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

by Robert Iger

life doesn’t always go the way you expect it will. Things happen that you can’t possibly anticipate.

When the unexpected does happen, a kind of instinctive triage kicks in. You have to rely on your own internal “threat scale.” There are drop-everything events, and there are others when you say to yourself, This is serious, I need to be engaged right now, but I also need to extricate myself and focus on other things and return to this later.

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.

Even after all of these years, I still sometimes find myself thinking, How did this happen? How did I get so lucky?

The days are challenging and dynamic, but they’re also a never-ending exercise in compartmentalization. You address one thing—What are the attributes of a Disney princess in today’s world and how should they manifest in our products?—then you put it away and shift your focus to the next: What will our slate of Marvel films be for the next eight years? And those are the rare days when things actually unfold according to schedule.

I told him how much I appreciated everything that he and my mom had done for us, the ethics they instilled, and the love they gave us. I told him that was enough, more than enough, and wished that my gratitude might liberate him in some small way from disappointment. I do know that so many of the traits that served me well in my career started with him. I hope that he understood that, too.

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.

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

Be decent to people. Treat everyone with fairness and empathy.

There are moments in our careers, in our lives, that are inflection points, but they’re often not the most obvious or dramatic ones.

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.

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.

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.

The tone you set as a leader has an enormous effect on the people around you.

Don’t let your ego get in the way of making the best possible decision.

It’s easy for leaders to send a signal that their schedules are too full, their time too valuable, to be dealing with individual problems and concerns. But being present for your people—and making sure they know that you’re available to them—is so important for the morale and effectiveness of a company.

I trusted my instincts, and I encouraged the people around me to trust theirs. Only much later did those instincts start to shape themselves into particular qualities of leadership that I could articulate.

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.

wherever you are along the path, you’re the same person you’ve always been.