Ride of a lifetime

Who Should Read It?

Anyone who appreciates spectacular biographies. This is a story of ingenuity, determination and boldness. Very inspiring and beautifully written.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

You have to change and improve, being stuck in old ways can do a lot of damage. This became very apparent when Iger took over Disney, the previous CEO behaved erratically and Disney was a extremely centralised company that didn’t foster independence amongst his top executives.
Understanding that in today’s economy, creating quality is more precious than quantity. As users are faced with a plethora of decisions.
Companies have to embrace new technologies in order to remain relevant.
Moving outside of your comfort zone can help us innovate and make us less stagnant/complacent.
Understanding that in business if you don’t innovate you die (Roone Arledge).
By being extremely bold and ingenious Iger managed to achieve remarkable results. Keep learning, be bold and make sure you are living your life according to your values.

📒 Summary + Notes

Disney position nowadays might come across as an easy ride, but this is far from the truth when Bob Iger took place as its CEO on 2005. After a span of incredible successes in the 1900s but particularly in the 1990s in collaboration with Pixar, Disney went through a series of disastrous decisions that nearly destroyed the company. The book is about who is Bob Iger, where he came from and how he transformed Disney to the empire it is today.

Bob Iger owes much of his success to his dad. He served in the US Navy during WW2 and was a graduate from Wharton school of business, although he suffered from manic depression and had difficult episodes in his life, it managed to give his son a deep sense of curiosity. His dad was a keen reader and they tended to discuss meaningful and political topics with his son. Bob Iger father also had a deep sense of morality, for instance, once he quit his job to be able to attend the Martin Luther King Jr protests. All he really cared about his son was that he was using his time productively and to better himself. In future parts of the book Iger reflects that one of his higher fears was to not ending with a the same sense of failure that haunted his father.

Iger began his career in ABC out of pure luck, his uncle and an executive managed to hire him to do the most mundane jobs in a remote radio studio. His role consisted in arriving at 4:30am, setting the set, coordinating with carpenters, etc. Essentially doing the most mundane tasks there are. Slowly he began climbing the ladder and even managed to meet Frank Sinatra, when he was asked to deliver some mouth wash to him. Most importantly he managed to meet an ABC sports executive, and impressed by Iger’s attitude he hired him for a position there, which was the highest earning division of ABC. There was a lifestyle change during his time there, things became fancier but most importantly he met the controversial figure of Roone Arledge, a pioneering journalist in the sports television industry, he came up with concepts like the slow motion replay, reverse angle cameras, etc. One of the core lessons learned here was “In order to survive in the business industry is to stay ahead of the curve”.

Iger’s decision to stay with ABC was arguably the best call of his career. At age 34 he was made vice president of ABC sports, and ABC was also bought by another company called Cap Cities. This shook up the whole company, not in a good way. Iger threatened to leave as things were not looking good in his eyes, until the new CEO Dan Burke (which turned out to be one of his great mentors) persuade him otherwise, Dan turned out to be amiable, energetic and infectiously optimistic an overall fabulous boss. Dan turned out to trust and delegate decisions to those around him, allowing Iger to take the lead on several projects. The biggest display of character came when Iger was responsible of covering the winter olympics in 1988, everything went well at first until the temperatures raised unexpectedly and there was no snow at all anymore, the event was cancelled, but Iger improvised and decided to cover interesting stories around characters in the olympics, such as Eddie “the eagle” Edwards and the Jamaican bobsleigh team, which worked tremendously well, this awarded Iger with the presidency of ABC entire entertainment division.

He moved to LA to take this position, in which he was completely out of his depth, doing something he had never done before. As he saw it, leadership is all about humility - few things are less confidence inspiring than a leader faking knowledge. Iger made some though calls, particularly airing a risky show on prime time called Twink Peaks, which was a huge gamble but it turned out to be a moderate success. Most importantly it gave him a name as someone willing to take risks in order to innovate and compete with other TV networks who were ahead of ABC. This grabbed the attention of directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Iger’s ability to network and maintain relationships throughout his career is remarkable and it payed off massively.

