The Ride of a Lifetime Read online

  I sat on the edge of the bed and dialed. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but when Jay answered, I explained who I was and that I was in Shanghai. “I don’t know if they’ll want to talk with me,” I said, “but if they do, I would like to express my sympathies. If they don’t, I’ll express them to you and ask you to pass them on.”

  “Give me a minute,” Jay said. I could hear talking in the background, and then suddenly Matt was there on speaker. I just started talking. I reiterated what I’d said in the statement, that I was a parent and a grandparent, that I couldn’t fathom what they must be going through. I told him that I wanted him to know from me, the person at the top of this company, that we would do anything we could possibly do to get them through this. I gave him my direct number and told him to call it if he needed anything, and then asked if there was anything I could do for them now.

  “Promise me that my son’s life won’t be in vain,” he said. He was speaking through heaving sobs, and I could hear Melissa also sobbing in the background. “Promise me you’ll do whatever you can to prevent this from ever happening to another child.”

  I gave him my promise. I knew from a lawyer’s perspective that I should be careful about what I was saying, that I should consider whether that was somehow an admission of negligence. When you work in a corporate structure for so long, you become trained to give legalistic, corporate responses, but I didn’t care about any of that in this moment. I reiterated to Jay that he should call me if there was anything they needed, and then we hung up, and I sat there shaking on the edge of my bed. I’d been crying so hard that both of my contact lenses had come out, and I was vaguely searching for them when Willow walked into the room.

  “I just talked with the parents,” I said. I was at a loss for how to explain what I felt. She came to me and wrapped her arms around me. She asked what she could do. “I just have to keep going,” I said. But I didn’t have anything left. The adrenaline that had been powering me for the last two weeks, all that this project meant to me and the thrill I’d felt at sharing it, had drained away. In thirty minutes, I was scheduled to meet the vice premier of China, the U.S. ambassador to China, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, the party secretary of Shanghai, and the mayor of Shanghai, and lead them on a tour of the park. I felt like I couldn’t move.

  Eventually I called my team and said to meet me in the hotel lounge. I knew if I described the conversation to them, I would start crying again, so I kept it short and told Bob Chapek what I’d promised Matt Graves. “We’re on it,” Bob said, and sent word back to his team in Orlando right away. (What they did there was remarkable. There are hundreds of lagoons and canals on the property, and thousands of alligators. Within twenty-four hours, they had ropes and fences and signs up throughout the park, which is twice the size of Manhattan.)

  I went off to meet the dignitaries. We rode rides and posed for pictures. I struggled to smile and go on with the show. It was a stark example of the truth that what people see on the outside so often doesn’t reflect what’s happening on the inside. When the tour was over, I was scheduled to give a speech to the thousands of people gathered there in the park, and millions more in China watching on TV, then cut a ribbon and officially open Shanghai Disneyland to the world. Disney coming to mainland China was a major event. There were members of the press there from all over the globe. Both President Xi and President Obama had written letters that we were planning to read at the opening. I was well aware of the weight of it all, but I also couldn’t stop thinking of the anguish of Matt Graves’s voice on the phone.

  As I walked away from the vice premier, the president of Shanghai Shendi Group, the Chinese company we’d partnered with, caught up to me and took me by the arm. “You’re not going to talk about Orlando, are you?” he said. “It’s a happy day. This is a happy day.” I assured him I wouldn’t say anything to dampen the mood.

  Less than half an hour later, I found myself sitting alone on a banquette in the Disney castle, waiting for a stage manager to give me the cue that it was time for my speech. I’d memorized the lines in Mandarin that I was planning to deliver, and now I was struggling to recall them. It was true, it was a happy day, and I needed to try to focus on that and recognize what it meant for all the people who had worked so hard, for so long, to make this day happen; and for the people of China, who would have this place to dream about in the same way that I and so many American kids dreamed of going to Disneyland. It was a happy day. It was also the saddest of my career.

  * * *

  —

  I’VE WORKED FOR the same company for forty-five years: twenty-two of them at ABC, another twenty-three at Disney, after Disney acquired ABC in 1995. For the past fourteen years, I’ve had the enviable task of being the sixth CEO to run the company since Walt founded it in 1923.

  There have been difficult, even tragic, days. But for me this has also been, to steal from a phrase, the happiest job on earth. We make movies and television shows and Broadway musicals, games and costumes and toys and books. We build theme parks and rides, hotels and cruise ships. We stage parades and street shows and concerts every day in our fourteen parks across the world. We manufacture fun. Even after all of these years, I still sometimes find myself thinking, How did this happen? How did I get so lucky? We used to call our biggest, most exciting theme-park attractions “E-Tickets.” That’s what comes to mind when I think about the job, that it’s been a fourteen-year ride on a giant E-Ticket attraction known as the Walt Disney Company.

