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

by Robert Iger

I knew from a lawyer’s perspective that I should be careful about what I was saying, that I should consider whether that was somehow an admission of negligence. When you work in a corporate structure for so long, you become trained to give legalistic, corporate responses,

We used to call our biggest, most exciting theme-park attractions “E-Tickets.”

He would sometimes check in on his way past my room to make sure I was “spending time productively,” as he put it. That meant reading or doing homework or being engaged in something that would “better” me in some way. He wanted my sister and me to have fun, but it also was very important to him that we use our time wisely and work in a focused way toward our goals. I’m certain that my vigilance (some might say obsessiveness) about time-management comes from him.

To this day, I wake nearly every morning at four-fifteen, though now I do it for selfish reasons: to have time to think and read and exercise before the demands of the day take over. Those hours aren’t for everyone, but 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.

The guys who worked in Sports were the “cool kids” at the company, a status reflected in pretty much everything about them, the way they dressed (tailored suits and Gucci loafers with no socks), what they ate and drank (expensive wine and scotch, often at lunch), and the Hollywood stars and famous athletes and politicians they fraternized with.

Bankers

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.

“Well, some days I feel like it’s tough just keeping my head above water.” Roone looked straight ahead. Without missing a beat, he said, “Get a longer snorkel.”

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.

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’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.

Each season we hold back shows as midseason replacements for the inevitability of a few failing shows. There’s a bit less pressure on those replacement shows than the ones that launch in the fall, and it seemed like the best strategy for Twin Peaks.

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

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.

I’m often in meetings with someone from outside the company and that person will look only at me, even though I’m surrounded by colleagues at the table. I don’t know if other CEOs feel this way, but it’s embarrassing to me, and in those moments I make a point of directing praise and attention to my coworkers. Similarly, when I’m the one attending a meeting with a group outside of Disney, 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.

The assets Disney acquired in the merger—especially ESPN—drove growth for years and were a vital buffer for nearly a decade as Disney Animation struggled with a series of box-office disappointments.

soon learned that others had much stronger feelings about the Ovitz hire than I did. I was told that Joe Roth, the chairman of the studio, was irate, and that Sandy Litvack and Steve Bollenbach, Disney’s chief financial officer, were unhappy with the new corporate structure and had refused to report to Ovitz. From three thousand miles away in New York, I could already feel the resentment building at “Disney Corporate.” Hiring Michael Ovitz had generated internal strife from the moment it was announced, but I had no idea how tense things were going to get.

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.

At its essence, good leadership isn’t about being indispensable; it’s about helping others be prepared to possibly step into your shoes—giving them access to your own decision making, identifying the skills they need to develop and helping them improve, and, as I’ve had to do, sometimes being honest with them about why they’re not ready for the next step up.

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. It really comes down to what you believe is right for the moment—when a more democratic approach is useful both in getting to the best outcome and in building morale, and when you have enough certainty in your opinion that you’re willing to be an autocrat even in the face of disagreement.

“Micromanaging is underrated.” I tend to agree with him, but to a point. Thanks to my years working for Roone Arledge, I didn’t need to be convinced that the success or failure of something so often comes down to the details. Michael often saw things that other people didn’t see, and then he demanded that they be made better. That was the source of so much of his and the company’s success, and I had immense respect for Michael’s tendency to sweat the details.

Pessimism leads to paranoia, which leads to defensiveness, which leads to risk aversion. 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.

No one wants to follow a pessimist.

A company called Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) is the biggest company in the world providing proxy and governance advice to investors—largely mid-sized funds—on how they should assess corporate governance and cast their proxy votes. ISS typically influences more than a third of the voting shares in a proxy election, and that morning they issued a public recommendation in support of Roy and Stanley’s campaign to vote against Michael.

I asked him what they were planning to say about the search. “That we’re going to look for outside candidates and inside candidates,” George said. “What inside candidates are there other than me?” “None,” he said. “You’re the only one.” “Then you need to write that,” I said. “I’m the COO, and as of today, you’re making Michael a lame duck. I’m going to have to step in and exert a lot more authority.”

“What are you asking?” George said. “I’m asking you to write in the press release that I’m the only internal candidate.”

Priorities are the few things that you’re going to spend a lot of time and a lot of capital on. Not only do you undermine their significance by having too many, but nobody is going to remember them all. “You’re going to seem unfocused,” he said. “You only get three. I can’t tell you what those three should be. We don’t have to figure that out today. You never have to tell me what they are if you don’t want to. But you only get three.”

If leaders don’t articulate their priorities clearly, then the people around them don’t know what their own priorities should be.

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 easiest and most productive way to do that was to recognize that what Roy needed, ultimately, was to feel respected. That was precious to him, and it cost me and the company so little. A little respect goes a long way, and the absence of it is often very costly. Over the next few years, as we made the major acquisitions that redefined and revitalized the company, this simple, seemingly trite idea was as important as all of the data-crunching in the world: If you approach and engage people with respect and empathy, the seemingly impossible can become real.

“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.

It could have seemed like a weakness—if you show that you want something so badly you’ll be made to pay—but in this case the genuine enthusiasm worked.

