The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons in Creative Leadership 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.

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.

At its simplest, this book is about being guided by a set of principles that help nurture the good and manage the bad.

Optimism. One of the most important qualities of a good leader is optimism, a pragmatic enthusiasm for what can be achieved.

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

Focus. Allocating time, energy, and resources to the strategies, problems, and projects that are of highest importance and value is extremely important, and it’s imperative to communicate your priorities clearly and often.

Thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness is one of the most underrated elements of good leadership. It is the process of gaining knowledge, so an opinion rendered or decision made is more credible and more likely to be correct. It’s simply about taking the time to develop informed opinions.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

If something broke, my mother would ask me to fix it, and I learned as a young kid how to repair whatever needed repairing. That’s part of where my curiosity about technology comes from, too, I think.

My parents were worriers. There was a sense with both of them that something bad would soon be coming down the pike. I don’t know how much of it is a fluke of genetics and how much is a learned reaction to their anxiety, but I’ve always been the opposite of that. With few exceptions in my life, I’ve never worried too much about the future, and I’ve never had too much fear about trying something and failing.

Something clicked for me when I went to college, though. I was determined to work hard and learn as much as I could learn, and I think that, too, was related to my father—a function of never wanting to experience the same sense of failure that he felt about himself. I didn’t have a clear idea of what “success” meant, no specific vision of being wealthy or powerful, but I was determined not to live a life of disappointment. Whatever shape my life took, I told myself, there wasn’t a chance in the world that I was going to toil in frustration and lack fulfillment.

“Do what you need to do to make it better.” Of all the things I learned from Roone, this is what shaped me the most. When I talk about this particular quality of leadership, I refer to it as “the relentless pursuit of perfection.” In practice that means a lot of things, and it’s hard to define. It’s a mindset, really, more than a specific set of rules. 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.

Only later, when I worked more closely with him, would I discover what people meant when they said that he refused to accept no for an answer. 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 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, 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.

It was important to me to know that when it came down to it, I could outwork anyone else, and so I was focused much more on that than I was on the vicissitudes of Roone’s moods.

But I learned something else along the way, too: Excellence and fairness don’t have to be mutually exclusive. I wouldn’t have articulated it that way at the time. Mostly I was just focused on doing my job well and certainly wasn’t thinking about what I’d do differently if I were in Roone’s shoes. But years later, when I was given the chance to lead, 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.

There are moments in our careers, in our lives, that are inflection points, but they’re often not the most obvious or dramatic ones. I wasn’t sure I was making the right decision. It was probably the safer one, really, to stay at the place I knew. But I also didn’t want to leave too impulsively, because my ego had been bruised or because I had some feeling of superiority when it came to Dennis. If I was ultimately going to leave, it had to be because there was an opportunity that was too great to say no, and the ICM job wasn’t that.

I’d soon learn that I had been totally wrong in my assessment of him. He was an amiable, funny guy; his energy and optimism were infectious; and, crucially, he knew what he didn’t know. This is a rare trait in a boss. It’s easy to imagine another person in Dennis’s shoes overcompensating for the fact that he’d never worked at a network by exuding a kind of fake authority or knowledge, but that wasn’t how Dennis was wired.

true integrity—a sense of knowing who you are and being guided by your own clear sense of right and wrong—is a kind of secret weapon.

Things were dire, for sure, but I needed to look at the situation not as a catastrophe but as a puzzle we needed to solve, and to communicate to our team that we were talented and nimble enough to solve these problems and make something wonderful on the fly.

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.

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

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. 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.

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

“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. Not with lack of effort but with the unavoidable truth that if you want innovation—and you should, always—you need to give permission to fail.

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.

Finding that balance between accepting credit for real achievements and not making too much of the hype from the outside world has only gotten more necessary during my years as CEO.

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.

