The Ride of a Lifetime

I tend not to feel much anxiety when things go awry.

we can’t prepare for everything.

Whatever shape my life took, I told myself, there wasn’t a chance in the world that I was going to toil in frustration and lack fulfillment.

The task was to not let my ego get the best of me. Rather than trying too hard to impress whoever was across the table, I needed to resist the urge to pretend I knew what I was doing and ask a lot of questions. There was no getting around that I was a square peg there. I didn’t come up through Hollywood. I didn’t have a big personality or any obvious swagger. I barely knew anyone in town. I could be insecure about that, or I could let my relative blandness—my un-Hollywood-ness—be a kind of mystery that worked to my advantage while I absorbed as much as I could.

if I had a strength, it was my ability to urge creative people to do their best work and take chances, while also helping them rebound from failure.

Similarly, when I’m the one attending a meeting with a group outside of Disney, I make sure to connect and speak with every person at the table. It’s a small gesture, but I remember how it felt to be the overlooked sidekick, and anything that reminds you that you’re not the center of the universe is a good thing.

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.

You can’t wear your disdain for people on your sleeve, though. You end up either cowing them into submission or frustrating them into complacency. Either way, you sap them of the pride they take in their work.

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. I tried to adopt that mindset in my ensuing conversations with Steve.

“A few solid pros are more powerful than dozens of cons,” Steve 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. It was a powerful quality of his.

Sometimes, even though you’re “in charge,” you need to be aware that in the moment you might have nothing to add, and so you don’t wade in. You trust your people to do their jobs and focus your energies on some other pressing issue.

it’s imperative to communicate your priorities clearly and often.

Those hours aren’t for everyone, but however you find the time, it’s vital to create space in each day to let your thoughts wander beyond your immediate job responsibilities, to turn things over in your mind in a less pressured, more creative way than is possible once the daily triage kicks in.

Instead, 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.

It’s a delicate thing, finding the balance between demanding that your people perform and not instilling a fear of failure in them. Most of us who worked for Roone wanted to live up to his standards, but we also knew that he had no patience for excuses and that he could easily turn on anyone, in his singularly cutting, somewhat cruel, way, if he felt we weren’t performing to his satisfaction.

They didn’t think every key decision should be made by the two of them or by a small group of strategists in corporate headquarters. They hired people who were smart and decent and hardworking, they put those people in positions of big responsibility, and they gave them the support and autonomy needed to do the job. They were also tremendously generous with their time and always accessible. Because of this, executives working for them always had a clear sense of what their priorities were, and their focus enabled us all to be focused, too.

On the final night of coverage, after we signed off, several of us hung around in the control room and drank champagne, toasting our efforts and laughing about how closely we’d averted disaster.

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. If you start petty, you seem petty. And if the big picture is a mess, then the small things don’t matter anyway, and you shouldn’t spend time focusing on them.

Managing your own time and respecting others’ time is one of the most vital things to do as a manager, and he was horrendous at it.

I’ve been asked a lot over the years about the best way to nurture ambition—both one’s own and that of the people you manage. 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. I’ve seen a lot of people who had their sights set on a particular job or project, but the opportunity to actually get that thing was so slim. Their focus on the small thing in the distance became a problem. They grew impatient with where they were. They didn’t tend enough to the responsibilities they did have, because they were longing so much for something else, and so their ambition became counterproductive. 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.

As is so often the case in life, the thing I’d been striving toward was finally here, and now the hard times were about to begin.

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. I can’t tell you what those three should be. We don’t have to figure that out today. You never have to tell me what they are if you don’t want to. But you only get three.” He was right. In my eagerness to demonstrate that I had a strategy for solving all of Disney’s problems and addressing all of the issues we were confronting, I hadn’t prioritized any of them. There was no signaling as to what was most important, no easily digested, comprehensive vision. My overall vision lacked clarity and inspiration. 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.

At its simplest, this book is about being guided by a set of principles that help nurture the good and manage the bad. I was reluctant to write it for a long time. Until fairly recently, I even avoided talking publicly about my “rules for leadership” or any such ideas, because I felt I hadn’t fully “walked the walk.”

One of the most important qualities of a good leader is optimism, a pragmatic enthusiasm for what can be achieved.

an optimistic leader does not yield to pessimism. Simply put, people are not motivated or energized by pessimists.

There’s a related lesson, though, that I only came to fully appreciate years later, when I was in a position of real leadership. It’s so simple that you might think it doesn’t warrant mentioning, but it’s surprisingly rare: 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. (If they don’t own up to their mistakes, or if they blame someone else, or if the mistake is the result of some unethical behavior, that’s a different story, and something that shouldn’t be tolerated.)

the culture that Tom and Dan created. They were two of the most authentic people I’ve ever met, genuinely themselves at all times. No airs, no big egos that needed to be managed, no false sincerity. They comported themselves with the same honesty and forthrightness no matter who they were talking to. They were shrewd businesspeople (Warren Buffett later called them “probably the greatest two-person combination in management that the world has ever seen or maybe ever will see”), but it was more than that. I learned from them that genuine decency and professional competitiveness weren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, true integrity—a sense of knowing who you are and being guided by your own clear sense of right and wrong—is a kind of secret weapon. They trusted in their own instincts, they treated people with respect, and over time the company came to represent the values they lived by. A lot of us were getting paid less than we would have been paid if we went to a competitor. We knew they were cheap. But we stayed because we felt so loyal to these two men.

