The Ride of a Lifetime by Robert Iger: book notes
💡JC's Newsletter #105
Dear friends,
As readers enjoyed the book summary of the Cold Start Problem I shared a few weeks ago, I’m doing it again, with The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company by Robert Iger.
I also strongly recommend you to buy it, it is a must read!
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💼 Qualities of a leader
👉 Optimism
One of the most important qualities of a good leader is optimism, a pragmatic enthusiasm for what can be achieved. Even in the face of difficult choices and less than ideal outcomes, an optimistic leader does not yield to pessimism. Simply put, people are not motivated or energized by pessimists.
Optimism in a leader, especially in challenging times, is so vital. Pessimism leads to paranoia, which leads to defensiveness, which leads to risk aversion.
➡️ I'm 100% aligned. We need optimism, being biased towards solutions. And we have to fight that in France, where people tend to be cynic-first.
Especially in difficult moments, the people you lead need to feel confident in your ability to focus on what matters, and not to operate from a place of defensiveness and self-preservation. This isn’t about saying things are good when they’re not, and it’s not about conveying some innate faith that “things will work out.” 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.
➡️ On the importance of being optimistic that we can find solutions if we work hard together, and how inspiring it is.
👉 Decisiveness: The Power of Courage & Taking Risks
All decisions, no matter how difficult, can and should be made in a timely way. Leaders must encourage a diversity of opinion balanced with the need to make and implement decisions. Chronic indecision is not only inefficient and counterproductive, but it is deeply corrosive to morale.
➡️ That is something I want us to keep improving on. We are too long at making decisions on some issues.
Having the right level of analysis
To my mind, though, they were often too deliberative, pouring every decision through their overly analytical sieve. Whatever we gained from having this group of talented people sifting through a deal to make sure it was to our advantage, we often lost in the time it took for us to act. This isn’t to say that research and deliberation aren’t important. You have to do the homework. You have to be prepared. You certainly can’t make a major acquisition without building the necessary models to help you determine whether a deal is the right one, but you also have to recognize that there is never 100% certainty. No matter how much data you’ve been given, it’s still, ultimately, a risk, and the decision to take that risk or not comes down to one person’s instinct.
➡️ I think sometimes we have that risk at Alan about over-analysing. While I really think that doing the homework and doing thought experiments are very important, spending too much time on the risk and trying to analyse everything can freeze us and prevent us from making decisions.
Long shots aren’t usually as long as they seem
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—and something that was greatly reinforced working for people like Roone and Michael—is that long shots aren’t usually as long as they seem. Roone and Michael both believed in their own power and in the ability of their organizations to make things happen—that with enough energy and thoughtfulness and commitment, even the boldest ideas could be executed.
➡️ We have learned several times that stuff that seems huge, and very hard, becomes easier as we just start.
Weighting pros and cons
“A few solid pros are more powerful than dozens of cons,” Steve (Jobs) 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.
➡️ When we make a list of risks and upsides, it is not about the quantity, it is about estimating how big the upside could be.
Doers
Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech, which has long been an inspiration: “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. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”
🤝 Authenticity & fairness
Authenticity. Be genuine. Be honest. Don’t fake anything. Truth and authenticity breed respect and trust.
➡️ Being one self is really important. It is also super important to over-communicate about it, and to have empathy for people who are different.
👉 The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection.
The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection. This doesn’t mean perfectionism at all costs, but it does mean a refusal to accept mediocrity or make excuses for something being “good enough.” If you believe that something can be made better, put in the effort to do it. If you’re in the business of making things, be in the business of making things great.
➡️ Here again, 100% agree. Pushing the boundaries of excellence makes a huge difference in terms of what you do, and it compounds.
What is perfection
Perfection was the result of getting all the little things right. On countless occasions, he would rip up an entire program before it aired and demand the team rework the whole thing, even if it meant working till dawn in an editing room. He wasn’t a yeller, but he was tough and exacting and he communicated in very clear terms what was wrong and that he expected it to get fixed, and he didn’t much care what sacrifice it required to fix it.
His commitment to making things great was galvanizing. It was often exhausting, often frustrating (largely because he would wait until very late in the production process to give notes or demand changes), but it was inspiring, too, and the inspiration far outweighed the frustration.
➡️ Perfection has a cost but is so motivating. It means getting the details right.
Refusing to accept mediocrity
His mantra was simple: “Do what you need to do to make it better.”
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 Japanese word shokunin, which is “the endless pursuit of perfection for some greater good.”