Iger boldness didn’t go unnoticed and in Sept 1994 he was promoted to COO. In 1996 Disney would acquire ABC, acquiring big assets from ABC like ESPN. Whilst reading the book is noticeable that this were the most unproductive years of Iger. Disney was buried in bureaucracy, every decision had to be run by Strategic planning, a unit stuffed from Ivy league MBAs, every project had to have the numbers crunched. This in contrast to the great culture that was created by Tom Murphy and Dan Burke at ABC, where they had a decentralised structure, as long as you stuck to your budget and behaved ethically you were given independence.

In a series of events Iger was promoted to COO and given a seat in the board of directors at Disney. The relationship with Pixar was the only thing that kept Disney afloat during this time, they signed for a 5 movie deal with them, which gave them:

Toy Story
A Bugs Life
Monsters Inc

This brought massive revenues to Disney. The Current CEO (Eisner) was a difficult man, who was stuck in his own ways and had a very old fashion of doing businesses, he ended up bullying Steve Jobs, who decided he never wanted to work with Disney again. After 9/11 things for Disney looked grim as people were not travelling as much, so the parks stagnated. Soon after there was a revolt amongst Disney shareholders and support for Eisner was gone.

Iger had to build a very strong case in order to become the CEO of Disney, he had a lot of help from an old friend at ABC (Scott Miller), which shows how important your network is in succeeding. Miller told hi that this would be a political campaign, to come out on top he would need to win the battle for the “soul of the company”. The most important role of a CEO is to provide a roadmap, tell people where you are now, where you are going next and how you are planning on getting there, you essentially give them reference points that help them frame their decisions. After this Iger landed on three strategic priorities for Disney:

Disney had to devote more of his time and capital to creating memorable movies and characters. In today’s market consumers face a dizzying number of choices. Great branded content helps them decide how to spend their precious time and money.
Disney needed to embrace cutting edge technologies. Both to create and to distribute new products. Unless consumers could access Disneys content in a more user friendly, mobile and digital way the company would struggle to remain relevant.
Disney needed to become a truly global company and tap into emerging markets like China or India. This wouldn’t just help Disney expand but it would also force them to create new kinds of content. Simply churning the same thing for the same customers, by contrast, was a recipe for stagnation.

After displaying a very persuasive case, Iger was named CEO of Disney in 2005.

One of the most important things Iger had to do as the new CEO of Disney was to repair his relationship with Pixar. Disney had racked a series of terrible decisions during the last decade, investing 1 billion in new movies and lost 40% of it, while Pixar had racked success after success. The relationship was severely damaged with Steve Jobs but with Iger things were different. After a series of negotiations and with his boldness and charm he managed to persuade Jobs to sell Pixar, but Pixar had to have their structure untouched, particularly their top executives to remain in complete freedom, something Iger completely accepted. After this, Disney had tremendous results, including Toy Story 3 and 4, Ratatouille, the incredible, etc. Some of the highest grossing films of the last 15 years.

Similarly Disney acquired Marvel after a series of hard negotiations, which really helped to have Steve Jobs on his side. This was a tremendous success and catapulted Disney movies to a different level, for example with the series “The Avengers” which grossed 2 billion in box office receipts. It also put Disney at the forefront of leading voice cultural debates, like with the black panther.

Disney ended up betting by essentially acquiring a tech company called BAMTech, which helped create the streaming service for a baseball channel, as well as for HBO. they would help to build ESPN+ as well as Disney+. This was hugely disruptive, by pulling its TV shows and movies from alternative streaming services like Netflix, Disney is effectively forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing fees, however, the decision marks the reinvention of Disney. Thanks to this the corporation will no longer be reliant on intermediaries like movie theatres and distributors - instead, it will be able to deliver its content straight to customers.

In 2019, Iger also pulled another merger with 21st Century Fox, for 52 billion. Meaning Disney now owns other franchises, including Star Wars. Disney future profitability and cultural relevance never looked more assure.