The Ride of a Lifetime

by Robert Iger;

  The good news was that this was my first opportunity to show them my plan. I laid out the three core principles, and then I fielded several questions about the poor state of morale within the company. “There is still tremendous passion for the brand,” I said. “But my goal is for Disney to be the most admired company in the world, by our consumers and our shareholders and by our employees. That last part is key. 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.”

  There was another, more practical issue that I mentioned regarding morale. Over the years we’d become a company in which virtually all noncreative decisions were made by the central oversight group, Strategic Planning, that I mentioned earlier. Strat Planning was composed of about sixty-five analysts with MBAs from the best business schools in the country. They occupied the fourth floor of our headquarters, and as the company expanded, Michael depended on them more and more to analyze all of our decisions and dictate the strategies for our various businesses.

  In many ways, this made sense. They were very good at what they did, but it created two problems. One was something I alluded to previously, that the centralized decision making had a demoralizing effect on the senior leaders of our businesses, who sensed that the power to run their divisions really resided at Strategic Planning. The other was that their overly analytical decision-making processes could be painstaking and slow. “The world is moving so much faster than it did even a couple of years ago,” I said to the board. “And the speed with which things are happening is only going to increase. Our decision making has to be straighter and faster, and I need to explore ways of doing that.”

  I assumed that if the leaders of our businesses felt more involved in making decisions, that would have a positive, trickle-down effect on the company’s morale. I had no idea at the time how dramatic and immediate that effect would be.

  * * *

  —

  THE SIX-MONTH PROCESS that followed that initial interview with the board tested me more than anything in my career. I’d never been more challenged intellectually—in terms of business intelligence, anyway—never done more intensive thinking about how our company operated and what needed fixing, never processed so much information in such a short amount of time. I was doing all of that on top of the day-to-day demands of helping to run the company (Michael was there, but his attention was often understandably elsewhere), and the long, stressful days began to wear on me.

  The strain wasn’t primarily because of the workload. I’ve always prided myself on my ability and willingness to put in a greater effort than anyone else. For me, the hardest test by far was managing the public scrutiny and the overtly expressed opinions that I should not be the next CEO. The Disney succession was an important business story, and the reporting around it—What was the board thinking? Who was in the mix? Could the company be righted?—was relentless. The consensus among business analysts and commentators largely echoed the opinions of those board members opposed to me: Disney needed fresh blood, a new perspective. Choosing Iger amounted to a giant rubber stamp of Michael Eisner.

  It wasn’t just the press, though. Early in the process, Jeffrey Katzenberg met me for breakfast near the Disney lot in Burbank. “You need to leave,” Jeffrey told me. “You’re not going to get this job. Your reputation has been tarnished.” I knew that distinguishing myself from Michael was going to be a struggle, but I hadn’t up to that point considered that the outside world perceived me as being tainted. Jeffrey felt a need to disabuse me of that idea. There was no separating me from the mess of the last few years, he said. “You should go do some pro bono work to rehabilitate your image.”

  Rehabilitate my image? I heard him out and tried to remain calm, but I was stunned, and angry, by Jeffrey’s certainty that I was done. Still another part of me wondered if he was right. Maybe I didn’t fully comprehend what everyone else around me could see plain as day: that there was no way I was getting this job. Or maybe this was all just Hollywood Kremlinology and the biggest task before me was to continue to make the best case I could make for myself and ignore all of the distractions that I couldn’t control.

  It’s so easy to get caught up in rumor mills, to worry about this person’s perception of you or that person’s, what someone might say or write about you. It’s easy to become defensive and petty and to want to lash out when you feel you’re being unfairly misrepresented. I didn’t believe I deserved this job; I didn’t think I was entitled to it, but I did believe I was right for it. Part of proving that was remaining steady in the face of so much publicly expressed doubt. I still recall one headline, in the Orlando Sentinel, that said “Eisner’s Heir Far from Apparent.” Many others expressed similar sentiments, and for a while it seemed that every day someone was writing or talking about what an abdication of responsibility it would be if the board named me CEO. Stanley Gold was quoted in another publication saying I was “a gentleman and a hard-working executive, but most of the Disney board have open questions about whether [I] should succeed Michael.” That had an ominous tone to it. There was one board member, Gary Wilson, who not only didn’t think I should get the job, but clearly thought he could further his own agenda by baiting me and attempting to humiliate me in our meetings. I had to consistently remind myself that Gary Wilson wasn’t my problem. As much as this process was a test of my ideas, it was also a test of my temperament, and I couldn’t let the negativity being expressed by people who knew little about me affect the way I felt about myself.

  By the end of the process, I would be interviewed fifteen times: that first all-on-one interview; then one-on-one interviews with every member of the board; then follow-up interviews with board members who requested them; then one of the most insulting experiences of my career, an interview with a headhunter named Gerry Roche, who ran a well-known search firm called Heidrick and Struggles.