I went up to Cupertino and had lunch with Steve and walked him through Marvel’s business. He claimed to have never read a comic book in his life (“I hate them more than I hate videogames,” he told me),

Steve wasn’t most people. He was looking at it through his own lens. “It’s not for you,” I said. “I’m sorry that I showed it to you.” I was a little mad at his snobbery, but I also knew that was just who he was. He built things of the highest quality, not necessarily affordable to all, but he never sacrificed quality in order to attain affordability.

We’d done our homework. We knew that time would prove that the brands could easily coexist, and we knew there was a depth to the Marvel universe that most people weren’t aware of. During our research, we’d put together a dossier that contained a list of about seven thousand Marvel characters. Even if we couldn’t obtain Spider-Man or the rights controlled by other studios, we’d still have more than enough to mine. The content was there, and the talent was there.

The movie business can be both thrilling and maddening. It doesn’t operate like other traditional businesses. It requires making bet after bet based on nothing but instinct. Everything is a risk. You can have what you think is a great idea and the right team assembled, and things can still get derailed for a whole host of reasons that are often beyond your control. A script doesn’t come together, a director has bad chemistry with his or her team or has a vision for a film that runs contrary to yours, a competitive movie comes out that upends your expectations.

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. You have to be clear about where you stand from the beginning.

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. No one on this project needed reminding of what was at stake. My job was to not let us lose sight of our ambition when we confronted creative and practical obstacles, and to help us get to solutions in the best possible way. Sometimes that meant allocating more resources, sometimes it meant talking through new drafts of a script, or watching endless dailies and numerous cuts of the film. Often it just meant reminding J.J. and Kathy Kennedy and Alan Horn that I believed in all of them and there were no better hands for this film to be in.

One of the biggest mistakes that I’ve seen film studios make is getting locked into a release date and then letting that influence creative decisions, often rushing movies into production before they’re ready. I’ve tried hard not to give in to calendar pressures. It’s better to give up a release date and keep working to make a better movie, and we’ve always tried to put quality before everything else, even if it means taking a short-term hit to our bottom line.

there was a lot of speculation in the press and from die-hard fans about how we were going to “Disney-fy” Star Wars. As with Marvel, I made the decision not to put “Disney” anywhere in the film credits or the marketing campaigns, and to not in any way change the Star Wars logo. “Disney-Pixar” made sense from an animation-branding perspective, but Lucas fans needed to be reassured that we, too, were fans first, respectful of the creator and looking to expand on his legacy, not usurp

Among the last things we negotiated before the deal closed was a non-disparagement clause. I asked George to agree that he wouldn’t publicly criticize any of the Star Wars films we made.

In the summer of 2016, we expressed interest to Twitter. They were intrigued, but felt they had an obligation to test the market, and so we reluctantly entered into an auction to buy them. By early fall, we’d virtually closed a deal. Twitter’s board supported the sale, and on a Friday afternoon in October, our board gave their approval to finalize a deal. Then, that weekend, I decided not to go through with it.

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 proposed a radical idea—essentially, that I would determine compensation, based on how much they contributed to this new strategy, even though, without easily measured financial results, this was going to be far more subjective than our typical compensation practices. I proposed stock grants that would vest or mature based on my own assessment of whether executives were stepping up to make this new initiative successful. The committee was skeptical at first; we’d never done anything like that. “I know why companies fail to innovate,” I said to them at one point. “It’s tradition. Tradition generates so much friction, every step of the way.” I talked about the investment community, which so often punishes established companies for reducing profits under any circumstances, which often leads businesses to play it safe and keep doing what they’ve been doing, rather than spend capital in order to generate long-term growth or adapt to change. “There’s even you,” I said, “a board that doesn’t know how to grant stock because there’s only one way we’ve ever done it.” At every stage, we were swimming upstream. “It’s your choice,” I said. “Do you want to fall prey to the ‘innovator’s dilemma’ or do you want to fight it?”

I also read some of the greatest speeches ever delivered, including Ronald Reagan’s speech on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day; Robert Kennedy’s impromptu speech in Indianapolis when Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed; Franklin Roosevelt’s and John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speeches; Obama’s speech after the massacre at the A.M.E. church in Charleston, South Carolina; and numerous Churchill addresses. I even reread the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

the next question was: What are these two companies worth together? How could we mine more value by combining them? Clearly there would be efficiencies by running them together. For instance, we would now have two movie studios, but under one umbrella, they could be run more efficiently. Then there’s leverage in the marketplace. What improved access to markets would we achieve because of suddenly owning more local assets? They had a big business in India, for instance, where we had only nascent operations, and they’d already placed big bets on direct-to-consumer businesses there. They also had a great television studio and had invested heavily in creative talent, and we lagged far behind them. As with our other acquisitions, we assessed their talent.

I don’t know if it’s true, but some people told us that Comcast sometimes tracks the movements of competitors’ private jets, so rather than flying into London, we flew first to Belfast, where we then chartered a different plane for the short jump to London.

As for the $38 price, I suspected that Comcast could possibly go higher than what they’d already bid, and that if we went to $35, they’d go to $36. If we went to $36, they’d go to $37, at each stage convincing themselves that it’s only a little more, until eventually we’d go up to $40 per share. Whereas if we started at $38, they’d have to think hard about going up at least $3 per share. (Since they were offering all cash, it would mean borrowing even more money and significantly raising their debt.)

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.

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.