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by
Robert Iger
The way you do anything is the way you do everything.
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. The show was the thing. It was everything to him.
His mantra was simple: “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.
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, and set an example that it’s okay to get things wrong sometimes. What’s not okay is to undermine others by lying about something or covering your own ass first.
And it was satisfying to face the challenge of each day knowing that the only way through was to stay laser-focused and to exude as much calmness as possible to the people around me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He wanted to offer people like Tom Clancy, Magic Johnson, Martin Scorsese, and Janet Jackson (and many more) omnibus deals that would span Disney’s businesses. He was constantly pitching these people on what Disney could do for them. Deals like this might sound great in a press release, but they rarely turn out well. They need a senior executive to act as a sponsor, putting in the time and energy necessary to shepherd each aspect of the deal through every business and every initiative.
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.
I think he still would have failed at Disney, because he was just not wired for corporate culture. I would give him a stack of materials in advance of a meeting, and the next day he’d come in not having read any of them and say, “Give me the facts,” then render a fast opinion. There was no sense that he was acting fast because he’d processed all the information. The opposite was the case. He was covering up for not being prepared, and in a company like Disney, if you don’t do the work, the people around you detect that right away and their respect for you disappears.
those instances in which you find yourself hoping that something will work without being able to convincingly explain to yourself how it will work—that’s when a little bell should go off, and you should walk yourself through some clarifying questions.
I’ve seen a lot of people who had their sights set on a particular job or project, but the opportunity to actually get that thing was so slim. Their focus on the small thing in the distance became a problem. They grew impatient with where they were. They didn’t tend enough to the responsibilities they did have, because they were longing so much for something else, and so their ambition became counterproductive.
Michael had plenty of valid reasons to be pessimistic, but 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.
A company’s culture is shaped by a lot of things, but this is one of the most important—you have to convey your priorities clearly and repeatedly.
It’s so easy to get caught up in rumor mills, to worry about this person’s perception of you or that person’s, what someone might say or write about you. It’s easy to become defensive and petty and to want to lash out when you feel you’re being unfairly misrepresented. I didn’t believe I deserved this job; I didn’t think I was entitled to it, but I did believe I was right for it. Part of proving that was remaining steady in the face of so much publicly expressed doubt.
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.
If you approach and engage people with respect and empathy, the seemingly impossible can become real.
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.
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.
The decision to disrupt businesses that are fundamentally working but whose future is in question—intentionally taking on short-term losses in the hope of generating long-term growth—requires no small amount of courage. Routines and priorities get disrupted, jobs change, responsibility is reallocated.
With a company the size of Disney, this can mean traveling around the world and holding regular town hall–style meetings with our various business units, communicating my thinking and responding to concerns, but it also means responding in a timely way and being thoughtful about any issues brought to me by my direct reports—returning phone calls and replying to emails, making the time to talk through specific problems, being sensitive to the pressures people are feeling. All of this became an even more significant part of the job as we embarked on this new, uncertain path.
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
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Take responsibility when you screw up. In work, in life, you’ll be more respected and trusted by the people around you if you own up to your mistakes. It’s impossible to avoid them; but it is possible to acknowledge them, learn from them, and set an example that it’s okay to get things wrong sometimes.
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.
A company’s reputation is the sum total of the actions of its people and the quality of its products. You have to demand integrity from your people and your products at all times.
If you walk up and down the halls constantly telling people “the sky is falling,” a sense of doom and gloom will, over time, permeate the company. You can’t communicate pessimism to the people around you. It’s ruinous to morale. No one wants to follow a pessimist.
It should be about the future, not the past.
Treating others with respect is an undervalued currency when it comes to negotiating. A little respect goes a long way, and the absence of it can be very costly.
You have to do the homework. You have to be prepared. You certainly can’t make a major acquisition, for example, without building the necessary models to help you determine whether a deal is the right one. But you also have to recognize that there is never 100 percent certainty. No matter how much data you’ve been given, it’s still, ultimately, a risk, and the decision to take that risk or not comes down to one person’s instinct.
In any negotiation, be clear about where you stand from the beginning. There’s no short-term gain that’s worth the long-term erosion of trust that occurs when you go back on the expectation you created early on.
Most deals are personal. This is even more true if you’re negotiating with someone over something he or she has created. You have to know what you want out of any deal, but to get there you also need be aware of what’s at stake for the other person.
