 16, 1985. He took with him a number of Apple employees to start NeXT Inc., his follow-up computer company. NeXT never became the success Jobs hope...

  Asian Paints is India’s number 1 company in paints when it comes to fundamentals since the 19s. Since its listing in 1982, it has grown at a CAGR of 28% and has given 1800x returns to its shareholders. It roughly doubles every 3 years. If you look at the current scenario, just in 1.5 years, the business doubled. How a paint company could do this over a span of 50+ years? How could they be so strong despite not being the number 1 quality paint company? How are they constantly outperforming their peers? Well, here’s the story: Champaklal Choksey did a brilliant move by removing the distributor and the wholesalers as they were taking off 20% of the margins of the company. They simply kept dealers who could directly sell and to whom they had to transport the paints. For dealers, this was a tough task to hold such a big inventory. They requested Mr. Choksey to look into this. Choksey did a genius move. He said that our truck would come every 3 hours and replenish the stock. So that wa...

 When Steve Jobs made his dramatic return to Apple in 1997 (after having been fired in 1985), one of his top priorities was reinvigorating not just the company’s products, but the brand’s image. In Apple’s early days, it was known for unconventional marketing. In 1984, the company created one of the best known TV commercials ever with its ad for the Macintosh, inspired by George Orwell’s book “1984,” which showed a heroine smashing a screen with “Big Brother.” But Apple’s brand had become unfocused in his decade long absence, Jobs said in a 1997 talk given to employees. “The Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect,” Jobs said. “We need to bring it back.” For inspiration, he turned to Nike. “The best example of all, and one of the greatest jobs of marketing the universe has ever seen is Nike,” Jobs explained. “Remember, Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes. And yet when you think of Nike, you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, they don’t ever talk a...