Robert Iger’s 15 Years Leading Disney

At the end of last year my sunglasses were removed from my, often-forgotten-to-be-locked, car. The desire to avoid adding a summer squint to my Zoom stare led me to The Oculus.

They have been pioneering a South African designed and manufactured eyewear range – ZERO.2.ONE. The designs are suitably eccentric for my test, so I left with a pair of eyeglasses as well. It always makes me happy to be able to buy African creativity.

/ Strategy

The New York Times called Robert Iger’s autobiography, Ride of a Lifetime, an “engaging work of self-hagiography”.

Robert and I don’t socialize much so I am not able to comment on the degree of hagiography involved.

I’ll say this, he was the CEO of the Walt Disney Company for 15 years, pulled off the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilms and drove the launch of Disney+.

For most of us, being in the room for just one of those projects would count as a career highlight. So, hagiography or not, he has a notable track record.

If you lead or aspire to lead, a large, complex organisation this is a must-read.

He reflects on Michael Eisner’s (his predecessor) comment that “micromanaging is underrated”.

Iger says that Eisner helped him “understand that great is often a collection of very small things” and that “sweating the details can show how much you care”.

It’s a delicate balance.

If you don’t have the respect of your teams and they don’t know you care, it will lead to you being perceived as petty and controlling, and alienate them. But identifying and celebrating the craft in someone’s work can build amazing results over time.

The chapter, “It’s about the future” describes how he balanced fighting for the CEO role after the Board had ended the relationship with Eisner, whilst showing respect for his predecessor and managing the fact that he himself had been COO for 5 years. It is a masterclass in strategy.

As Iger took over as CEO, he radically reduced the power and size of a central oversight group that had grown to ‘65 analysts with MBAs from the best business schools in the country’ under Eisner’s leadership. Iger reflects that one decision had a radical effect on unlocking creativity and innovation.

It’s a mistake often made. Decision-making gets centralized away from operational leadership. It’s a double whammy. One, people now directing the decisions don’t have a lived experience of the business and so missteps inevitably happen. Two, those leading the business day-to-day are alienated. They bring less of themselves to their roles. They give up trying to prevent the impending train wrecks that emerge from the central office. It gets costly quickly.

It’s even most costly in creative businesses where the people are the business. You don’t want to alienate them. Iger changed that with one simple but powerful move.

Iger took this same philosophy into his conversation with Steve Job about acquiring Pixar. He says “A lot of companies acquire others without much sensitivity regarding what they’re really buying…In most instances what they’re really acquiring is people. In a creative business, that’s where the value truly lies.”

The same awareness reflects in his negotiations with the owner and CEO of Marvel, Ike Perlmutter, telling him, “It doesn’t make any sense for us to buy you for what you are and then turn you into something else.”

Jobs and Eisner had a fractious relationship, but Iger was convinced both that Disney needed Pixar’s content magic, and that having Steve Jobs on the Disney Board, and Ed Catmull and John Lasseter heading Disney Animation would be invaluable. To get this right he needed to convince Jobs.

After their initial meeting, Iger was despondent. There was a long list of cons, but Jobs said “A few solid pros are more powerful than dozens of cons.”

It is hard to not let the negatives drown out the positives. Remember that it easy to poke holes. It is harder to envisage the future, so protect those pros.

In launching Disney+, Iger needed to disrupt much of the current way of working.

As he puts it, “intentionally taking on short-term losses in the hope of generating long-term growth – requires no small amount of courage”. How often don’t you encounter businesses that both want to innovate and protect current margins? Inevitably they wither away.

To accomplish this bold step, he needed his Board to change the way they remunerated Disney executives. Iger wanted them to relinquish a measurement-based system to allow him to award bonuses at his discretion. His logic was the metrics only told you about the existing business and the past. He needed to create the future, and so wanted to be able to reward his team for actions leading to that outcome. He convinced them.

Each of these steps has shaped the entertainment world as we know it. Arguably no Disney-Marvel deal, no Black Panther and we’d all be poorer for it.

/ SELF

I enjoyed how Iger (and his writing partner Joel Lovell) toggle between recounting the history and giving us visibility of what was happening ‘behind the curtain’. In that, we get both a fascinating history and insight to take into our leadership journeys.

He describes the relentless pursuit of perfection as being “not about perfectionism at all costs. It’s about creating an environment in which people refuse to accept mediocrity.”

And I loved this take on leadership, “True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.”

/ SOUL

The Norval Foundation in Cape Town is currently exhibiting the work of the late Xitsonga sculptor Jackson Hlungwani.

When you stand in the presence of Hlungwani’s work, you can feel him leading you to places that lie beyond the current moment.

Some of the work is monumental, towering metres high, some small and trenchant (his depiction of the archangel Gabriel is a revelation).

The curators – Nessa Leibhammer, Amos Letsoalo and Karel Nel – do a phenomenal job of helping visitors understand how Hlungwani wove Xitsonga symbology together with an African Christianity informed by the Ethiopian Church to create his own vision.

It is a subtle weaving that centers his artistic agency in forging works that are unequivocally African, original, informed both by the land in which they were created, and the worlds occupied by the man who created them.

They help us understand him and in doing so they ensure that we know the power that rested in this great artist.

One leaves the exhibition with a deep sense of knowing that this work emerges from the African continent with an African spirit. It is not a derivation from some other tradition. Curators from other places may leave us with that sense. The Norval’s curators help us know Hlungwani’s creative power and in doing so, empower us.

As you go into your week, I’ll leave you with these words from Iger, “If something doesn’t feel right to you, it won’t be right for you”.

Karl

PS: Each week I receive comments from different readers. I thought I’d share some of them here. I’d love to read your comments, so please get in contact.

(This letter was first published on 25 October 2020)