Starting at the Bottom. … his entire self was wrapped up in the fact that he was responsible for what was perhaps the greatest mythology of our time. Jobs reveals his health issues just before the Pixar public announcement, jeopardizing the acquisition. The fate of a legendary boy, Temudjin, later the Genghis Khan, who became the most powerful emperor of Mongolia. Many of these books are popular only because people want to signal they’ve read them. He stood with marker in hand and scrawled PROS on one side and CONS on the other. He’d never made a film as big as Black Panther, with a massive budget and so much pressure on it to do well. A few weeks later, a large number of shareholders voted against Eisner’s contract. It’s not about the past.” That may seem obvious, but it came as a revelation to me. Jeff had apparently told Brian that our Marvel deal confounded him. Disney wanted it released straight to video, but since costs were mounting, they decided to show it in theaters first. Every time a question came up about what had gone wrong at Disney over the past years, what mistakes Michael made, and why they should think I’m any different, my response could simply and honestly be: “I can’t do anything about the past. What is Iger’s plan? It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Too often, we lead from a place of fear rather than courage. 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. I promised that we would be open to his ideas (this was not a hard promise to make; of course we would be open to George Lucas’s ideas), but like the outlines, we would be under no obligation. Jobs was frosty and offered a deal that wasn’t very good, but it would be better than nothing. I told him we needed to look closely at Lucasfilm and we needed his cooperation. Of great interest to me was the fact that almost every traditional media company, while trying to figure out its place in this changing world, was operating out of fear rather than courage, stubbornly trying to build a bulwark to protect old models that couldn’t possibly survive the sea change that was under way. Following the acquisition, Iger again sets out to reset Disney’s culture and structure: I asked myself: What would, could, or should the new company look like? Chapter Five covers Iger’s years running ABC under Eisner, as he hoped to ascend to the COO role at Disney. You can’t use anyone else as an excuse. When the first episode of Twin Peaks aired, 35 million viewers tuned in to see what all the fuss was about. This is my book summary of On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. Treating others with respect is an undervalued currency when it comes to negotiating. Steve would likely say no immediately. You can’t have big wins without them. making fraught decisions regarding freedom of speech, fake accounts algorithmically spewing out political “messaging”, and the general rage and lack of civility. Black Panther is the fourth-highest-grossing superhero film of all time, and Captain Marvel the tenth. The first priority was that Disney needed to spend more time making movies and characters people would remember. So I was surprised how much I liked The Ride of a Lifetime, Iger’s recounting of his life and career, from his beginnings as a studio supervisor at ABC up to his reign as CEO at Disney, which continues today. Lastly, we considered what we might do at our theme parks, given the fact that we were already paying Lucasfilm for the rights to the Star Tours attractions in three of our locations. Optimism sets a different machine in motion. Michael Eisner used to say, “micromanaging is underrated.” I agree with him—to a point. Shortform has the world’s best summaries of 1000+ nonfiction books and articles. Recently, they released Black Panther, which was set in Africa with black leads. It was a timely decision for Disney because the entertainment giant had been having trouble in the mid-nineties. The author did not have a lot of experience. In Chapter ten, Iger discusses the challenges of acquiring Marvel: the CEO’s personality, the character licensing complexities, the skeptics of the deal, and overcoming stale cultural assumptions to create massive movie hits. He was more concerned that Cap Cities hired an outsider to head up his department. He told Bob about how successful he was and gave him the contact information of Iger’s nephew who is looking for a job because the executive felt like it was an opportunity to help someone out. However, ABC found people to interview and tell stories about instead of the Olympic events. Disney was very different in that every project required approval from Strategic Planning, which contained Harvard and Stanford MBAs who crunched numbers before giving their ok for projects to proceed. You can pick up The Ride of a Lifetime from Amazon today. Projecting your anxiety onto your team is counterproductive. He was the oldest of two children. His [Arlidge’s] mantra was simple: “Do what you need to do to make it better.” Of all the things I learned from Roone, this is what shaped me the most. Iger shares his philosophy on firing people: There’s no good playbook for how to fire someone, though I have my own internal set of rules. The Ride of a Lifetime Book Summary, by Robert Iger, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Book Summary, by Dale Carnegie. Big Idea #9: Disney’s acquisition of Marvel was a financial and creative coup. Your confidence can easily tip over into overconfidence and become a liability. As a leader, you are the embodiment of that company. creating an environment in which people refuse to accept mediocrity. However, Steve Jobs did not want to sell his company and he also didn’t like Disney. It was so personal, and involved so much pride and ego, and this battle of his had been going on for decades. I asked George if he’d ever thought about selling. Iger was paid $150 a week to be the gopher at the television station. He was right, of course. This