The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company - Softcover

Iger, Robert

 
9781984801463: The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1984801465 ISBN 13: 9781984801463
Verlag: Random House, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A memoir of leadership and success: The CEO of Disney shares the ideas and values he embraced while reinventing one of the world’s most beloved companies and inspiring the people who bring the magic to life.

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company in 2005, during a difficult time. Competition was more intense than ever and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company’s history. His vision came down to three clear ideas: Recommit to the concept that quality matters, embrace technology instead of fighting it, and think bigger—think global—and turn Disney into a stronger brand in international markets.

Today, Disney is the largest, most admired media company in the world, counting Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox among its properties. Under Iger’s leadership, Disney’s value grew nearly five times what it was, making Iger one of the most innovating and successful CEOs of our era.

In The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger answers the question: What are the qualities of a good leader? He shares the lessons he learned while running Disney and leading its 220,000-plus employees, and he explores the principles that are necessary for true leadership, including:

• Optimism. Even in the face of difficulty, an optimistic leader will find the path toward the best possible outcome and focus on that, rather than give in to pessimism and blaming.
• Courage. Leaders have to be willing to take risks and place big bets. Fear of failure destroys creativity.
• Decisiveness. All decisions, no matter how difficult, can be made on a timely basis. Indecisiveness is both wasteful and destructive to morale.
• Fairness. Treat people decently, with empathy, and be accessible to them.

This book is about the relentless curiosity that has driven Iger since the day he started as the lowliest studio grunt at ABC. It’s also about thoughtfulness and respect, and a decency-over-dollars approach that has become the bedrock of every project and partnership Iger pursues, from a deep friendship with Steve Jobs in his final years to an abiding love of the Star Wars mythology.
 
“The ideas in this book strike me as universal,” Iger writes. “Not just to the aspiring CEOs of the world, but to anyone wanting to feel less fearful, more confidently themselves, as they navigate their professional and even personal lives.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Iger is the CEO of The Walt Disney Company and directs the company’s creative endeavors. He served as CEO from 2005 to 2020 and as executive chairman from 2020 to 2022. He previously was president and COO from 2000 to 2005. Iger began his career at ABC in 1974, and as chairman of the ABC Group he oversaw the broadcast television network and station group, managed the cable television properties, and guided the merger between Capital Cities/ABC, Inc., and The Walt Disney Company. Iger officially joined the Disney senior management team in 1996 as chairman of the Disney-owned ABC Group and in 1999 was given the additional responsibility of president, Walt Disney International. In that role, Iger expanded Disney’s presence outside of the United States, establishing the blueprint for the company’s international growth today. In 2023, he was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A memoir of leadership and success: The executive chairman of Disney, Time's 2019 businessperson of the year, shares the ideas and values he embraced during his fifteen years as CEO while reinventing one of the world's most beloved companies and inspiring the people who bring the magic to life.



NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR



Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company in 2005, during a difficult time. Competition was more intense than ever and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company's history. His vision came down to three clear ideas: Recommit to the concept that quality matters, embrace technology instead of fighting it, and think bigger-think global-and turn Disney into a stronger brand in international markets.



Today, Disney is the largest, most admired media company in the world, counting Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox among its properties. Its value is nearly five times what it was when Iger took over, and he is recognized as one of the most innovative and successful CEOs of our era.



In The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger shares the lessons he learned while running Disney and leading its 220,000-plus employees, and he explores the principles that are necessary for true leadership, including:



• Optimism. Even in the face of difficulty, an optimistic leader will find the path toward the best possible outcome and focus on that, rather than give in to pessimism and blaming.

• Courage. Leaders have to be willing to take risks and place big bets. Fear of failure destroys creativity.

• Decisiveness. All decisions, no matter how difficult, can be made on a timely basis. Indecisiveness is both wasteful and destructive to morale.

• Fairness. Treat people decently, with empathy, and be accessible to them.



This book is about the relentless curiosity that has driven Iger for forty-five years, since the day he started as the lowliest studio grunt at ABC. It's also about thoughtfulness and respect, and a decency-over-dollars approach that has become the bedrock of every project and partnership Iger pursues, from a deep friendship with Steve Jobs in his final years to an abiding love of the Star Wars mythology.



"The ideas in this book strike me as universal" Iger writes. "Not just to the aspiring CEOs of the world, but to anyone wanting to feel less fearful, more confidently themselves, as they navigate their professional and even personal lives."

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Chapter 1

Starting at the Bottom

This book is not a memoir, but it’s impossible to talk about the traits that have served me well over the course of my professional life and not look back at my childhood. There are certain ways I’ve always been, things I’ve always done, that are the result of some inscrutable mix of nature and nurture. (I’ve always woken early, for example, as far back as I can remember, and cherished those hours to myself before the rest of the world wakes up.) There are other qualities and habits that are the result of purposeful decisions I made along the path. As is the case with many of us, those decisions were partially made in response to my parents, in particular my father, a brilliant and troubled man who shaped me more than anyone.

