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

by Robert Iger

feedback I received, instructing Kevin to move quickly to purchase control of BAMTech and telling everyone else to prepare for a significant strategic shift into the streaming business.

We would continue supporting our television channels in the traditional space, for as long as they continued to generate decent returns, and we would continue to present our films on big screens in movie theaters all over the world, but we were now fully committed to also becoming a distributor of our own content, straight to consumers, without intermediaries.

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.”

was an easy decision, really. I never asked what the financial repercussions would be, and didn’t care. In moments like that, you have to look past whatever the commercial losses are and be guided, again, by the simple rule that there’s nothing more important than the quality and integrity of your people and your product. Everything depends on upholding that principle.

We did not want Comcast to have any inkling of our plan to bid higher. We reserved a room in a hotel in London that we never stay in, under different names. 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.

To tell great stories, you need great talent.

Now more than ever: innovate or die. There can be no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new.

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 leadership weapon. If you trust your own instincts and treat people with respect, the company will come to represent the values you live by.

Value ability more than experience, and put people in roles that require more of them than they know they have in them.

Don’t start negatively, and don’t start small. People will often focus on little details as a way of masking a lack of any clear, coherent, big thoughts. If you start petty, you seem petty.

Too often, we lead from a place of fear rather than courage, stubbornly trying to build a bulwark to protect old models that can’t possibly survive the sea change that is under way.

If you walk up and down the halls constantly telling people “the sky is falling,” a sense of doom and gloom will, over time, permeate the company. You can’t communicate pessimism to the people around you.