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

by Robert Iger

The days are challenging and dynamic, but they’re also a never-ending exercise in compartmentalization. You address one thing—What are the attributes of a Disney princess in today’s world and how should they manifest in our products?—then you put it away and shift your focus to the next: What will our slate of Marvel films be for the next eight years?

As I near the end of all of that and think back on what I’ve learned, these are the ten principles that strike me as necessary to true leadership. I hope they’ll serve you as well as they’ve served me.

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

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

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

Decisiveness. All decisions, no matter how difficult, can and should be made in a timely way.

Curiosity. A deep and abiding curiosity enables the discovery of new people, places, and ideas, as well as an awareness and an understanding of the marketplace and its changing dynamics.

Fairness. Strong leadership embodies the fair and decent treatment of people.

Thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness is one of the most underrated elements of good leadership.

Authenticity. Be genuine. Be honest. Don’t fake anything.

The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection. This doesn’t mean perfectionism at all costs, but it does mean a refusal to accept mediocrity or make excuses for something being “good enough.”

Integrity. Nothing is more important than the quality and integrity of an organization’s people and its product.

As I grew older, I became more aware of my father’s disappointment in himself. He’d led a life that was unsatisfying to him and was a failure in his own eyes. It’s part of why he pushed us to work so hard and be productive, so that we might be successful in a way that he never was.

anchorman. I’m only half-joking when I say that the experience of giving the people of Ithaca their daily weather report taught me a necessary skill, which is the ability to deliver bad news.

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.

I’ve come to cherish that time alone each morning, and am certain I’d be less productive and less creative in my work if I didn’t also spend those first hours away from the emails and text messages and phone ...

Roone taught me the dictum that has guided me in every job I’ve held since: Innovate or die, and there’s no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new or untested.

master sushi chef from Tokyo named Jiro Ono, whose restaurant has three Michelin stars and is one of the most sought-after reservations in the world.

He is described by some as being the living embodiment of the Japanese word shokunin, which is “the endless pursuit of perfection for some greater good.”

I loved the documentary so much that I showed excerpts of it to 250 executives at a Disney retreat. I wanted them to understand better, through the example of Jiro, what I meant when I talked about “the relentless pursuit of perfection.”

This is what it looks like to take immense personal pride in the work you create, and to have both the instinct toward perfection and the work ethic to follow through on that instinct.

It’s a delicate thing, finding the balance between demanding that your people perform and not instilling a fear of failure in them.

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.

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.

conference. I was standing in a parking lot talking with Tom, and I could see Warren Buffett, our largest shareholder, and Michael Eisner talking nearby. They waved for Tom to come over, and before he walked away, I said, “Do me a favor. If you decide to sell to Michael, give me some warning, okay?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Michael’s natural pessimism often worked for him, up to a point. He was motivated in part out of a fear of calamity, and that often fueled his perfectionism and his success, although it’s not a very useful tool to motivate people.

“This is for you,” he said. “It’s free.” I asked what it was. “This is our campaign playbook,” he said. “Campaign?” “What you’re about to embark on is a political campaign,” he said. “You understand that, right?”

I needed a strategy for getting votes, he said, which meant figuring out who on the board might be persuadable and focusing my message on them. He asked me a series of questions: “Which board members are definitely in your corner?”

A lot of work is complex and requires intense amounts of focus and energy, but this kind of messaging is fairly simple: This is where we want to be. This is how we’re going to get there. Once those things are laid out simply, so many decisions become easier to make, and the overall anxiety of an entire organization is lowered.

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.

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.

THE ACQUISITION OF Marvel has proved to be much more successful than even our most optimistic models accounted for. As I write this, Avengers: Endgame, our twentieth Marvel film, is finishing up the most successful opening weeks in movie history.

The Marvel skeptics in New York weren’t the only ones who felt that a black-led superhero movie couldn’t perform at the box office. There’s a long-held view in Hollywood that films with predominantly black casts, or with black leads, will struggle in many international markets.

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.

we began to focus even more on the dramatic changes we were experiencing in our media businesses and the profound disruption we were feeling.

The future of those businesses had begun to seriously worry us, and we concluded it was time for us to start delivering our content in new and modern ways, and to do so without intermediaries, on our own technology platform.

We had to do it, I was sure of that. It was the old lesson all over again about the need to constantly innovate. So the next question was: Do we build a tech platform or do we buy one? Kevin Mayer warned me that building one would take five years and would be a massive investment.

When we looked at acquisitions, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook were obviously off the table, given their size, and as far as we knew, none of them was looking to buy us.

What was left was Snapchat, Spotify, and Twitter. They were all digestible in terms of size, but who was potentially for sale, and who delivered the qualities we needed to reach our consumers most effectively and rapidly? We landed on Twitter.

We were less interested in them as a social media company than as a new distribution platform with global reach, which we could use to deliver movies, television, sports, and news. In the summer of 2016, we expressed interest to Twitter.

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.

AROUND THE SAME TIME that we entered into the Twitter negotiations, we also invested in a company called BAMTech, which was primarily owned by Major League Baseball and had perfected a streaming technology that allowed fans to subscribe to an online service and watch all of their favorite teams’ games live.