It’s a delicate thing, finding the balance between demanding that your people perform and not instilling a fear of failure in them.
👉 Focus on what you can control
I’m often asked what aspect of the job most keeps me up at night. The honest answer is that I don’t agonize over the work very much. I don’t know if it’s a quirk of brain chemistry, or a defense mechanism I developed in reaction to some family chaos in my youth, or the result of years of discipline—some combination of all of those things, I suppose—but I tend not to feel much anxiety when things go awry. And I tend to approach bad news as a problem that can be worked through and solved, something I have control over rather than something happening to me.
➡️ I’m very similar to that.
🏇 Betting on Talent
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.
👉 Betting on people, ability more than experience
The job they’d just given me—number two at ABC TV—felt like a pretty far reach. I was thirty-seven years old, I’d primarily worked in sports, and now I would be running daytime and late-night and Saturday morning television, as well as managing business affairs for the entire network. I knew precisely nothing about how any of that was done, but Tom and Dan seemed confident I could learn on the job.
➡️ Bet on people you trust.
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.
➡️ That is something I really want us to focus on “valuing ability more than experience”, especially when we hire.
👉 Rise up, patiently
As a leader, you should want those around you to be eager to rise up and take on more responsibility, as long as dreaming about the job they want doesn’t distract them from the job they have. You can’t let ambition get too far ahead of opportunity.
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.
➡️ Very important learning for Alaners, and how to focus on impact and not career to optimise for your long-term success. The importance of being patient to show your impact too.
👉 Managing creative processes & feedback
Managing creative processes starts with the understanding that it’s not a science—everything is subjective; there is often no right or wrong. The passion it takes to create something is powerful, and most creators are understandably sensitive when their vision or execution is questioned. I try to keep this in mind whenever I engage with someone on the creative side of our business. When I am asked to provide insights and offer critiques, I’m exceedingly mindful of how much the creators have poured themselves into the project and how much is at stake for them.
I never start out negatively, and unless we’re in the late stages of a production, I never start small. I’ve found that often people will focus on little details as a way of masking a lack of any clear, coherent, big thoughts.
➡️ Very important when we give feedback, or comment in issues. The details can hide the big thoughts. Start positively, and focus on the one thing that could really improve the direction.
🧮 Strategy
👉 Focus on strategy
Then he added, “You’re going to need some strategic priorities.” I’d given this considerable thought, and I immediately started ticking off a list. I was five or six in when he shook his head and said, “Stop talking. Once you have that many of them, they’re no longer priorities.” 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.”
➡️ Distilling your strategy (especially for large groups) in few very clear priorities help everyone seeing what the company wants to deliver.
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.
➡️ I have learned the importance of repeating the important messages several times as we scale, and especially the why, so we are sure we are aligned on the why.
If leaders don’t articulate their priorities clearly, then the people around them don’t know what their own priorities should be.
A CEO must provide the company and its senior team with a roadmap. 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.
👉 M&A
Price & negotiation
The worst thing you can do when entering into a negotiation is to suggest or promise something because you know the other person wants to hear it, only to have to reverse course later. You have to be clear about where you stand from the beginning.
➡️ Being very clear from scratch on what you will accept or not, and don’t change position.
Typically, the price we pay for assets doesn’t vary much from what we believe the value to be in the first place. It’s often possible to start low and hope to pay far less than what you’re valuing an asset at, but in the process you risk alienating the person you’re negotiating with.
“I’m not going to come in low and negotiate toward the middle. I’m going to do it the way I did it with Steve.”
We agreed to a price quickly, but then we negotiated back and forth for several months over what his role would be.
➡️ We should set prices fast in M&A even if it is a risk.
Stepping out of a deal
In the summer of 2016, we expressed interest to Twitter. They were intrigued, but felt they had an obligation to test the market, and so we reluctantly entered into an auction to buy them. By early fall, we’d virtually closed a deal. Twitter’s board supported the sale, and on a Friday afternoon in October, our board gave their approval to finalize a deal. Then, that weekend, I decided not to go through with it. If earlier acquisitions, especially Pixar, were about trusting my instinct that it was the right thing for the company, the acquisition of Twitter was the opposite of that. Something inside me didn’t feel right. Echoing in my head was something Tom Murphy had said to me years earlier: “If something doesn’t feel right to you, then it’s probably not right for you.” I could see clearly how the platform could work to serve our new purposes, but there were brand-related issues that gnawed at me.
➡️ How they stopped the Twitter deal the week-end of the closing. It is never done until you get the money.
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I read it last summer. Great book!