The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company

by Robert Iger

My instinct throughout my career has always been to say yes to every opportunity. In part this is just garden-variety ambition. I wanted to move up and learn and do more, and I wasn’t going to forgo any chance to do that, but I also wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of doing things that I was unfamiliar with.

I flew back to New York and sat down with my wife. We’d agreed before I went out there that I wouldn’t make any final decision without our talking it through first. This job meant living in L.A., and we had a life we loved in New York. We’d just renovated our apartment; our girls were at a great school; our closest friends were in New York. Susan was an executive producer of news at WNBC and one of those New Yorkers who never want to live anywhere else. I knew this would be hard for her and that in her heart she wouldn’t want to go. She was incredibly supportive. “Life’s an adventure,” she said. “If you don’t choose the adventurous path, then you’re not really living.”

Finding that balance between accepting credit for real achievements and not making too much of the hype from the outside world has only gotten more necessary during my years as CEO. I often feel guilty in front of other people with whom I work, when so much attention and credit is being directed toward me. It manifests itself in strange ways. I’m often in meetings with someone from outside the company and that person will look only at me, even though I’m surrounded by colleagues at the table. 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.

Conversely, if you’re a boss, these are the people to nurture—not the ones who are clamoring for promotions and complaining about not being utilized enough but the ones who are proving themselves to be indispensable day in and day out.

Optimism sets a different machine in motion. Especially in difficult moments, the people you lead need to feel confident in your ability to focus on what matters, and not to operate from a place of defensiveness and self-preservation. This isn’t about saying things are good when they’re not, and it’s not about conveying some innate faith that “things will work out.” It’s about believing you and the people around you can steer toward the best outcome, and not communicating the feeling that all is lost if things don’t break your way. The tone you set as a leader has an enormous effect on the people around you. No one wants to follow a pessimist.

spent a few days after the announcement trying to figure out a way to thread that particular needle—how to talk about the past without implicating myself too much in decisions that weren’t mine, or swinging too far the other way and joining in a pile-on of Michael. The solution to that predicament came from an unexpected place. A week or so after the board’s announcement, I received a phone call from a highly regarded political consultant and brand manager named Scott Miller. Years ago, Scott had done some very useful consulting for ABC, so when he called to say he was in L.A. and asked if he could come see me, I was eager to meet with him.

various businesses. In many ways, this made sense. They were very good at what they did, but it created two problems. One was something I alluded to previously, that the centralized decision making had a demoralizing effect on the senior leaders of our businesses, who sensed that the power to run their divisions really resided at Strategic Planning. The other was that their overly analytical decision-making processes could be painstaking and slow. “The world is moving so much faster than it did even a couple of years ago,” I said to the board. “And the speed with which things are happening is only going to increase. Our decision making has to be straighter and faster, and I need to explore ways of doing that.”

When I look back on that time now, I think of it as a hard-earned lesson about the importance of tenacity and perseverance, but also about the need to steer clear of anger and anxiety over things you can’t control. I can’t overstate how important it is to keep blows to the ego, real as they often are, from occupying too big a place in your mind and sapping too much of your energy. It’s easy to be optimistic when everyone is telling you you’re great. It’s much harder, and much more necessary, when your sense of yourself is being challenged, and in such a public way.

PEOPLE SOMETIMES SHY AWAY from taking big swings because they assess the odds and build a case against trying something before they even take the first step. One of the things I’ve always instinctively felt—and something that was greatly reinforced working for people like Roone and Michael—is that long shots aren’t usually as long as they seem. Roone and Michael both believed in their own power and in the ability of their organizations to make things happen—that with enough energy and thoughtfulness and commitment, even the boldest ideas could be executed. I tried to adopt that mindset in my ensuing conversations with Steve.

