For my article A year in reading. My 5 books to implement new ideas in real life, I have selected Robert’s Iger book: The Ride of a Lifetime as one of my best 2020 reads.
This blog is partly about how to advance in your career. Robert’s ride brings excellent insights into leadership, career development, and life principles. He started as the lowliest studio grunt at ABC and ended up becoming the CEO of Disney.
There are two main parts in the book, learning and leading. You’ll navigate through Robert’s career challenges and Disney’s success story, marked by several huge acquisitions like Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox.
I have chosen to summarize the book focusing on Robert’s main principles and some pieces of advice he disseminated in his story.
Main Principles
Optimism
Simply put, people are not motivated or energized by pessimists.
It’s about believing in your and others’ abilities.
In a career spanning 45 years, Robert had to overcome several obstacles.
He had many reasons to become pessimistic, but he does not believe that brings any good. Instead, he conveyed a message of trust despite the difficulties he faced.
With few exceptions in my life, I’ve never worried too much about the future, and I’ve never had too much fear about trying something and failing.
When he became the CEO of Disney in 2005, the company was in a complicated situation and he had to face a lot of public criticism, which tested his ability to remain positive.
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.
Courage
I didn’t want to be in the business of playing it safe. I wanted to be in the business of creating possibilities for greatness.
When the stakes are high, when no amount of analysis can give absolute certainty – like in several of the significant acquisitions Robert went through – at one point a courageous decision must be made.
And it’s also true for opportunities in our daily life. We won’t have absolute certainty, yet we need to have the courage to jump if we want to grow.
Focus
It’s at the center of any personal or collective success.
It’s much easier when you have to deal only with yourself.
To this day, I wake nearly every morning at four-fifteen, though now I do it for selfish reasons: to have time to think and read and exercise before the demands of the day take over.
And more complicated when you have to lead an organization of more than 220,000 people to focus on the right priorities. The author describes this with simplicity.
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.
Decisiveness
Despite the size and the complexity of his organization, Mr. Iger made a point of making any decision in a timely way.
I believe this is interlinked with the courage principle. Technology allows us to analyze topics in so many ways, but there is no absolute certainty.
Robert recognized this, and accepted to jump in and lead the way against all the uncertainties several times. This quality, combined with optimism, was part of his success.
Chronic indecision is not only inefficient and counterproductive, but it is deeply corrosive to morale.
As a leader, you impact your team’s morale, but it’s also valid for your personal decisions. Your attitude and your behavior affect your morale and, in a way, the morale of people around you: your family, your spouse, your children.
Doing nothing is also a decision in itself, and often the worst one. Learn to enjoy deciding. You never know when you’re making that decision how things will turn out, but you will feel much better. You move away from fear and channel that energy into creativity.
Fairness
Treating others with respect is an undervalued currency when it comes to negotiating. A little respect goes a long way, and the absence of it can be very costly
Robert made huge acquisitions during his tenure. He showed a lot of respect to the creative owners involved. Soft skills are often more important than hard facts, even when millions are at stake.
Take responsibility when you screw up. In work, in life, you’ll be more respected and trusted by the people around you if you own up to your mistakes.
As a leader, and a person in general, acknowledging that we were wrong is key to building a relationship based on trust.
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.
And there’s no need to be the CEO of a huge company. We all have to do it with the people we love the most (see the bad child).
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.
I love the expression “emotionally consistent”. Nowadays, we often idolatrize people that are known for their bad temperament. It’s normal, he was a bit nervous…
I don’t believe it. It could happen, but it shouldn’t be a trait of character.
It’s about developing trust. It does not mean that you can’t be firm, but that you keep a calm mind. It’s definitively a good quality.
Authenticity
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.
Think about it, do you often hear it in a meeting room? I don’t know.
One of the golden rules for growth is to get out of our comfort zone. When you are there, it’s normal not to know everything. If it’s not the case, you’re playing it too safe. And even when you win, it leaves a bitter taste.
The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection
This was one of the three key priorities Robert had in terms of how he ran Disney.
Recommitting to the idea that quality matters, embracing technology, and turning Disney into a stronger brand in the international markets.
There is assuredly no perfection, but chasing it increases the standard. And he was really aware of its danger.
It’s not, at least as I have internalized it, about perfectionism at all costs.
He learned this mantra from Roone Arledge, one of his mentors: “Do what you need to do to make it better”.
He sees it as a mindset, really, more than a specific set of rules.
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.
Maybe the Japanese word “shokunin” encompasses this idea the best, “the endless pursuit of perfection for some greater good”.
Integrity
“Another way of saying this is: The way you do anything is the way you do everything”.
The way you act with a restaurant waiter shows more than what you say during a corporate speech.
I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university. Einstein.
In the corporate world, but not only, it’s rare to see people driven by their own sense of right and wrong. When hard decisions need to be made, you are more likely to see people following a group than speaking their minds.
Developing your ability to speak your own mind is a superpower that is often rewarded in the long term.
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.
A few observations that can help in corporate life.
What does it mean to be a good boss?
As he had 20 bosses throughout his career, Robert was able to spot the qualities that define a good boss. And he was deeply influenced by Tom Murphy and Dan Burke, the owners of Capital Cities Communications who bought ABC.
It was a 3,5 billion dollars deal; the small company, Capital Cities, was able to swallow the big one ABC.
Warren Buffett later called them “probably the greatest two-person combination in management that the world has ever seen or maybe ever will see”.
What did they do?
- They acted with a simple business strategy. They were hypervigilant about controlling costs, and they believed in a decentralized corporate structure.
- They hired smart people; they put those people in the hot seat, and gave them the support and autonomy needed to do the job.
- They valued ability more than experience, and they believed in putting people in roles that required more of them than they knew they had in them.
Because of this, Robert felt that he was treated well.
As with so many things, Tom and Dan were perfect models in this regard. They were invested in my growth, they conveyed how much they wanted me to succeed, and they cleared a path for me to learn what I needed to know in order to move up and eventually run the company. At every stage, I worked hard to absorb as much as I could, knowing that if I performed, they had larger plans in place. As a result, I felt profoundly loyal to them.
How did Robert manage his career?
My instinct throughout my career has always been to say yes to every opportunity.
It looks like an evident mindset for ambitious people, but it’s not. I’ve seen many times in my career people who were offered opportunities (risk goes hand in hand with opportunity) and refused or thought about it for so long that someone else took ended up taking them.
I wanted to move up and learn and do more, and I wasn’t going to forgo any chance to do that, but I also wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of doing things that I was unfamiliar with.
Robert also speaks about the danger of being too ambitious and the impatience that goes with it.
Don’t let ambition get ahead of opportunity. By fixating on a future job or project, you become impatient with where you are. You don’t tend enough to the responsibilities you do have, and so ambition can become 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, whom your bosses feel they have to turn to when an opportunity arises.
This concept is also well described by Jim Collins with the idea of the “pocket of excellence”. Don’t think about your next job. Put all your energy into building a pocket of excellence in what you do. By acting so, you’ll be spoilt for choice in terms of opportunities.
I truly adapted this idea in the second part of my career. Apart from getting results and having more opportunities than ever, it was very liberating. I’m enjoying the ‘now’ instead of thinking of the future.
And, as often, there is strong support behind every great success. Robert’s wife was incredibly supportive at critical points of his career.
“Life’s an adventure,” she said. “If you don’t choose the adventurous path, then you’re not really living.”
I have enjoyed the book and learned a lot. You have the impression to sit next to a great leader, sharing 45 years of experience.
I warmly recommend it.
Inspiring ! I will read it
Great. enjoy it and keep us posted.
Mr. OTG