Tom and Dan were the perfect bosses in this regard. They would talk about 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.

They gave me this job, and I’d delivered quickly, and that gave me an enormous amount of latitude with them. I couldn’t do whatever I wanted, but I had the freedom to exercise a considerable amount of authority. It’s a trust that Brandon Stoddard, my predecessor, never earned. He refused to respect them, and therefore they didn’t respect him, which in turn meant they were determined to tell him no when he fought for things he wanted.

I now have a cordial relationship with Michael Ovitz. He’s been generous about Disney’s success during my time as CEO, and when I look back on it, I think of him not as a bad guy but as a participant in a big mistake. The culture shift was just too big a leap for him.

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.

No one could have handled the stress that Michael was under perfectly, but optimism in a leader, especially in challenging times, is so vital. Pessimism leads to paranoia, which leads to defensiveness, which leads to risk aversion. Optimism sets a different machine in motion. 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.

You can do a lot for the morale of the people around you (and therefore the people around them) just by taking the guesswork out of their day-to-day life. A CEO must provide the company and its senior team with a road map. 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.

It’s perhaps not the most responsible advice in a book like this to say that leaders should just go out there and trust their gut, because it might be interpreted as endorsing impulsivity over thoughtfulness, gambling rather than careful study. As with everything, the key is awareness, taking it all in and weighing every factor—your own motivations, what the people you trust are saying, what careful study and analysis tell you, and then what analysis can’t tell you. You carefully consider all of these factors, understanding that no two circumstances are alike, and then, if you’re in charge, it still ultimately comes down to instinct. Is this right or isn’t it? Nothing is a sure thing, but you need at the very least to be willing to take big risks. You can’t have big wins without them.

There’s no rule book for how to manage this kind of challenge, but in general, you have to try to recognize that when the stakes of a project are very high, there’s not much to be gained from putting additional pressure on the people working on it. Projecting your anxiety onto your team is counterproductive. It’s subtle, but there’s a difference between communicating that you share their stress—that you’re in it with them—and communicating that you need them to deliver in order to alleviate your stress. No one on this project needed reminding of what was at stake.

Looking back on the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, the thread that runs through all of them (other than that, taken together, they transformed Disney) is that each deal depended on building trust with a single controlling entity. There were complicated issues to negotiate in all of the deals, and our respective teams spent long days and weeks reaching agreement on them. But the personal component of each of these deals was going to make or break them, and authenticity was crucial. Steve had to believe my promise that we would respect the essence of Pixar. Ike needed to know that the Marvel team would be valued and given the chance to thrive in their new company. And George had to trust that his legacy, his “baby,” would be in good hands at Disney.

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.

The path to innovation begins with curiosity.

People committing honest mistakes deserve second chances, and judging people too harshly generates fear and anxiety, which discourage communication and innovation.

He knew, first and foremost, that we were telling stories and not just broadcasting events, and to tell great stories, you need great talent. He was the most competitive person I’ve ever worked for, and a relentless innovator, but he also knew that he was only as good as the people he surrounded himself with.

He wanted to try every new gadget and break every stale format. He was looking, always, for new ways to connect to viewers and grab their attention. Roone taught me the dictum that has guided me in every job I’ve held since: Innovate or die, and there’s no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new or untested.

It is the process of gaining knowledge, so an opinion rendered or decision made is more credible and more likely to be correct. It’s simply about taking the time to develop informed opinions.

Roone never said anything to me about it, but he treated me differently, with higher regard, it seemed, from that moment on. In my early days, I thought there was only one lesson in this story, the obvious one about 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.

I was motivated by Roone’s drive for perfection and have carried it with me ever since. But I learned something else along the way, too: Excellence and fairness don’t have to be mutually exclusive. I wouldn’t have articulated it that way at the time.

So what do you do in a situation like that? The first rule is not to fake anything. You have to be humble, and you can’t pretend to be someone you’re not or to know something you don’t. You’re also in a position of leadership, though, so you can’t let humility prevent you from leading. It’s a fine line, and something I preach today. You have to ask the questions you need to ask, admit without apology what you don’t understand, and do the work to learn what you need to learn as quickly as you can. There’s nothing less confidence-inspiring than a person faking a knowledge they don’t possess. True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.

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.

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.

A lot of companies acquire others without much sensitivity regarding what they’re really buying. They think they’re getting physical assets or manufacturing assets or intellectual property (in some industries, that’s more true than in others). In most cases, what they’re really acquiring is people.

