"The Ride of a Lifetime"

[fiefoe]

I'd like to know how Robert Iger got to be the head of ABC at the age of 43, but ultimately leadership lessons from the head of Disney are equivalent to dragon-slayer skills (i.e. 屠龙术).

• Over the eighteen years that took to complete the park, I met with three presidents of China, five mayors of Shanghai, and more party secretaries than I can remember, one of whom was arrested for corruption and banished to northern China in the middle of negotiations, setting the project back nearly two years.
• Everytime I excused myself to take a call, Father Galando seems mildly thrilled, knowing he was hearing about one of the biggest acquisitions in the history of American business before the rest of the world.
• Hiring Michael Ovitz had generated internal strife from the moment it was announced.
• (Disney) 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 given very little thought as to how to do it with sensitivity and care.
• At its essence, good leadership is not about being indispensable, it's about helping others be prepared to possibly step into your shoes.
• (Shanghai Disney site:) What we would consider modernity was nowhere in sight.
• If the rest of the company didn't believe I was a serious candidate, then I had no real authority, and I would be a lame duck right along with Michael.
• The challenge for me was how do I convince the Disney board that I was the change they were looking for without criticizing Michael in the process.
• “You cannot win this as an incumbent,” he said. “You cannot win on the defensive. It’s only about the future. It’s not about the past.” <> That may seem obvious, but it came as a revelation to me. I didn’t have to rehash the past. I didn’t have to defend Michael’s decisions. I didn’t have to criticize him for my own benefit. It’s only about the future. Every time a question came up about what had gone wrong at Disney over the past years, what mistakes Michael made, and why they should think I’m any different, my response could simply and honestly be: “I can’t do anything about the past. We can talk about lessons learned, and we can make sure we apply those lessons going forward. But we don’t get any do- overs. You want to know where I’m going to take this company, not where it’s been. Here’s my plan.”
• 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.
• By the end of the process, I would be interviewed (by the board) fifteen times.
• Theodore Roosevelt: "The Man in the Arena":
      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; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds;
• It was an upcoming change in capital gains laws that eventually savaged the negotiations. If we didn't close the deal by the end of 2012, George (Lucas)... would take a roughly 500 million dollar hit on the sale.
• Essentially that I would determine compensation based on how much they contributed to this new strategy (of adopting technology to the fullest extent.)