  Gerry had been hired by the board to “benchmark” me against the outside candidates and to help the board field candidates they did not know. When I learned of this, I complained to George Mitchell that it was offensive and that I’d already answered everything that could be asked of me. “Just do it,” George said. “The board wants to check off every box.”

  So I flew to New York for a lunch meeting at Gerry’s office. We sat in a conference room, with only water on the table. Gerry held a copy of James Stewart’s DisneyWar, which had just been published and which investigated—and in several instances reported inaccurately—Michael’s years as CEO and mine as COO. The book had Post-it notes on several pages, to mark the passages he wanted to challenge me on. He flipped through the book and asked me a series of questions that had little or nothing to do with me. Thirty minutes into the interview, Gerry’s assistant came in with a single brown-bagged lunch, for him, and told him the private jet that was going to take him to a wedding in Florida was leaving soon, and he had to go or he was going to miss it. With that, he got up and left. I never ate, and I walked out of the interview infuriated at the waste of time and the lack of respect.

  There was only one time that the stress and frustration truly got to me. It was January 2005, several months into the process, and I’d taken my six-year-old son, Max, to an L.A. Clippers game at the Staples Center. In the middle of the game, my skin began to feel clammy. My chest tightened, and I felt short of breath. Both of my parents had suffered heart attacks at fifty. I was fifty-four at the time and I knew the symptoms. In fact, I’d always lived in fear of having one. Part of me was sure this was it, and another part was sure it couldn’t be. I ate well, worked out seven days a week, had regular checkups. I couldn’t be experiencing a heart attack, could I? I debated calling for an EMT at the game, but was worried about frightening Max.

  Instead, I told him I was feeling sick to my stomach, and we left for home.
There was a driving rainstorm in L.A. that afternoon, and I was barely able to see the road. My heart felt like it was getting squeezed by a fist inside my chest. I knew it was foolish to be behind the wheel with my son in the backseat, and I worried that I’d made a terrible mistake. In the moment, though, I could only think that I needed to get home. I pulled into our driveway, Max jumped out of the car, and I immediately phoned my internist, Dennis Evangelatos, then called a friend who came and drove me to Dennis’s house. Dennis knew me well and he was aware of the stress I’d been under. He checked my vital signs, then looked me square in the eye and said, “You’re having a classic anxiety attack, Bob. You have to get some rest.”

  It was a relief, but also a worry. I’d always thought of myself as somewhat impervious to stress, able to stay focused and calm in tense situations. The strain of this process was taking a bigger toll than I’d admitted even to myself, much less to my family or close friends, and a bigger toll than it should take. I left Dennis’s house and got home and took some time to put everything that was happening into perspective. It was a big job, and a big title, but it wasn’t my life. My life was with Willow and my boys, with my girls back in New York, with my parents and my sister and my friends. All of this strain was ultimately still about a job, and I vowed to myself to try to keep that in perspective.

  The only time I cracked in front of the board was in my final interview with them. After months of interviews and presentations, they called for one more, a Sunday evening meeting in a hotel conference room in Pasadena. I arrived to learn that they had spent the afternoon at one of the board member’s homes interviewing Meg Whitman, the CEO of eBay, who was the other main contender at that point. (The other four had either dropped out or been eliminated.) By then, I had had it with the whole process. I couldn’t believe there was anything left that they didn’t know, any question that hadn’t already been answered thoroughly several times over. I wanted it to come to an end. The company, which had been facing an uncertain future for half a year now—much longer, if you added in the months of turmoil around Michael’s future—needed it to come to an end even more. Some members of the board didn’t comprehend this, and I had hit the limits of my patience.

  Toward the end of that final interview, Gary Wilson, the board member who had been goading me to disparage Michael throughout the entire process, asked me one more time: “Tell us why we should believe that you are different. What do you think Michael did wrong? What would you do differently?” It struck a nerve, and I lashed back at him in front of the rest of the board. “You’ve asked me the same questions on three prior occasions,” I said, struggling to keep myself from hollering. “I find it offensive, and I’m not going to answer it.”

  Everyone in the room went silent, and the interview came to an abrupt end. I stood up and left without looking any of them in the eye. I didn’t shake anyone’s hand. I didn’t thank them for their time. I’d flunked my self-imposed test to withstand anything they threw at me with patience and respect. That night, George Mitchell and another board member, Aylwin Lewis, each called me at home. “You probably didn’t do yourself irreparable harm,” George said, “but you didn’t do yourself much good, either.” Aylwin was harsher. “This wasn’t the time to let everyone see you sweat, Bob,” he said.

  I wasn’t happy I’d done it, but I was human. I couldn’t take it back at that point, anyway, and I felt my anger was justified. At the end of my conversation with George, I said, “Please just make a decision. It’s time. The company is suffering because of all this.”

