The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company
✒️ Author: Robert Iger |. 📖 Published: 2019 | 🗓 Read: March 15, 2020 | 📄 Pages: 272
Summary
Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company in 2005, during a difficult time. The competition was more intense than ever and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company’s history. His vision came down to three clear ideas: Recommit to the concept that quality matters, embrace technology instead of fighting it, and think bigger—think global—and turn Disney into a stronger brand in international markets.
Twelve years later, Disney is the largest, most-respected media company in the world, counting Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox among its properties. Its value is nearly five times what it was when Iger took over, and he is recognized as one of the most innovative and successful CEOs of our era.
Why You Should Read
You learn what it takes to be the CEO of Disney. It’s fascinating to look “under the hood” and to understand how Bob Iger made his way to the top.
Notable Highlights
In every emergency I’ve encountered as CEO, I’ve been grateful for the competence and cool heads and humanity of the team around me.
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And I tend to approach bad news as a problem that can be worked through and solved, something I have control over rather than something happening to me.
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Sometimes, even though you’re “in charge,” you need to be aware that in the moment you might have nothing to add, and so you don’t wade in. You trust your people to do their jobs and focus your energies on some other pressing issue.
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Optimism. One of the most important qualities of a good leader is optimism, a pragmatic enthusiasm for what can be achieved. Even in the face of difficult choices and less than ideal outcomes, an optimistic leader does not yield to pessimism. Simply put, people are not motivated or energized by pessimists.
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Courage. The foundation of risk-taking is courage, and in ever-changing, disrupted businesses, risk-taking is essential, innovation is vital, and true innovation occurs only when people have courage. This is true of acquisitions, investments, and capital allocations, and it particularly applies to creative decisions. Fear of failure destroys creativity.
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Focus. Allocating time, energy, and resources to the strategies, problems, and projects that are of highest importance and value is extremely important, and it’s imperative to communicate your priorities clearly and often.
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Decisiveness. All decisions, no matter how difficult, can and should be made in a timely way. Leaders must encourage a diversity of opinion balanced with the need to make and implement decisions. Chronic indecision is not only inefficient and counterproductive, but it is deeply corrosive to morale.
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Curiosity. A deep and abiding curiosity enables the discovery of new people, places, and ideas, as well as an awareness and an understanding of the marketplace and its changing dynamics. The path to innovation begins with curiosity.
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Fairness. Strong leadership embodies the fair and decent treatment of people. Empathy is essential, as is accessibility. People committing honest mistakes deserve second chances, and judging people too harshly generates fear and anxiety, which discourage communication and innovation. Nothing is worse to an organization than a culture of fear.
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Thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness is one of the most underrated elements of good leadership. It is the process of gaining knowledge, so an opinion rendered or decision made is more credible and more likely to be correct. It’s simply about taking the time to develop informed opinions.
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Authenticity. Be genuine. Be honest. Don’t fake anything. Truth and authenticity breed respect and trust.
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The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection. This doesn’t mean perfectionism at all costs, but it does mean a refusal to accept mediocrity or make excuses for something being “good enough.” If you believe that something can be made better, put in the effort to do it. If you’re in the business of making things, be in the business of making things great.
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Integrity. Nothing is more important than the quality and integrity of an organization’s people and its product. A company’s success depends on setting high ethical standards for all things, big and small. Another way of saying this is: The way you do anything is the way you do everything.
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Roone taught me the dictum that has guided me in every job I’ve held since: Innovate or die, and there’s no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new or untested.
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His mantra was simple: “Do what you need to do to make it better.” Of all the things I learned from Roone, this is what shaped me the most.
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It’s not, at least as I have internalized it, about perfectionism at all costs (something Roone wasn’t especially concerned about). Instead, it’s about creating an environment in which you refuse to accept mediocrity.
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It’s a delicate thing, finding the balance between demanding that your people perform and not instilling a fear of failure in them.
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In your work, in your life, you’ll be more respected and trusted by the people around you if you honestly own up to your mistakes.
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It’s so simple that you might think it doesn’t warrant mentioning, but it’s surprisingly rare: Be decent to people. Treat everyone with fairness and empathy. This doesn’t mean that you lower your expectations or convey the message that mistakes don’t matter. It means that you create an environment where people know you’ll hear them out, that you’re emotionally consistent and fair-minded, and that they’ll be given second chances for honest mistakes.