They should both have known that it couldn’t work, but they willfully avoided asking the hard questions because each was somewhat blinded by his own needs. It’s a hard thing to do, especially in the moment, but 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. What’s the problem I need to solve? Does this solution make sense? If I’m feeling some doubt, why? Am I doing this for sound reasons or am I motivated by something personal?

I’ve been asked a lot over the years about the best way to nurture ambition—both one’s own and that of the people you manage. As a leader, you should want those around you to be eager to rise up and take on more responsibility, as long as dreaming about the job they want doesn’t distract them from the job they have. You can’t let ambition get too far ahead of opportunity. 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. It’s important to know how to find the balance—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. Conversely, if you’re a boss, these are the people to nurture—not the ones who are clamoring for promotions and complaining about not being utilized enough but the ones who are proving themselves to be indispensable day in and day out.

As is so often the case in life, the thing I’d been striving toward was finally here, and now the hard times were about to begin.

What struck me, and what was invaluable in my own education, was his ability to see the big picture as well as the granular details at the same time, and consider how one affected the other.

He understood that “great” is often a collection of very small things, and he helped me appreciate that even more deeply.

Michael had plenty of valid reasons to be pessimistic, but as a leader you can’t communicate that pessimism to the people around you.

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.

Often people who worry too much about public perception of their power do so because they are insecure. In this case, I needed the board to bestow some degree of power in me if I was going to be able to help run the company through this turbulent time, and if I was going to have any chance of being the next CEO.

Every time a question came up about what had gone wrong at Disney over the past years, what mistakes Michael made, and why they should think I’m any different, my response could simply and honestly be: “I can’t do anything about the past. We can talk about lessons learned, and we can make sure we apply those lessons going forward. But we don’t get any do-overs. You want to know where I’m going to take this company, not where it’s been. Here’s my plan.”

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. In my experience, it’s what separates great managers from the rest. If leaders don’t articulate their priorities clearly, then the people around them don’t know what their own priorities should be. Time and energy and capital get wasted. People in your organization suffer unnecessary anxiety because they don’t know what they should be focused on. Inefficiency sets in, frustration builds up, morale sinks.

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. I still recall one headline, in the Orlando Sentinel, that said “Eisner’s Heir Far from Apparent.” Many others expressed similar sentiments, and for a while it seemed that every day someone was writing or talking about what an abdication of responsibility it would be if the board named me CEO.

As much as this process was a test of my ideas, it was also a test of my temperament, and I couldn’t let the negativity being expressed by people who knew little about me affect the way I felt about myself.

I left Dennis’s house and got home and took some time to put everything that was happening into perspective. It was a big job, and a big title, but it wasn’t my life. My life was with Willow and my boys, with my girls back in New York, with my parents and my sister and my friends. All of this strain was ultimately still about a job, and I vowed to myself to try to keep that in perspective.

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.

The succession process was the first time in my career that I had to face that level of anxiety head on. It was impossible to completely filter out the chatter about me or to not be hurt by very public conversations about how ill-suited I was for the job. But I learned, through strong self-discipline and love from my family, that I had to recognize it for what it was—that it had no bearing on who I was—and put it in its proper place. I could control what I did and how I comported myself. Everything else was beyond my control. I didn’t maintain that perspective every moment, but to the extent that I was able to, it kept the anxiety from having too strong a hold.

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

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. Roone and Michael both believed in their own power and in the ability of their organizations to make things happen—that with enough energy and thoughtfulness and commitment, even the boldest ideas could be executed. I tried to adopt that mindset in my ensuing conversations with Steve.

“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.

I even took a moment before I walked into the room to look again at Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech, which has long been an inspiration: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.” My face wasn’t quite marred by dust and sweat and blood, and the Disney boardroom wasn’t the harshest of arenas. But I had to go in there and fight for something I knew was a risk. If they said yes, and it worked, I’d be a hero for changing the fortunes of the company. If they said yes, and it didn’t work, I wouldn’t be long in the job.