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

by Robert Iger

Simply put, people are not motivated or energized by pessimists.

Chronic indecision is not only inefficient and counterproductive, but it is deeply corrosive to morale.

Nothing is worse to an organization than a culture of fear.

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. I’ve

Excellence and fairness don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes it’s worth talking through their reservations and patiently responding to their concerns. Other times you simply need to communicate that you’re the boss and you want this done. It’s not that one approach is “nice” and the other isn’t. It’s just that one is more direct and nonnegotiable.

Michael was proud of his micromanagement, but in expressing his pride, and reminding people of the details he was focused on, he could be perceived as being petty and small-minded. I once watched him give an interview in the lobby of a hotel and say to the reporter, “You see those lamps over there? I chose them.” It’s a bad look for a CEO.

build a bulwark to protect old models that couldn’t possibly survive the sea change that was under way.

as a leader you can’t communicate that pessimism to the people around you. It’s ruinous to morale. It

“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.”

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.

about the need to steer clear of anger and anxiety over things you can’t control.

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.

FIRING PEOPLE, OR taking responsibility away from them, is arguably the most difficult thing you have to do as a boss.

You can’t make small talk once you bring someone in for that conversation. I normally say something along the lines of: “I’ve asked you to come in here for a difficult reason.”

That’s an unavoidable part of the job, but you have to demand honesty and integrity from everyone, and when there’s a lapse you have to deal with it immediately.

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.

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.

I don’t like to lay out problems without offering a plan for addressing them. (This is something I exhort my team to do, too—it’s okay to come to me with problems, but also offer possible solutions.)

I can’t emphasize enough how much success is also dependent on luck, and I’ve been extraordinarily lucky along the 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.