Reed Hastings: Master of Business Transitions

Netflix was supposed to be toast, roadkill on the digital content highway, remember? Most firms might have met that fate when a huge transition had to be made. But that is partly, perhaps largely, what defines business winners from losers: there are some people and companies that actually can manage a transition from one business era to the next, replacing a successfu--but dying--business model with a new one.

Reed Hastings has for those and other reasons been named "number one" on Fortune magazine's "Businessperson of the Year" list. Apple CEO Steve Jobs might also have been a very-strong candidate for inventing yet another consumer product category (the tablet). But Steve Jobs is something more like "Businessperson of the Decade," one might argue.

In January 2005, Wedbush Securities stock analyst Michael Pachter called Netflix a "worthless piece of crap." He put a price target of $3 on the stock, at the time trading around $11. The doubters thought Blockbuster, Wal-Mart or Amazon, with their economies of scale and established customer bases, would simply destroy Netflix. Ironic, eh?

Reed Hastings: Leader of the pack - Fortune Tech