Two hours later, the pros were meager and the cons were abundant, even if a few of them, in my estimation, were quite petty. I felt dispirited, but I should have expected this. “Well,” I said. “It was a nice idea. But I don’t see how we do this.” “A few solid pros are more powerful than dozens of cons,” Steve said. “So what should we do next?” Another lesson: Steve was great at weighing all sides of an issue and not allowing negatives to drown out positives, particularly for things he wanted to accomplish. It was a powerful quality of his.

The banker had a point. It’s true that on paper the deal didn’t make obvious sense. But I felt certain that this level of ingenuity was worth more than any of us understood or could calculate at the time. It’s perhaps not the most responsible advice in a book like this to say that leaders should just go out there and trust their gut, because it might be interpreted as endorsing impulsivity over thoughtfulness, gambling rather than careful study. As with everything, the key is awareness, taking it all in and weighing every factor—your own motivations, what the people you trust are saying, what careful study and analysis tell you, and then what analysis can’t tell you. You carefully consider all of these factors, understanding that no two circumstances are alike, and then, if you’re in charge, it still ultimately comes down to instinct. Is this right or isn’t it? Nothing is a sure thing, but you need at the very least to be willing to take big risks. You can’t have big wins without them.

The Pixar deal was announced at 1:05 PST. After Steve and I addressed the press, we both stood on a platform in the cavernous Pixar atrium, John and Ed at our side, in front of almost a thousand Pixar employees. Before I spoke, someone gave me a Luxo lamp as a present to commemorate the moment. Extemporaneously, I thanked the group and told them I was going to use it to illuminate our castle. It has ever since.

There’s no good playbook for how to fire someone, though I have my own internal set of rules. You have to do it in person, not over the phone and certainly not by email or text. You have to look the person in the eye. You can’t use anyone else as an excuse. This is you making a decision about them—not them as a person but the way they have performed in their job—and they need and deserve to know that it’s coming from you. You can’t make small talk once you bring someone in for that conversation. I normally say something along the lines of: “I’ve asked you to come in here for a difficult reason.” And then I try to be as direct about the issue as possible, explaining clearly and concisely what wasn’t working and why I didn’t think it was going to change. I emphasize that it was a tough decision to make, and that I understand that it’s much harder on them. There’s a kind of euphemistic corporate language that is often deployed in those situations, and it has always struck me as offensive. There’s no way for the conversation not to be painful, but at least it can be honest, and in being honest there is at least a chance for the person on the receiving end to understand why it’s happening and eventually move on, even if they walk out of the room angry as hell.

After the funeral, Laurene came up to me and said, “I’ve never told my side of that story.” She described Steve coming home that night. “We had dinner, and then the kids left the dinner table, and I said to Steve, ‘So, did you tell him?’ ‘I told him.’ And I said, ‘Can we trust him?’ ” We were standing there with Steve’s grave behind us, and Laurene, who’d just buried her husband, gave me a gift that I’ve thought about nearly every day since. I’ve certainly thought of Steve every day. “I asked him if we could trust you,” Laurene said. “And Steve said, ‘I love that guy.’ ” The feeling was mutual.

I eventually called George and told him we had narrowed it down to a price range, and we still needed time to home in on a specific price. It would be between $3.5 billion and $3.75 billion. George had come way down from his “Pixar price,” but I could tell he was not going to accept anything lower than Marvel. I met with Kevin and his team and we looked at our analysis again. We didn’t want to falsely raise our box office estimates, but even at the top end of the range I’d given George, there was some room for us to pay more, though it would put a lot more pressure on the timing and performance of the films. Could we make three in six years? These were Star Wars films, and we would have to be very careful. Ultimately, Kevin and I decided we could afford $4.05 billion, or slightly above what we paid for Marvel, and George immediately agreed.

I also read some of the greatest speeches ever delivered, including Ronald Reagan’s speech on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day; Robert Kennedy’s impromptu speech in Indianapolis when Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed; Franklin Roosevelt’s and John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speeches; Obama’s speech after the massacre at the A.M.E. church in Charleston, South Carolina; and numerous Churchill addresses.