  When I look back on that time now, I think of it as a hard-earned lesson about the importance of tenacity and perseverance, but also about the need to steer clear of anger and anxiety over things you can’t control. I can’t overstate how important it is to keep blows to the ego, real as they often are, from occupying too big a place in your mind and sapping too much of your energy. It’s easy to be optimistic when everyone is telling you you’re great. It’s much harder, and much more necessary, when your sense of yourself is being challenged, and in such a public way.

  The succession process was the first time in my career that I had to face that level of anxiety head on. It was impossible to completely filter out the chatter about me or to not be hurt by very public conversations about how ill-suited I was for the job. But I learned, through strong self-discipline and love from my family, that I had to recognize it for what it was—that it had no bearing on who I was—and put it in its proper place. 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.

  * * *

  —

  ON A SATURDAY in March 2005, the board convened to make its decision. Most of the members called into the meeting; Michael and George Mitchell were together in a conference room at ABC in New York.

  I woke up that morning thinking I might have convinced enough of the “undecided” members of the board to give me the job, but when I thought of all the drama and scrutiny around the process, it felt just as possible that they would go another way, that some of the skeptics would have argued forcefully for a change in the narrative, and they would name an outsider.

  I spent the day with my two boys, trying to distract myself. Max and I tossed a ball around, went to lunch, and spent an hour in his favorite neighborhood park. I told Willow that if bad news came, I was getting in my car and taking the cross-country drive that I’d long dreamed of taking. A solo trip across the United States seemed like heaven to me.

  As soon as that meeting ended, George Mitchell and Michael called me at home. Willow was with me in the office we shared. The job of CEO was mine, they said; it would be announced the next day. I appreciated that Michael was on the call. I knew it must have been painful for him. He’d poured himself into that job and wasn’t quite ready to relinquish it, but if he had to be succeeded by someone, I believe he was happy that that person was me.

  I was grateful to George for the way he had treated me throughout the process. If not for him, I don’t think I would have gotten a fair shake by the rest of the board.

  Mostly, I was thankful for Willow. I couldn’t have done it without her faith and wisdom and support. She was rooting for me the whole time, of course, but time after time, she told me this was not the most important thing in my life, in our lives. I knew she was right, but taking her words to heart took work, too, and she helped me do that. Once the call ended, Willow and I sat quietly for a moment, trying to savor it all. I had a mental list of the people I wanted to call right away, and I was fighting the urge to start dialing and instead trying to just be still, to breathe a bit, to let in both the elation and the relief.

  Eventually, I called my parents in Long Island. They were proud, if a little incredulous that their son was going to be running the company founded by Walt Disney. Then I called my daughters in New York, and my old Capital Cities bosses, Dan Burke and Tom Murphy. And then I called Steve Jobs. It was an odd call to make, but it felt important to me to reach out to him, in case there might still someday be a chance of salvaging the relationship with Pixar.

  I barely knew Steve at that point, but I wanted him to know that it was going to be announced the next day that I was the next CEO of the company. His response was basically “Okay, well, that’s cool for you.” I told him that I’d love to come see him and try to convince him that we could work together, that things could be different. He was typical Steve. “How long have you worked for Michael?”

  “Ten years.”

  “Huh,” he said. “Well, I don’t see how things will be any different, but, sure, when the dust settles, be in touch.”

  PART TWO

  LEADING

  CHAPTER 8

  THE POWER OF RESPECT

  THERE WAS A six-month waiting period between my appointment and Mi
chael’s exit from Disney. I had plenty to focus on running the company day to day, but I was looking forward to taking a breather and spending some time gathering my thoughts after the long succession process. I figured the clock on my “first 100 days” would start when Michael walked out the door, and until then I could fly somewhat under the radar and be patient and methodical in my plans.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. Immediately after the announcement, everyone—the press, the investment community, the rest of the industry, Disney employees—was asking the same thing: What’s your strategy for fixing the company and how fast can you implement it? Because of its history, and because Michael had so dramatically transformed it, Disney has always been one of the most scrutinized corporations in the world. The very public struggles we’d endured over the last few years only increased intrigue around who I was and what I was going to do. There were a lot of skeptics who still saw me as a temporary CEO, a short-term patch until the board could identify a star from the outside. Curiosity was high, and expectations were low, and I quickly realized that I needed to define our direction and get some key things done before my tenure officially began.

  In week one of my CEO-in-waiting period, I called my closest advisers—Tom Staggs, who was now CFO; Alan Braverman, our general counsel; and Zenia Mucha, our communications chief—into my office and ticked off a list of the most critical things to accomplish in the next six months. “First, we have to try to bury the hatchet with Roy,” I said. Roy Disney had felt vindicated to some extent by the fact that Michael was forced to leave, but he was still angry that the board hadn’t acted sooner, and he was critical of their decision to give me the job, especially after I’d spoken publicly in Michael’s defense. I didn’t believe there was much Roy could do practically to undermine me at this point, but I felt it was important for the image of the company not to be in an ongoing battle with a member of the Disney family.