  But Disney also exists in the world of quarterly earnings reports and shareholder expectations and countless other obligations that come with running a company that operates in nearly every country in the world. On the least eventful days, this job requires an ability to constantly adapt and re-adapt. You go from plotting growth strategy with investors, to looking at the design of a giant new theme-park attraction with Imagineers, to giving notes on the rough cut of a film, to discussing security measures and board governance and ticket pricing and pay scale. The days are challenging and dynamic, but they’re also a never-ending exercise in compartmentalization. You address one thing—What are the attributes of a Disney princess in today’s world and how should they manifest in our products?—then you put it away and shift your focus to the next: What will our slate of Marvel films be for the next eight years? And those are the rare days when things actually unfold according to schedule. As the week described above makes all too clear, there are also, always, crises and failures for which you can never be fully prepared. Few will be as tragic as the events of that week, but something will always come up.

  This is true not just of the Walt Disney Company but of any company or institution. Something will always come up. 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.” After forty-five years, though—and especially after the past fourteen—I’ve come to believe that I have insights that could be useful beyond my own experience.

  If you run a business or manage a team or collaborate with others in pursuit of a common goal, this book might be helpful to you. My experiences from day one have all been in the media and entertainment world, but these strike me as universal ideas: about fostering risk taking and creativity; about building a culture of trust; about fueling a deep and abiding curiosity in oneself and inspiring that in the people around you; about embracing change rather than living in denial of it; and about operating, always, with integrity and honesty in the world, even when that means facing things that are difficult to face. These are abstractions, but my hope is that the stories and examples that are significant to me as I look back at the long arc of my career will help them feel more concrete and relatable, not just to the aspiring CEOs of
the world but to anyone wanting to be less fearful, more confidently themselves, as they navigate their professional and even personal lives.

  For the most part, the book is organized chronologically. Since my first day at ABC, I’ve had twenty jobs and fourteen bosses. I’ve been the lowliest crew member working on a daytime soap opera and run a network that produced some of the most innovative television (and one of the most infamous flops) of all time. I’ve twice been on the side of the company being taken over, and I’ve acquired and assimilated several others, among them Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and, most recently, 21st Century Fox. I’ve schemed about the future of entertainment with Steve Jobs and become the keeper of George Lucas’s Star Wars mythology. I’ve thought every day about how technology is redefining the way we create, deliver, and experience media, and what it means to be both relevant to a modern audience and faithful to a nearly hundred-year-old brand. And I’ve worked hard and thoughtfully to make a connection between that brand and billions of people around the globe.

  As I near the end of all of that and think back on what I’ve learned, these are the ten principles that strike me as necessary to true leadership. I hope they’ll serve you as well as they’ve served me.

  Optimism. One of the most important qualities of a good leader is optimism, a pragmatic enthusiasm for what can be achieved. Even in the face of difficult choices and less than ideal outcomes, an optimistic leader does not yield to pessimism. Simply put, people are not motivated or energized by pessimists.

  Courage. The foundation of risk-taking is courage, and in ever-changing, disrupted businesses, risk-taking is essential, innovation is vital, and true innovation occurs only when people have courage. This is true of acquisitions, investments, and capital allocations, and it particularly applies to creative decisions. Fear of failure destroys creativity.

  Focus. Allocating time, energy, and resources to the strategies, problems, and projects that are of highest importance and value is extremely important, and it’s imperative to communicate your priorities clearly and often.

  Decisiveness. All decisions, no matter how difficult, can and should be made in a timely way. Leaders must encourage a diversity of opinion balanced with the need to make and implement decisions. Chronic indecision is not only inefficient and counterproductive, but it is deeply corrosive to morale.

  Curiosity. A deep and abiding curiosity enables the discovery of new people, places, and ideas, as well as an awareness and an understanding of the marketplace and its changing dynamics. The path to innovation begins with curiosity.

  Fairness. Strong leadership embodies the fair and decent treatment of people. Empathy is essential, as is accessibility. People committing honest mistakes deserve second chances, and judging people too harshly generates fear and anxiety, which discourage communication and innovation. Nothing is worse to an organization than a culture of fear.

  Thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness is one of the most underrated elements of good leadership. 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.

  Authenticity. Be genuine. Be honest. Don’t fake anything. Truth and authenticity breed respect and trust.

  The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection. This doesn’t mean perfectionism at all costs, but it does mean a refusal to accept mediocrity or make excuses for something being “good enough.” If you believe that something can be made better, put in the effort to do it. If you’re in the business of making things, be in the business of making things great.

  Integrity. Nothing is more important than the quality and integrity of an organization’s people and its product. A company’s success depends on setting high ethical standards for all things, big and small. Another way of saying this is: The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

  PART ONE

  LEARNING

  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 complicated man who shaped me more than anyone.

  He certainly 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, mostly 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.

  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 meant that if I wanted to have any spending money, I needed to find my own jobs. 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 never wanting 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 fulfillment.