A light and insightful into the life of Bog Iger that provides a very business focused perspective on the operations and goals of Disney as a company. My favorite part is how complimentary it is so Pixar’s story even after having read both “Creativity Inc” and “The Pixar Touch”.

I’m a lot more familiar with the career paths of well known individuals in STEM related fields (Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, Edward Thorpe, Ed Catmul, etc
), who start of being scrappy in a garage, with a big vision, facing a ton of financial and emotional hardships along the way and then somehow skyrocketing to success and fame when an inflection point occurs. Though Walt Disney’s story may have been similar, Bob Iger is a lot more “slow and steady” wins the race kind of individual, in an admirable way. He was very focused and worked hard throughout his whole career, always focusing on the task at hand while thinking about what’s next, but not letting his goals and ambitions take precedence of the here and now. In some sense, he is a “career media mogul”, where he slowly moved up the ranks, first at ABC and later at Disney. He never rushed anything and seems to have deserved all the success he has gained. When he became number two at ABC, he only had sports and the olympics under his belt. Though he didn’t have that much experience yet, people trusted his gut because he was pleasant to work with.

The book starts off a little depressing as Bob talks about the Orlando shootings, and the horror story where an alligator attacked a child at a Disney resort. This really sets the context that regardless of the upbeat image everyone associated with Disney, running an international company employing hundreds of thousands of people comes with a lot of hardships. Almost every political event will affect your employees and must be addressed. The corona virus is a growing epidemic at the time of this writing, and given that a Shanghai Disney resort opened up in 2016, I’m sure this is something that is top on Bob Iger’s priority list. The tone he uses throughout the book shows he has a lot of experience in dealing with matter like this, and how well trained he is at “political speak”.

Under Iger’s leadership, Disney turned from from a mammoth to a behemoth. He led many different acquisitions, the most prominent of which include Pixar, Marvel, LucasFilm and 21st Century Fox! The biggest surprise the book had opened up to me is how key personal relationships were to the success of all these acquisitions. Before the financials were sorted out, he had to personally convince the leader of each company that it was the right call:

  • Promise Steve Jobs that he was not trying to lowball or undervalue Pixar

  • Promise Ed Catmull that Pixar’s culture will remain separate and intact, since that is ultimately the reason for why they’re acquiring the company

  • Promise George Lucas that he will continue having creative input (as a consultant) even after the acquisition

There are many lessons sprinkled throughout the book that leaders need to keep in mind, and while they’re obvious, they’re much harder to implement in practice. Here are a few that stood out to me that I will keep in mind when I run my own team:

  • Don’t be a pessimist

  • Always be thoughtful and authentic

  • Excellence and perfection don’t have to be mutually exclusive

  • Need to be fair and kind, but still strive for perfection

  • Always own up to your mistakes

  • Bet on talent rather than experience

  • Projecting anxiety onto team and sharing that you have the same stress is different

  • There should only be a few (<5) top priorities. Do not present “secondary top priorities”!!!

  • Good leadership isn’t about being indispensable, but about helping others to potentially step into your shoes

  • *** It’s important to find a balance between management and impacting the creative process. It’s important to take risks, many of which will not work out.

My favorite quote from the book is “Don’t let ambition get ahead of opportunity.” Generally speaking, he suggests that we shouldn’t fixate on where we want to be but concentrate on our immediate responsibilities. Ambition becomes counterproductive and we become impatient if we focus too much on the future instead of the present. And lastly, he says: “the moment you see a title on your forehead, you’ve lost your way.”