The ride of a life time

• Goal of the book
  If you run a business or manage a team or collaborate with others in pursuit of a common goal, this book might be helpful to you. My experiences from day one have all been in the media and entertainment world, but these strike me as universal ideas: about fostering risk taking and creativity; about building a culture of trust; about fueling a deep and abiding curiosity in oneself and inspiring that in the people around you; about embracing change rather than living in denial of it; and about operating, always, with integrity and honesty in the world, even when that means facing things that are difficult to face. These are abstractions, but my hope is that the stories and examples that are significant to me as I look back at the long arc of my career will help them feel more concrete and relatable, not just to the aspiring CEOs of the world but to anyone wanting to be less fearful, more confidently themselves, as they navigate their professional and even personal lives.
• learning

  • Starting at the Bottom

    • “Do what you need to do to make it better.”“the relentless pursuit of perfection.” 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. 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.
    • 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
    • Excellence and fairness don’t have to be mutually exclusive. 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.

  • Betting on Talent

    • what a boss should look like: I learned from them that genuine decency and professional competitiveness weren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, 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 weapon. They trusted in their own instincts, they treated people with respect, and over time the company came to represent the values they lived by. A lot of us were getting paid less than we would have been paid if we went to a competitor. We knew they were cheap. But we stayed because we felt so loyal to these two men.
    • Their business strategy was fairly simple. They were hypervigilant about controlling costs, and they believed in a decentralized corporate structure. Meaning: They didn’t think every key decision should be made by the two of them or by a small group of strategists in corporate headquarters. They hired people who were smart and decent and hardworking, they put those people in positions of big responsibility, and they gave them the support and autonomy needed to do the job. They were also tremendously generous with their time and always accessible. Because of this, executives working for them always had a clear sense of what their priorities were, and their focus enabled us all to be focused, too.
    • But it was such a stressful way to kick things off, and a reminder of how one person’s unwillingness to give a timely response can cause so much unnecessary strain and inefficiency.
    • My instinct throughout my career has always been to say yes to every opportunity. In part this is just garden-variety ambition. I wanted to move up and learn and do more, and I wasn’t going to forgo any chance to do that, but I also wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of doing things that I was unfamiliar with.
    • Tom and Dan were the perfect bosses in this regard. They would talk about valuing ability more than experience, and they believed in putting people in roles that required more of them than they knew they had in them. It wasn’t that experience wasn’t important, but they “bet on brains,” as they put it, and trusted that things would work out if
      they put talented people in positions where they could grow, even if they were in unfamiliar territory.
    • “Life’s an adventure,” she said. “If you don’t choose the adventurous path, then you’re not really living.”

  • Know What You Don’t Know (and Trust in What You Do)

    • True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else. Rather than trying too hard to impress whoever was across the table, I needed to resist the urge to pretend I knew what I was doing and ask a lot of questions.
    • Innovate or die.
    • “We tried something big and it didn’t work,” I said. “I’d much rather take big risks and sometimes fail than not take risks at all.”
    • 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 way they conveyed their faith in me at every step made all the difference in my success.

  • Enter Disney

    • Managing your own time and respecting others’ time is one of the most vital things to do as a manager. You have to be attentive. You often have to sit through meetings that, if given the choice, you might choose not to sit through. You have to learn and absorb. You have to hear out other people’s problems and help find solutions. It’s all part of being a great manager.

  • Second in Line

    • the best way to nurture ambition: do the job you have well; be patient; look for opportunities to pitch in and expand and grow; and make yourself one of the people, through attitude and energy and focus, that your bosses feel they have to turn to when an opportunity arises. if you’re a boss, these are the people to nurture—not the ones who are clamoring for promotions and complaining about not being utilized enough but the ones who are proving themselves to be indispensable day in and day out.
    • a good boss: They were invested in my growth, they conveyed how much they wanted me to succeed, and they cleared a path for me to learn what I needed to know in order to move up and eventually run the company. At every stage I worked hard to absorb as much as I could, knowing that if I performed, they had larger plans in place. As a result, I felt profoundly loyal to them.
    • 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.
    • It’s a tricky thing, moving people over to your side and enlisting their enthusiastic engagement. 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.

