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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Robert Iger
Read between
May 26 - June 1, 2023
Fear of failure destroys creativity.
it’s imperative to communicate your priorities clearly and often.
The path to innovation begins with curiosity.
If you’re in the business of making things, be in the business of making things great.
The producer looked at me with complete disdain. Then he unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis, and replied, “I don’t know. You tell me how it looks.” Forty-five years later, I still get angry when I recall that scene.
I didn’t understand how he did it, but I’d later learn that this was classic Roone, absolutely unwilling to accept “good enough,” and completely comfortable pushing right up against an unmovable deadline (and exhausting a lot of people along the way) to make it great.
Innovate or die, and there’s no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new or untested.
No detail was too small for Roone. Perfection was the result of getting all the little things right. On countless occasions, just as I’d witnessed at the Sinatra concert, he would rip up an entire program before it aired and demand the team rework the whole thing, even if it meant working till dawn in an editing room. He wasn’t a yeller, but he was tough and exacting and he communicated in very clear terms what was wrong and that he expected it to get fixed, and he didn’t much care what sacrifice it required to fix it.
His commitment to making things great was galvanizing. It was often exhausting, often frustrating (largely because he would wait until very late in the production process to give notes or demand changes), but it was inspiring, too, and the inspiration far outweighed the frustration. You knew how much he cared about making things great, and you simply wanted to live up to his expectations.
“Do what you need to do to make it better.”
Instead, it’s about creating an environment in which you refuse to accept mediocrity. You instinctively push back against the urge to say There’s not enough time, or I don’t have the energy, or This requires a difficult conversation I don’t want to have, or any of the many other ways we can convince ourselves that “good enough” is good enough.
If he asked you to do something, you were expected to exhaust every possible method to accomplish it. If you came back and said you tried and it couldn’t be done, he’d just tell you, “Find another way.”
Roone never knew the lengths I’d gone to to get it done, but I know I wouldn’t have done it had I not been driven in part by his expectations and my desire to please him. It’s a delicate thing, finding the balance between demanding that your people perform and not instilling a fear of failure in them. Most of us who worked for Roone wanted to live up to his standards, but we also knew that he had no patience for excuses and that he could easily turn on anyone, in his singularly cutting, somewhat cruel, way, if he felt we weren’t performing to his satisfaction.
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.
He was a capricious boss, and over time capriciousness takes a huge toll on a staff’s morale. One day he would make you feel like you were the most important person in the division; the next he would deliver withering criticism or would put a knife in your back for reasons that were never quite clear.
I was instinctively aware of both the need to strive for perfection and the pitfalls of caring only about the product and never the people.
They would talk about valuing ability more than experience, and they believed in putting people in roles that required more of them than they knew they had in them. It wasn’t that experience wasn’t important, but they “bet on brains,” as they put it, and trusted that things would work out if they put talented people in positions where they could grow, even if they were in unfamiliar territory.
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.
True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.
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.
“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.”
Empathy is a prerequisite to the sound management of creativity, and respect is critical.
This time I told him, “If the ratings are good, call. If they’re bad, just send a fax.” At 5:00 A.M., I woke to the sound of the fax machine humming, then closed my eyes and went back to bed.
I got up and addressed the cast and crew. “We tried something big and it didn’t work,” I said. “I’d much rather take big risks and sometimes fail than not take risks at all.”
Of all the lessons I learned in that first year running prime time, the need to be comfortable with failure was the most profound.
“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.
As co-head of CAA, a privately held agency, he was used to showing up with a ton of ideas
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.
You have to be attentive. You often have to sit through meetings that, if given the choice, you might choose not to sit through. You have to learn and absorb. You have to hear out other people’s problems and help find solutions. It’s all part of being a great manager.
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.
Sometimes it’s worth talking through their reservations and patiently responding to their concerns. Other times you simply need to communicate that you’re the boss and you want this done. It’s not that one approach is “nice” and the other isn’t. It’s just that one is more direct and nonnegotiable. It really comes down to what you believe is right for the moment—when a more democratic approach is useful both in getting to the best outcome and in building morale, and when you have enough certainty in your opinion that you’re willing to be an autocrat even in the face of disagreement.
I once watched him give an interview in the lobby of a hotel and say to the reporter, “You see those lamps over there? I chose them.” It’s a bad look for a CEO. (I should confess that I’ve caught myself—or have been caught—doing the same thing a few times. Zenia Mucha has said to me, in a way only she can: “Bob, you know you did that, but the world doesn’t need to know, so shut up!”)
as a leader you can’t communicate that pessimism to the people around you. It’s ruinous to morale. It saps energy and inspiration. Decisions get made from a protective, defensive posture.
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.
