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

by Robert Iger

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Those hours aren’t for everyone, but however you find the time, it’s vital to create space in each day to let your thoughts wander beyond your immediate job responsibilities, to turn things over in your mind in a less pressured, more creative way than is possible once the daily triage kicks in.

Innovate or die, and there’s no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new or untested.

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. 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.

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. (If they don’t own up to their mistakes, or if they blame someone else, or if the mistake is the result of some unethical behavior,

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. There’s nothing less confidence-inspiring than a person faking a knowledge they don’t possess. True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.

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.

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.

Disney was whispering behind his back about what a disaster he was. 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.

do the job you have well; be patient; look for opportunities to pitch in and expand and grow; and make yourself one of the people, through attitude and energy and focus, that your bosses feel they have to turn to when an opportunity arises.

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.

Michael went out of his way during those years to be solicitous with Roy and show him deference and respect. This wasn’t easy to do. Roy could be very difficult at times. He viewed himself as the keeper of the Disney legacy. He lived and breathed and bled Disney, operating as if any break from tradition was a violation of some sacred pact he’d made with Walt himself (who supposedly never showed his nephew much respect). Roy tended to revere the past instead of respecting it, and as a result he had a difficult time tolerating change of any sort. He hated Michael’s acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC, because it meant introducing non-Disney brands into the company’s bloodstream. On a lesser but maybe more illustrative note, he got very angry one Christmas season when we decided to sell pure white Mickey Mouse plush dolls in our Disney stores. “Mickey is only these colors, black and white and red and yellow, and that’s it!” Roy raged in emails to Michael and me. He wanted the “albino Mickeys,” as he called them, taken from the shelves, which we didn’t do, but it was a huge distraction.

If you approach and engage people with respect and empathy, the seemingly impossible can become real.

You can’t wear your disdain for people on your sleeve, though. You end up either cowing them into submission or frustrating them into complacency. Either way, you sap them of the pride they take in their work. Over time, nearly everyone abdicated responsibility to Peter and Strat Planning, and Michael was comforted by the analytical rigor they represented.

“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.

once gave him a tour of a hotel in Orlando called “Art of Animation.” It’s a huge hotel, three thousand rooms, priced more affordably than many of our hotels. I was proud of its quality for the price, and when Steve came down for a board retreat shortly after it opened, I took him to see it. We walked into the hotel, and Steve looked around and proclaimed, “This is crap. You’re not faking anybody.” “Steve,” I said, “this is for people who want to come to Disney World with their kids and can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars a night on a room. It’s ninety bucks, and it’s a decent, nice, clean, pleasant place.” “I don’t get it,” he barked. Most people would have appreciated the quality and the care we’d taken to design it, but Steve wasn’t most people. He was looking at it through his own lens. “It’s not for you,” I said. “I’m sorry that I showed it to you.” I was a little mad at his snobbery, but I also knew that was just who he was. He built things of the highest quality, not necessarily affordable to all, but he never sacrificed quality in order to attain affordability. I never showed him anything like that again.

In George’s mind, Lucasfilm was as valuable as Pixar, but even from our relatively uninformed analysis they weren’t. They might be someday, but it would take years of work to get it there, and we’d still have to make great films. I didn’t want to offend him, but I didn’t want to lead him on, either. The worst thing you can do when entering into a negotiation is to suggest or promise something because you know the other person wants to hear it, only to have to reverse course later. You have to be clear about where you stand from the beginning. I knew if I misled George, simply to begin the bargaining process, or to

There’s no rule book for how to manage this kind of challenge, but in general, you have to try to recognize that when the stakes of a project are very high, there’s not much to be gained from putting additional pressure on the people working on it.

Projecting your anxiety onto your team is counterproductive. It’s subtle, but there’s a difference between communicating that you share their stress—that you’re in it with them—and communicating that you need them to deliver in order to alleviate your stress.

“This morning we all woke up to a tweet by Roseanne Barr, in which she referred to Valerie Jarrett as a product of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes. We found this comment, no matter what its context was, to be intolerable and deplorable, and we made the decision to cancel Roseanne’s show. I don’t mean to stand on a high horse, but as a company, we have always tried to do what we felt was right, no matter what the politics or the commerce. In other words, demanding quality and integrity from all of our people and of all of our products is paramount, and there is no room for second chances, or for tolerance when it comes to an overt transgression that discredits the company in any way.

We were addressing some of the same questions we asked ourselves almost fifteen years earlier: Are high-quality branded products likely to become even more valuable in a changed marketplace? How do we deliver our products to consumers in more relevant, more inventive ways? What new habits of consumption are being formed, and how do we adapt to them?

How do we deploy technology as a powerful new tool for growth instead of falling victim to its disruption and destruction?

Maybe this is the case for many of us: 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.

Don’t start negatively, and don’t start small. People will often focus on little details as a way of masking a lack of any clear, coherent, big thoughts. If you start petty, you seem petty.