  • Good Things Can Happen

    • he taught me how to see in a way I hadn’t been able to before. I had no experience with the creative process that went into building and running a theme park, and had never spent time visually imagining a visitor’s experience. Michael walked through the world with a set designer’s eye, and while he wasn’t a natural mentor, it felt like a kind of apprenticeship to follow him around and watch him work.
    • What struck me, and what was invaluable in my own education, was his ability to see the big picture as well as the granular details at the same time, and consider how one affected the other.“great” is often a collection of very small things
    • “great” is often a collection of very small things. Michael often saw things that other people didn’t see, and then he demanded that they be made better.
    • as a leader you can’t communicate that pessimism to the people around you. It’s ruinous to morale. It saps energy and inspiration. Decisions get made from a protective, defensive posture. optimism in a leader, especially in challenging times, is so vital. Pessimism leads to paranoia, which leads to defensiveness, which leads to risk aversion.It’s about believing you and the people around you can steer toward the best outcome, and not communicating the feeling that all is lost if things don’t break your way. The tone you set as a leader has an enormous effect on the people around you. No one wants to follow a pessimist.

  • It’s About the Future

    • It’s only about the future. 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. We can talk about lessons learned, and we can make sure we apply those lessons going forward. But we don’t get any do-overs. You want to know where I’m going to take this company, not where it’s been. Here’s my plan.”
    • You must think, plan, and act like an insurgent,” Scott told me, and your plan should be formed with one clear thought in mind: “This is a battle for the soul of the brand. Talk about the brand, how to grow its value, how to protect it.”
    • 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.
    • A company’s culture is shaped by a lot of things, but this is one of the most important—you have to convey your priorities clearly and repeatedly. In my experience, it’s what separates great managers from the rest. If leaders don’t articulate their priorities clearly, then the people around them don’t know what their own priorities should be. Time and energy and capital get wasted. People in your organization suffer unnecessary anxiety because they don’t know what they should be focused on. Inefficiency sets in, frustration builds up, morale sinks.
    • A CEO must provide the company and its senior team with a road map. 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.
    • We’ll never get the admiration or the public unless we get it from our own people first. And the way to get the people working for us to admire the company and believe in its future is to make products they’re proud of. It’s that simple
    • I couldn’t let the negativity being expressed by people who knew little about me affect the way I felt about myself.
    • steer clear of anger and anxiety over things you can’t control.I could control what I did and how I comported myself. Everything else was beyond my control. I didn’t maintain that perspective every moment, but to the extent that I was able to, it kept the anxiety from having too strong a hold.
• leading
  • The Power of Respect
    • About Roy, I detected vulnerability in him now. There was nothing to be gained by making him feel smaller or insulted. He was just someone looking for respect, and getting it had never been especially easy for him. It was so personal, and involved so much pride and ego, and this battle of his had been going on for decades. strategy: give Roy an emeritus role on the board and would invite him to film premieres and theme-park openings and special company events.I’d also give him a small consulting fee and an office on the lot so he could come and go and call Disney his home again.
    • A little respect goes a long way, and the absence of it is often very costly. If you approach and engage people with respect and empathy, the seemingly impossible can become real.
  • Disney-Pixar and a New Path to the Future
    • In advance of most board meetings, I’ve asked all of my business heads for an update on their businesses, so that I could inform the board on business performance, important issues, and challenges and opportunities.
    • “The average tenure for a Fortune 500 CEO is less than four years.” At the time, it was a joke between us, to make sure the expectations I set for myself were realistic. Now, though, she said it with a tone that implied I had little to lose by acting fast. “Be bold,” was the essence of her advice.
    • 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. One of the things I’ve always instinctively felt is that long shots aren’t usually as long as they seem.
    • “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.
    • Steve: intense, energetic, engaged, and far more open to the possibility of making this idea (and I suspected many ideas) work.
    • As with everything, the key is awareness, taking it all in and weighing every factor—your own motivations, what the people you trust are saying, what careful study and analysis tell you, and then what analysis can’t tell you. You carefully consider all of these factors, understanding that no two circumstances are alike, and then, if you’re in charge, it still ultimately comes down to instinct. Is this right or isn’t it? Nothing is a sure thing, but you need at the very least to be willing to take big risks. You can’t have big wins without them.
    • 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 ended by saying, as if it wasn’t already clear, that I really wanted to try to make this happen.
  • Marvel and Massive Risks That Make Perfect Sense
    • There’s no good playbook for how to fire someone, though I have my own internal set of rules. You have to do it in person, not over the phone and certainly not by email or text. You have to look the person in the eye. You can’t use anyone else as an excuse.
    • 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.
    • Surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do.
  • Star Wars
    • There’s no rule book for how to manage this kind of challenge, but in general, you have to try to recognize that when the stakes of a project are very high, there’s not much to be gained from putting additional pressure on the people working on it. 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.
    • There was more than enough pressure to go around for both of us, and I wanted him to feel that he could call me at any moment to discuss any problem he was wrestling with, and that I would call him with ideas that I had. I was a resource for him, and a collaborator, but not someone who needed to put my stamp on this film out of vanity or title or obligation.

