Bob Iger: Power, Succession, and Leading Disney Through Upheaval

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The main argument that I make in my book is that, uh, CEOs matter not because they do or control everything, but because they shape everything that matters. You had a predecessor who also had a very long tenure. You'd waited a long time to become CEO. You were very ready for it when you got the job. One of the first things that you had to do was to tell the very storied part of Disney, which was the animation business, that they needed, uh, a reset. And you brought in Pixar as a way to help the company reimagine its future. Can you walk us through how you had Disney confront this reality and what it took to get people to get on board?

The signs were all there that Disney Animation was faltering and that its importance to the company was rather significant and therefore had to be fixed and fixed fast. And it wasn't that the company was in denial, but I think because that they had no solutions in terms of how to fix Disney Animation, uh, there wasn't any real movement to try to do so. Uh, they were kind of stuck in neutral in that regard, knowing there was a problem, but not knowing how to get out of it. I studied the company very carefully. It was very clear to me that at least in two thousand and four, two thousand and five when I became CEO, um, the, the animation, uh, business to the company and animation in particular was probably more important than any other business in terms of not just the bottom line, but the perception of the company. And so I felt a sense of urgency and I acted very quickly to address it. And that was to buy Pixar and to not only bring Pixar into Disney, but bring the leadership of Pixar into Disney Animation to turn Disney Animation around. And, and fortunately, um, it paid off. The people at Pixar that came in, John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, in fact turned Disney Animation around and relatively quickly. And, um, kind of the rest is history. The success of Disney Animation since then with movies like Moana and Frozen and Tangled and Zootopia has been very, very obvious, not just to the bottom line, but to the overall perception of Disney.

One of the tasks that CEOs have to do is to both, uh, build on the heritage of the