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But I learned something else along the way, too: Excellence and fairness don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
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There are moments in our careers, in our lives, that are inflection points, but they’re often not the most obvious or dramatic ones. I wasn’t sure I was making the right decision. It was probably the safer one, really, to stay at the place I knew. But I also didn’t want to leave too impulsively, because my ego had been bruised or because I had some feeling of superiority when it came to Dennis. If I was ultimately going to leave, it had to be because there was an opportunity that was too great to say no, and the ICM job wasn’t that.
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what do you do in a situation like that? The first rule is not to fake anything. You have to be humble, and you can’t pretend to be someone you’re not or to know something you don’t. You’re also in a position of leadership, though, so you can’t let humility prevent you from leading. It’s a fine line, and something I preach today.
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You have to ask the questions you need to ask, admit without apology what you don’t understand, and do the work to learn what you need to learn as quickly as you can.
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True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.
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Looking back on it now, I’m not convinced I was right. I was applying a more traditional television approach to the storytelling, and David may have been ahead of his time. Deep down, I felt David was frustrating the audience, but it may well be that my demands for an answer to the question of who killed Laura Palmer threw the show into another kind of narrative disarray. David might have been right all along.
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Managing creative processes starts with the understanding that it’s not a science—everything is subjective; there is often no right or wrong. The passion it takes to create something is powerful, and most creators are understandably sensitive when their vision or execution is questioned.
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When I am asked to provide insights and offer critiques, I’m exceedingly mindful of how much the creators have poured themselves into the project and how much is at stake for them.
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I never start out negatively, and unless we’re in the late stages of a production, I never start small. I’ve found that often people will focus on little details as a way of masking a lack of any clear, coherent, big thoughts. If you start petty, you seem petty. And if the big picture is a mess, then the small things don’t matter anyway, and you shouldn’t spend time focusing on them.
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“You’ve created a very special film. I have some specific notes, but before I give them to you, I want you to know we have tremendous faith in you.”
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This is all a way of stating what might seem obvious but is often ignored: that a delicate balance is required between management being responsible for the financial performance of any creative work and, in exercising that responsibility, being careful not to encroach on the creative processes in harmful and counterproductive ways. Empathy is a prerequisite to the sound management of creativity, and respect is critical.
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Of all the lessons I learned in that first year running prime time, the need to be comfortable with failure was the most profound.
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Not with lack of effort but with the unavoidable truth that if you want innovation—and you should, always—you need to give permission to fail.
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You can’t erase your mistakes or pin your bad decisions on someone else. You have to own your own failures. You earn as much respect and goodwill by standing by someone in the wake of a failure as you do by giving them credit for a success.
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I don’t know if other CEOs feel this way, but it’s embarrassing to me, and in those moments I make a point of directing praise and attention to my coworkers. Similarly, when I’m the one attending a meeting with a group outside of Disney, I make sure to connect and speak with every person at the table. It’s a small gesture, but I remember how it felt to be the overlooked sidekick, and anything that reminds you that you’re not the center of the universe is a good thing.
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The way they conveyed their faith in me at every step made all the difference in my success.
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Dan handed me a note that read: “Avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil. You may become the greatest trombone-oil manufacturer in the world, but in the end, the world only consumes a few quarts of trombone oil a year!” He was telling me not to invest in projects that would sap the resources of my company and me and not give much back. It was such a positive way to impart that wisdom, though, and I still have that piece of paper in my desk, occasionally pulling it out when I talk to Disney executives about what projects to pursue and where to put their energy.
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Managing your own time and respecting others’ time is one of the most vital things to do as a manager, and he was horrendous at it.
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At its essence, good leadership isn’t about being indispensable; it’s about helping others be prepared to possibly step into your shoes—giving them access to your own decision making, identifying the skills they need to develop and helping them improve, and, as I’ve had to do, sometimes being honest with them about why they’re not ready for the next step up.
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Michael had plenty of valid reasons to be pessimistic, but as a leader you can’t communicate that pessimism to the people around you. It’s ruinous to morale.
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Don’t let your ego get in the way of making the best possible decision.
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If you approach and engage people with respect and empathy, the seemingly impossible can become real.
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No matter who we become or what we accomplish, we still feel that we’re essentially the kid we were at some simpler time long ago. Somehow that’s the trick of leadership, too, I think, to hold on to that awareness of yourself even as the world tells you how powerful and important you are. The moment you start to believe it all too much, the moment you look yourself in the mirror and see a title emblazoned on your forehead, you’ve lost your way. That may be the hardest but also the most necessary lesson to keep in mind, that wherever you are along the path, you’re the same person you’ve always been.
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