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

by Robert Iger

and banished to northern China in the middle of our negotiations, setting the project back nearly two

Risk of chinese investment

the perils of cultural imperialism.

was “authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese.”

Very good

Ron’s security team ran Mateen’s name through our database and found that he’d visited the Magic Kingdom a couple of months before the shooting, then again the weekend before. There was closed-circuit television footage of him on

This is surprising

humanity of the team around

instinctive triage kicks in. You have to rely on your own internal “threat

Zenia Mucha, our chief communications officer. Zenia and I have worked together for more than a dozen years. She’s been with me through it all, good and bad. She’s tough, she’ll tell me straight to my face

This is important. this reminds me of President moon jae in

I wanted our response to come from me.

We manufacture

fun.

mythology. I’ve thought every day about how technology is redefining the way we create, deliver, and experience media, and what it means to be both relevant to a modern audience and faithful to a nearly hundred-year-old brand.

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.

in ever-changing, disrupted businesses, risk-taking is essential, innovation is vital, and true innovation occurs only when people have courage.

Curiosity.

Authenticity. Be genuine. Be honest.

mean

refusal to accept mediocrity

If you’re in the business of making things, be in the business of making things great.

I’d grab the New York Times on our front lawn and read it at the kitchen table before anyone

Cleaning gum from the bottoms of a thousand desks can build character, or at least a tolerance for monotony, or something…. I attended Ithaca College and spent nearly every weekend night my freshman and sophomore year making pizza at the local Pizza Hut.

feature news reporter at a tiny cable TV station in Ithaca, New

experience of giving the people of Ithaca their daily weather report taught me a necessary skill, which is the ability to deliver bad news.

I learned to tolerate the demanding hours and the extreme workload of television production,

To this day, I wake nearly every morning at four-fifteen, though now I do it for selfish reasons: to have time to think and read and exercise before the demands of the day take over.

ABC Sports showed me the world and made me more sophisticated. I got exposed to things I’d never contemplated before.

Athletes were characters in unfolding narratives. Where did they come from? What did they have to overcome to get here? How was this competition analogous to geopolitical dramas? How was it a window into different cultures? He reveled in the idea that we were bringing not just sports but the world into the living rooms of millions of Americans.

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.

Perfection was the result of getting all the little things right.

His mantra was simple: “Do what you need to do to make it better.”

shokunin, which is “the endless pursuit of perfection for some greater good.” I fell in love with Jiro when I watched it and became fascinated by the concept of shokunin.

If you came back and said you tried and it couldn’t be done, he’d just tell you, “Find another way.”

It’s a delicate thing, finding the balance between demanding that your people perform and not instilling a fear of failure in them.

Roone never said anything to me about it, but he treated me differently, with higher regard, it seemed, from that moment on. In my early days, I thought there was only one lesson in this story, the obvious one about the importance of taking responsibility when you screw up. That’s true, and it’s significant. 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. It’s impossible not to make them; but it is possible to acknowledge them, learn from them,

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.

With help from Tom’s close friend Warren Buffett, who backed the $3.5 billion deal, they were able to swallow our much larger company. (As Tom Murphy put it, they were “the minnow that ate the whale.”)

honesty and forthrightness no matter who they were talking to. They were shrewd businesspeople (Warren Buffett later called them “probably the greatest two-person combination in management that the world has ever seen or maybe ever will see”), but it was more than that. I learned from them that genuine decency and professional competitiveness weren’t mutually exclusive.

They were hypervigilant about controlling costs, and they believed in a decentralized corporate structure. Meaning: They didn’t think every key decision should be made by the two of them or by a small group of strategists in corporate headquarters.

didn’t know what those plans were, but the job they’d just given me—number two at ABC TV—felt like a pretty far reach. I was thirty-seven years old, I’d primarily worked in sports, and now

“We want you to survive here, Bob. We hope when you’re done you’ll be carrying your shield and not being carried out on it!”

“Life’s an adventure,” she said. “If you don’t choose the adventurous path, then you’re not really living.”

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.

True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.

I arrived in L.A. with six weeks left to decide on a lineup for the 1989–90 prime-time season. On my first day in the office, I was handed a stack of forty scripts to read. Each night I’d take them home and dutifully make my way through them, making notes in the margins but struggling to imagine how the script in front of me would translate to the screen, and doubting my ability

I had such respect for Tom, but I also knew this show was important enough to fight for. There were changes taking place that we had to face. We were now competing with the edgier programming available on cable TV, and with the new upstart Fox Network, not to mention the growth of videogames and the rise of the VCR. I felt that network television had become boring and derivative, and we had the chance with Twin Peaks to put something on TV that was utterly original.

Managing creative processes starts with the understanding that it’s not a science—everything is subjective; there is often no right or wrong.

ways. Empathy is a prerequisite to the sound management of creativity, and respect is critical.

if you want innovation—and you should, always—you need to give permission to fail.

at age forty-three, I became president of the ABC television network.

My old mentors—Roone in News, Dennis Swanson in Sports—were now reporting to me.

When the two people at the top of a company have a dysfunctional relationship, there’s no way that the rest of the company beneath them can be functional. It’s like having two parents who fight all the time. The kids feel the strain, and they start to reflect the animosity back onto the parents and vent it at each other.