My father made me curious about the world. We had a den lined with shelves full of books, and my dad had read every one of them. I didn’t become a serious reader until I was in high school, but when I did finally fall in love with books, it was because of him. He had complete sets that he ordered from the Book of the Month Club of the works of all the American literary giants—Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck and so on. I’d pull down from the shelves his copy of Tender Is the Night or For Whom the Bell Tolls or dozens of others and devour them, and he’d urge me to read even more. We also spent our dinners discussing world events, and as young as ten years old, I’d grab the New York Times on our front lawn and read it at the kitchen table before anyone else woke up.

We lived in a split-level house in a small working-class town on Long Island called Oceanside. I was the older of two kids; my sister is three years younger. My mother was warm and loving, a stay-at-home mom until I went to high school, at which point she got a job in the local junior high school library. My dad was a Navy veteran who came back from the war and played the trumpet with some “lesser” big bands, but he figured he could never make much of a living as a musician, so never tried to do it full-time. He majored in marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and his first job was working in marketing for a food manufacturing company, and that led him into advertising. He became an account executive at an advertising agency on Madison Avenue—he handled the Old Milwaukee and Brunswick bowling accounts—but eventually lost that job. He changed agencies several times, almost always lateral moves. By the time I was ten or eleven, he’d changed jobs so many times that I began to wonder why.

He was always deeply politically engaged and had a very strong liberal bias. He once lost a job because he was determined to go to the March on Washington and see Martin Luther King, Jr., speak. His boss wouldn’t give him the day off, but he went anyway. I don’t know if he quit and went to the speech or if he was fired for going after he’d been told he couldn’t, but it was just one of several such endings.

I was proud of his strong character and his politics. He had a fierce sense of what was right and fair, and he was always on the side of the underdog. But he also had trouble regulating his moods and would often say things that got him into trouble. I later learned that he’d been diagnosed with manic depression, and that he’d tried several therapies, including electroshock therapy, to treat his illness. As the older child, I bore the brunt of his emotional unpredictability. I never felt threatened by his moods, but I was acutely aware of his dark side and felt sad for him. We never knew which Dad was coming home at night, and I can distinctly recall sitting in my room on the second floor of our house, knowing by the sound of the way he opened and shut the door and walked up the steps whether it was happy or sad Dad.

He would sometimes check in on his way past my room to make sure I was “spending time productively,” as he put it. That meant reading or doing homework or being engaged in something that would “better” me in some way. He wanted my sister and me to have fun, but it also was very important to him that we use our time wisely and work in a focused way toward our goals. I’m certain that my vigilance (some might say obsessiveness) about time-management comes from him.

The extent to which I tend to be emotionally consistent with the people in my life, or dependable in a crisis, comes from him, too. My sister and I were never deprived of love as kids, but we were deprived of consistency. I felt early on that it was my job to be the steady center of our family, which extended even to practical matters around the house. If something broke, my mother would ask me to fix it, and I learned as a young kid how to repair whatever needed repairing. That’s part of where my curiosity about technology comes from, too, I think. I liked using tools and taking things apart and understanding how they worked.

My parents were worriers. There was a sense with both of them that something bad would soon be coming down the pike. I don’t know how much of it is a fluke of genetics and how much is a learned reaction to their anxiety, but I’ve always been the opposite of that. 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.

As I grew older, I became more aware of my father’s disappointment in himself. He’d led a life that was unsatisfying to him and was a failure in his own eyes. It’s part of why he pushed us to work so hard and be productive, so that we might be successful in a way that he never was. His employment troubles necessitated that I find jobs if I wanted to have any spending money, and I started working in eighth grade, shoveling snow and babysitting and working as a stock boy in a hardware store. At fifteen, I got a job as the summer janitor in my school district. It involved cleaning every heater in every classroom, then moving on to the bottom of every desk, making sure they were gum-free when the school year started. Cleaning gum from the bottoms of a thousand desks can build character, or at least a tolerance for monotony, or something . . . .

I attended Ithaca College and spent nearly every weekend night my freshman and sophomore year making pizza at the local Pizza Hut. I got mostly B’s and a few A’s in high school, but academics was never my passion. Something clicked for me when I went to college, though. I was determined to work hard and learn as much as I could learn, and I think that, too, was related to my father—a function of both my admiration for how learned he was and a growing feeling that I never wanted to experience the same sense of failure that he felt about himself. I didn’t have a clear idea of what “success” meant, no specific vision of being wealthy or powerful, but I was determined not to live a life of disappointment. 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 of fulfillment.

I don’t carry much pain with me from those early years, other than the pain that my dad didn’t live a happier life, and that my mother suffered, too, as a result. I wish he could have felt prouder of himself. We always had a roof over our heads and food on the table, but there was little money for much else. Vacations were usually spent driving to mundane places in our car or going to the beach a few minutes away from our house. We had enough clothes to look presentable, but nothing extra, and when I tore a pair of pants in the fall, I was typically told to wear them with a patch until we had the...

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Verlag
Random House
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1984801465
ISBN 13 
9781984801463
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Deutschland

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