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. There were complicated issues to negotiate in all of the deals, and our respective teams spent long days and weeks reaching agreement on them. But the personal component of each of these deals was going to make or break them, and authenticity was crucial. Steve had to believe my promise that we would respect the essence of Pixar. Ike needed to know that the Marvel team would be valued and given the chance to thrive in their new company. And George had to trust that his legacy, his “baby,” would be in good hands at Disney.

• If You Don’t Innovate, You Die
  • The questions for us were: Could we find the technology we needed to accomplish that and be at the forefront of change rather than simply being undone by it? Did we have the stomach to start cannibalizing our own still-profitable businesses in order to begin building a new model? Could we disrupt ourselves, and would Wall Street tolerate the losses that we would inevitably incur as we tried to truly modernize and transform the company?
  • I don’t like to lay out problems without offering a plan for addressing them. (This is something I exhort my team to do, too—it’s okay to come to me with problems, but also offer possible solutions.)
  • 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. With a company the size of Disney, this can mean traveling around the world and holding regular town hall–style meetings with our various business units, communicating my thinking and responding to concerns, but it also means responding in a timely way and being thoughtful about any issues brought to me by my direct reports—returning phone calls and replying to emails, making the time to talk through specific problems, being sensitive to the pressures people are feeling. All of this became an even more significant part of the job as we embarked on this new, uncertain path.
• No Price on Integrity
  • use white board to plan around ideas
    • The first thing I did was separate “content” from “technology.” We would have three content groups: movies (Walt Disney Animation, Disney Studios, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Twentieth Century Fox, Fox 2000, Fox Searchlight), television (ABC, ABC News, our television stations, Disney channels, Freeform, FX, National Geographic), and sports (ESPN). All of that went on the left side of the whiteboard. On the other side went tech: apps, user interfaces, customer acquisition and retention, data management, sales, distribution, and so on. The idea was simply to let the content people focus on creativity and let the tech people focus on how to distribute things and, for the most part, generate revenue in the most successful ways. Then, in the middle of the board I wrote “physical entertainment and goods,” an umbrella for various large and sprawling businesses: consumer products, Disney stores, all of our global merchandise and licensing agreements, cruises, resorts, and our six theme-park businesses.
  • I don’t mean to stand on a high horse, but as a company, we have always tried to do what we felt was right, no matter what the politics or the commerce. In other words, demanding quality and integrity from all of our people and of all of our products is paramount, and there is no room for second chances, or for tolerance when it comes to an overt transgression that discredits the company in any
  • our future depended on three things: making high-quality branded content, investing in technology, and growing globally.
  • Determining principles of leadership is impossible to do without experience, but I had great mentors. Michael, for sure, and Tom and Dan before him, and Roone before them. Each was a master in his own way, and I’d absorbed everything I could from them. Beyond that, I trusted my instincts, and I encouraged the people around me to trust theirs. Only much later did those instincts start to shape themselves into particular qualities of leadership that I could articulate.
  • wherever you are along the path, you’re the same person you’ve always been.
• Core Values