Maybe most important, I learned to tolerate the demanding hours and the extreme workload of television production, and that work ethic has stayed with me ever since.

He gave me two weeks to find a job in another department or I was done at the company. I was twenty-three and certain my career in television was already over. But I went to the ABC job-posting site—in those days it was a clipboard hanging on a wall—and there, in a list of about twenty-five other jobs I wasn’t qualified for, was the description of an opening at ABC Sports. I immediately called one of the guys I knew from the Sinatra concert and explained that I was in a tough spot. He told me to come down to 1330 (ABC’s corporate headquarters, 1330 Avenue of the Americas), and a month later I was hired as a studio operations supervisor at ABC Sports.

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. The show was the thing. It was everything to him. The show was more important to Roone than to the people who made it, and you had to make peace with that if you worked for him. 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. You knew how much he cared about making things great, and you simply wanted to live up to his expectations.

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.

It wasn’t that everything they did was bad, it was just the opposite of what those of us who’d worked for Tom and Dan were used to. They were a completely centralized, process-oriented company, and we instinctively bristled at the way they operated. They had also never acquired a big company before, and they’d given very little thought as to how to do it with sensitivity and care. Disagreements that could have been handled with diplomacy were instead done with a tone that was often authoritative and demanding. They acted as if, because they’d bought us, we were expected always to bend to their will.

I wasn’t planning to quit. I didn’t like it—my first six months at Disney were the most dispiriting and unproductive of my career—but I was still new to the company, and because I was based in New York, I wasn’t exposed to the pain quite as much as others were. Mostly what I thought was, this is a difficult problem for Michael to deal with, and I don’t want to add to his strain.

He was proud that I’d risen to the top of the company, but he still thought of me as his understudy—that I’d cut my teeth under him and I was his ally in the front office who would protect him from corporate meddling and allow him to do his thing. I was less blindly devoted to Roone than he wanted to believe, but there was no harm in his thinking it, and no real reason for me to ever disabuse him of the notion. He was at his best when his ego was least threatened.

If the first two priorities were largely about how the public perceived us, this one was about transforming the perception of the company from within.

The drama with Roy reinforced something that tends not to get enough attention when people talk about succeeding in business, which is: Don’t let your ego get in the way of making the best possible decision. I was stung when Roy and Stanley sued the board for choosing me as CEO, and I certainly could have gone to battle with them and prevailed, but it all would have come at a huge cost to the company and been a giant distraction from what really mattered. My job was to set our company on a new path, and the first step was to defuse this unnecessary struggle. The easiest and most productive way to do that was to recognize that what Roy needed, ultimately, was to feel respected. That was precious to him, and it cost me and the company so little.

A little respect goes a long way, and the absence of it is often very costly. Over the next few years, as we made the major acquisitions that redefined and revitalized the company, this simple, seemingly trite idea was as important as all of the data-crunching in the world: If you approach and engage people with respect and empathy, the seemingly impossible can become real.

The ease and the speed with which we got it done, combined with the fact that it showed an admiration for Apple and its products, blew Steve’s mind. He told me he’d never met anyone in the entertainment business who was willing to try something that might disrupt his own company’s business model.

I went to our board’s compensation committee and explained the dilemma. When you innovate, everything needs to change, not just the way you make or deliver a product. Many of the practices and structures within the company need to adapt, too, including, in this case, how the board rewards our executives.

Roseanne’s tweet violated that tenet and our only choice was to do what was morally right. A statement will be released momentarily.” It was an easy decision, really. I never asked what the financial repercussions would be, and didn’t care. In moments like that, you have to look past whatever the commercial losses are and be guided, again, by the simple rule that there’s nothing more important than the quality and integrity of your people and your product. Everything depends on upholding that principle.

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.

It would be easy in a book like this to act as if all the success Disney experienced during my tenure is the result of the perfectly executed vision that I had from the beginning, that I knew, for instance, that focusing on three specific core strategies rather than others would lead us to where we are now. But you can only put that story together in retrospect. In truth, I needed to come up with a plan for the future in order to lead the company. I believed that quality would matter most. I believed we needed to embrace technology and disruption rather than fear it. I believed that expanding into new markets would be vital. I had no real idea, though, especially then, where this journey would take me.

A company’s reputation is the sum total of the actions of its people and the quality of its products. You have to demand integrity from your people and your products at all times.

In fairness, it was a small idea, and arguably not worth the time and investment (though we ended up selling W and Jane to Si Newhouse at Condé Nast and made a profit on the transaction). But there’s a way to convey that while also conveying that you trust the people who work for you, and preserving in them an entrepreneurial spirit. Dan Burke taught me that exact lesson early on in a way that couldn’t have been more opposite from the Strat Planning approach. I can’t recall exactly what it was in response to, but in one of our conversations about some initiative I was considering, Dan handed me a note that read: “Avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil. You may become the greatest trombone-oil manufacturer in the world, but in the end, the world only consumes a few quarts of trombone oil a year!” He was telling me not to invest in projects that would sap the resources of my company and me and not give much back.