chapter covers Iger’s battle to become CEO following Eisner’s removal. That didn’t bother Iger. When the time came for him to lead, Iger didn’t make the same mistakes as Ovitz. Don’t start negatively, and don’t start small. Iger’s mentor Roone Arledge taught him that if you don’t innovate, then you’ll die. He found it unproductive and dispiriting. It should be about the future, not the past. Iger finds a management star who was cast aside by Warner Bros. due to his age: Bob Daly, who was then co-chair of Warner Bros., called me and said I should talk to Alan Horn about serving as an adviser to Rich. The Marvel acquisition was a huge success: THE ACQUISITION OF Marvel has proved to be much more successful than even our most optimistic models accounted for. I should have prepared him for the meeting with J.J. and Michael and told him about our conversations, that we felt it was better to go in another direction. We then projected what we might do if we owned them, which was pure conjecture. I normally say something along the lines of: “I’ve asked you to come in here for a difficult reason.” And then I try to be as direct about the issue as possible, explaining clearly and concisely what wasn’t working and why I didn’t think it was going to change. An executive wanted to impress Bob. If I were to erase history and build something totally new today, with all of these assets, how would it be structured? Get the Summary of Bob Iger's The Ride of a Lifetime in 20 minutes. He interrupted meetings to field calls and didn’t read reports. I referred to a concept I called “management by press release”—meaning that if I say something with great conviction to the outside world, it tends to resonate powerfully inside our company. That afternoon, Iger received a call that he had been selected as CEO of the company. He met a supervisor at ABC Sports who liked his attitude and hired him to work in their most profitable division. Looking back with the perspective of several years and a few more Star Wars films, I believe J.J. achieved the near-impossible, creating a perfect bridge between what had been and what was to come. Michael Eisner was surprised when he fired Michael Ovitz. 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. He’s been successful in the job beyond all of my hopes. ABC needed to keep up with its competitors by grabbing viewers’ attention. He had a plan for that, which included acquiring Pixar. On the day of the rededication of Star Tours in Orlando, I set up a breakfast with him [George Lucas] at the Brown Derby, which was near the attraction in our Hollywood Studios Park. (No extra charge.). Steve Jobs was one of the first people Iger called as Disney’s CEO. “I’m not really ready to sell,” he said. He pulled some strings to get the executive a meeting at ABC’s production services department, where he was hired on the spot. (Before long, Comcast would buy NBC from them.) I came back from our Christmas holiday and dragged a whiteboard into the conference room next to my office and began to play around. In the short term, Disney’s decision is hugely disruptive because it will forego hundreds of millions in annual revenue. Buying an existing platform was expensive, but it allowed Disney to enter the market quickly. He believes that leadership is all about humility, because fake leaders are less credible than those who admit their own weaknesses. When they met for their meeting, Eisner assumed that it was about him being fired and decided not to fight back against the decision since it seemed inevitable anyway. Though each major acquisition, a common trait saved negotiations: Looking back on the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, the thread that runs through all of them (other than that, taken together, they transformed Disney) is that each deal depended on building trust with a single controlling entity. The new owners of ABC Sports took away the limousines that were previously given to employees. If we didn’t close the deal by the end of 2012, George, who owned Lucasfilm outright, would take a roughly $ 500 million hit on the sale. “And why are you telling me now?” “I am about to become your biggest shareholder and a member of your board,” he said. There were also issues with personnel. 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. That’s a hard thing to let go, and I was deeply sensitive to that. this was one final way for George to put someone in whom he trusted to be the steward of his legacy. Iger spoke to the Disney board, imploring them not to focus on the past issues of the company, but to look to his plan for the future: “You cannot win on the defensive. Last-minute surprises can jeopardize a business deal, even after you think it’s sealed: Just after noon, Steve found me and pulled me aside. It became a billion-dollar business. As a result, Disney’s animation studio was in disarray. It was a lesson Iger took to heart and applied during his time as CEO of Disney. No airs, no big egos that needed to be managed, no false sincerity. The soul. Disney needed to become a global company and appeal to new markets, such as India and China. He realized the changing relationship between consumers and entertainment content in 2006, so he had to figure out how Disney could stay on top of things. Once those things are laid out simply, so many decisions become easier to make, and the overall anxiety of an entire organization is lowered. Iger was steadfast in his decision. Jobs didn’t like video games or comics at all, but he put those feelings aside in order to help Iger out by calling Perlmutter directly and vouching for his integrity. I was “crazy,” as one of our investment bankers put it, because the numbers would never work out and this was an impossible “sale” to the street. Here’s my plan.”. Like “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. I have some specific notes, but before I give them to you, I want you to know we have tremendous faith in you.”.