Read: 2026-07-10
Recommend: 10/10
This book is fantastic for anyone looking to sharpen their management skills! The summary at the end is a bit dry, but the really interesting stuff is scattered throughout the rest of the book. I think Robert (Bob) Iger is a key reason Disney is so successful, especially with his famous saying, “innovate or die.”
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
I’ve seen other companies deal with crises by letting a “company spokesperson” be their official voice, and that strategy has always struck me as cold and a bit cowardly. Corporate systems often work to insulate and protect CEOs, sometimes to a fault, and I was determined not to do that now.
As I near the end of all of that and think back on what I’ve learned, these are the ten principles that strike me as necessary to true leadership. I hope they’ll serve you as well as they’ve served me.
Decades after I stopped working for Roone, I watched a documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about a master sushi chef from Tokyo named Jiro Ono, whose restaurant has three Michelin stars and is one of the most sought-after reservations in the world. In the film, he’s in his late eighties and still trying to perfect his art. He is described by some as being the living embodiment of 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.
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 impossible not to make them; but it is possible to acknowledge them, learn from them, and set an example that it’s okay to get things wrong sometimes. What’s not okay is to undermine others by lying about something or covering your own ass first.
Be decent to people. Treat everyone with fairness and empathy. This doesn’t mean that you lower your expectations or convey the message that mistakes don’t matter. It means that you create an environment where people know you’ll hear them out, that you’re emotionally consistent and fair-minded, and that they’ll be given second chances for honest mistakes.
I didn’t want to be in the business of playing it safe. I wanted to be in the business of creating possibilities for greatness. Of all the lessons I learned in that first year running prime time, the need to be comfortable with failure was the most profound. Not with lack of effort but with the unavoidable truth that if you want innovation—and you should, always—you need to give permission to fail.
if you don’t do the work, the people around you detect that right away and their respect for you disappears. 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.
They should both have known that it couldn’t work, but they willfully avoided asking the hard questions because each was somewhat blinded by his own needs. It’s a hard thing to do, especially in the moment, but those instances in which you find yourself hoping that something will work without being able to convincingly explain to yourself how it will work—that’s when a little bell should go off, and you should walk yourself through some clarifying questions. What’s the problem I need to solve? Does this solution make sense? If I’m feeling some doubt, why? Am I doing this for sound reasons or am I motivated by something personal?
It’s important to know how to find the balance—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. Conversely, 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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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 PIXAR ACQUISITION served our urgent need to revitalize Disney Animation, but it was also the first step in our larger growth strategy: to increase the amount of high-quality branded content we created; to advance technologically, both in our ability to create more compelling products and to deliver those products to consumers; and to grow globally.
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. This is you making a decision about them—not them as a person but the way they have performed in their job—and they need and deserve to know that it’s coming from you. You can’t make small talk once you bring someone in for that conversation. 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. I emphasize that it was a tough decision to make, and that I understand that it’s much harder on them. There’s a kind of euphemistic corporate language that is often deployed in those situations, and it has always struck me as offensive. There’s no way for the conversation not to be painful, but at least it can be honest, and in being honest there is at least a chance for the person on the receiving end to understand why it’s happening and eventually move on, even if they walk out of the room angry as hell.
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.
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 don’t mess around when it comes to these things,” I told George. We would quickly arrive at a number that we believed his company was worth—and one that I believed I could sell to the board, to our shareholders, and to Wall Street—and whatever that number was, I said, “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.”
“I know why companies fail to innovate,” I said to them at one point. “It’s tradition. Tradition generates so much friction, every step of the way.” I talked about the investment community, which so often punishes established companies for reducing profits under any circumstances, which often leads businesses to play it safe and keep doing what they’ve been doing, rather than spend capital in order to generate long-term growth or adapt to change. “There’s even you,” I said, “a board that doesn’t know how to grant stock because there’s only one way we’ve ever done it.” At every stage, we were swimming upstream. “It’s your choice,” I said. “Do you want to fall prey to the ‘innovator’s dilemma’ or do you want to fight it?”
This was a clear example, though, of how a company’s integrity depends on the integrity of its people, and while I had great personal affection and concern for him, he’d made choices that violated Disney policy. It was a painful decision to let him go, but the right one—even if it meant that, as we entered what was the most taxing stretch for the company and for me since I’d become CEO, we were now without leaders in two of our most important businesses: ESPN and Animation.
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 way.
The cost of building the app and creating the content, combined with the losses incurred by undercutting our own traditional businesses, meant we’d reduce our profits by a few billion dollars a year over the first few years. It would take some time before success would be measured in profits. First, it would be measured in subscribers. We wanted the service to be accessible to as many people as possible around the world, and we had settled on a price that we estimated would bring in somewhere between sixty and ninety million subscribers in the first five years.
I’m comforted by something I’ve come to believe more and more in recent years—that it’s not always good for one person to have too much power for too long. Even when a CEO is working productively and effectively, it’s important for a company to have change at the top. I don’t know if other CEOs agree with this, but I’ve noticed that you can accumulate so much power in a job that it becomes harder to keep a check on how you wield it. Little things can start to shift. Your confidence can easily tip over into overconfidence and become a liability. You can start to feel that you’ve heard every idea, and so you become impatient and dismissive of others’ opinions. It’s not intentional, it just comes with the territory. You have to make a conscious effort to listen, to pay attention to the multitude of opinions. I’ve raised the issue with the executives I work most closely with as a kind of safeguard. “If you notice me being too dismissive or impatient, you need to tell me.” They’ve had to on occasion, but I hope not too often.
Maybe this is the case for many of us: No matter who we become or what we accomplish, we still feel that we’re essentially the kid we were at some simpler time long ago. Somehow that’s the trick of leadership, too, I think, to hold on to that awareness of yourself even as the world tells you how powerful and important you are. The moment you start to believe it all too much, the moment you look yourself in the mirror and see a title emblazoned on your forehead, you’ve lost your way. That may be the hardest but also the most necessary lesson to keep in mind, that wherever you are along the path, you’re the same person you’ve always been.
HERE’S AN OLD ADAGE that says success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. In my case, success has many fathers and mothers. Everything we’ve accomplished at Disney these last fifteen years has been the result of the collaborative efforts of countless people