Reed Hastings

Under Hastings, Netflix swapped the usual polished quarterly release for a plain letter to shareholders, followed by a recorded interview, setting out subscriber numbers, forecasts and the reasoning behind big bets on streaming and original shows. It also missed its own forecasts in public and said so. His 2011 apology over the botched Qwikster split was a model of owning a mistake, even if the decision itself was poor.