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

by Robert Iger

people liked and respected me.

hoped they would be willing to be patient with me as I learned on the job.

“Life’s an adventure,” she said.

you don’t choose the adventurous path, then you’re not really living.”

Your inexperience can’t be an excuse for failure.

The first rule is not to fake anything. You have to be humble,

so you can’t let humility prevent you from leading.

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 quic...

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

Rather than trying too hard to impress whoever was across the table, I needed to resist the urge to pretend I knew what I was doing and ask

a kind of mystery that worked to my advantage while I absorbed as much as I could.

This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen and we have to do this.

We couldn’t just fall back into our same old stance while everything changed around

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 the big picture is a mess, then the small things don’t matter anyway, and you shouldn’t spend time focusing on them.

want you to know we have tremendous faith in you.”

“I’d much rather take big risks and sometimes fail than not take risks at all.”

wanted to be in the business of creating possibilities for greatness.

the need to be comfortable with failure was the most profound.

You can’t erase your mistakes or pin your bad decisions on someone else.

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.

my skirt isn’t wide enough for you”—he pointed at me—“to hide behind.”

couldn’t do whatever I wanted, but I had the freedom to exercise a considerable amount of authority.

He refused to respect them, and therefore they didn’t respect him, which in turn meant they were determined to tell him no when he fought for things he wanted.

(Brandon called to congratulate me when the rankings came out showing ABC on top. He was a classy guy, and he’d done something that no one will ever do again.

I’d come to Entertainment knowing nothing about the job, and this group of incredibly talented people shared everything they knew with me.

was my ability to urge creative people to do their best work and take chances, while also helping them rebound from failure.

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. I often feel guilty

I make sure to connect and speak with every person at the table.

anything that reminds you that you’re not the center of the universe is a good thing.

I’ve generally tried over the years to keep my eye on the job I have and not the jobs I might someday have,

but it wasn’t the right time to fight for that.

any event, there was nothing to be gained by getting off to a bad start with either of them.

Disagreements that could have been handled with diplomacy were instead done with a tone that was often authoritative and demanding.

he was the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Deals like this might sound great in a press release, but they rarely turn out well.

The body language alone was painful to witness,

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.

Managing your own time and respecting others’ time is one of the most vital things to do as a manager,

you don’t do the work, the people around you detect that right away and their respect for you disappears.

You have to learn and absorb. You have to hear out other people’s problems and help find solutions. It’s

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?

I’m feeling some doubt, why? Am I doing this for sound reasons or am I motivate...

It meant I was committed to doing my own job as best I could, and to learning as much as I could about all aspects of the company.

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.

do the job you have well; be patient;

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.