The Ride of a Lifetime Read online

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  IN APRIL 1996, Michael Eisner visited me in my office in New York. He walked in and closed the door and said, “I know it’s not working with Michael. It was a disaster to hire him.” He knew that other executives, like Joe Roth, the head of Disney Studios, were talking about quitting because they were so frustrated, and he pleaded with me not to do that. I wasn’t planning to quit. I didn’t like it—my first six months at Disney were the most dispiriting and unproductive of my career—but I was still new to the company, and because I was based in New York, I wasn’t exposed to the pain quite as much as others were. Mostly what I thought was, this is a difficult problem for Michael to deal with, and I don’t want to add to his strain.

  “I don’t know exactly when I’m going to do it,” Michael said to me. “But I’m going to fire him.” He asked me not to discuss it with anyone, and I gave him my word. I was never sure who else he told, but I expected Michael would say something to Ovitz within weeks of that discussion. Instead, months dragged on, and the tension and the dysfunction grew even worse. Everyone—the two of them, all of the senior leadership, the entire staff who worked for Ovitz—was unhappy. It was time to stop the bleeding.

  Finally, in December, more than eight months after he told me he was going to do it, Michael Eisner fired Michael Ovitz and ended this painful chapter in the history of the company (though the pain lingered on in the form of shareholder lawsuits over the $100 million–plus severance package Ovitz received). I now have a cordial relationship with Michael Ovitz. He’s been generous about Disney’s success during my time as CEO, and when I look back on it, I think of him not as a bad guy but as a participant in a big mistake. The culture shift was just too big a leap for him.

  He and Michael both wanted it to work, each for his own powerful reasons. Michael expected that Ovitz would come in and know how to do the work, and Ovitz had no idea what kind of adjustments he’d need to make to succeed within the culture of a giant, publicly traded company.

  They should both have known that it couldn’t work, but they willfully avoided asking the hard questions because each was somewhat blinded by his own needs. It’s a hard thing to do, especially in the moment, but those instances in which you find yourself hoping that something will work without being able to convincingly explain to yourself how it will work—that’s when a little bell should go off, and you should walk yourself through some clarifying questions. What’s the problem I need to solve? Does this solution make sense? If I’m feeling some doubt, why? Am I doing this for sound reasons or am I motivated by something personal?

  CHAPTER 5

  SECOND IN LINE

  FOR THE NEXT three years, Michael ran the company without a number two. Our relationship grew closer in the wake of Ovitz’s leaving, but I also sensed from time to time a wariness on Michael’s part, that he felt I had an eye on his job and could never fully trust me. It resulted in a kind of ongoing approach and avoidance. Michael would bring me in on decisions at times and confide in me, and then suddenly he would go cold and keep me at arm’s length.

  It was true that I’d stayed on after the acquisition in part because I thought I might have a shot at running the company one day, but that didn’t mean I was angling for Michael’s job. It meant I was committed to doing my own job as best I could, and to learning as much as I could about all aspects of the company. As had been the case throughout my career, if the time came when Michael was ready to step down, I wanted to be ready when the opportunity arose.

  I’ve been asked a lot over the years about the best way to nurture ambition—both one’s own and that of the people you manage. As a leader, you should want those around you to be eager to rise up and take on more responsibility, as long as dreaming about the job they want doesn’t distract them from the job they have. You can’t let ambition get too far ahead of opportunity. I’ve seen a lot of people who had their sights set on a particular job or project, but the opportunity to actually get that thing was so slim. Their focus on the small thing in the distance became a problem. They grew impatient with where they were. They didn’t tend enough to the responsibilities they did have, because they were longing so much for something else, and so their ambition became 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, that your bosses feel they have to turn to when an opportunity arises. Conversely, if you’re a boss, these are the people to nurture—not the ones who are clamoring for promotions and complaining about not being utilized enough but the ones who are proving themselves to be indispensable day in and day out.

  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.

  The dynamics between a CEO and the next person in line for his or her job are often fraught, though. We all want to believe we’re irreplaceable. The trick is to be self-aware enough that you don’t cling to the notion that you are the only person who can do this job. At its essence, good leadership isn’t about being indispensable; it’s about helping others be prepared to possibly step into your shoes—giving them access to your own decision making, identifying the skills they need to develop and helping them improve, and, as I’ve had to do, sometimes being honest with them about why they’re not ready for the next step up.

  Michael’s relationship with me played itself out in complicated ways. Sometimes I felt he was questioning my abilities; other times he was generous and encouraging and leaned on me to take work off his plate. A high point in our relationship came in late 1998, when Michael came to my office in New York and told me he wanted me to create and run a new international organization. I was chairman of the ABC Group at the time, which meant I was running the ABC network and ESPN, as well as all of Disney TV. This was going to be a huge lift on top of those responsibilities, but I was eager to do it and grateful that Michael had turned to me.

  Disney was surprisingly parochial back then. We had offices all over the world, from Latin America to India to Japan, but we didn’t have a coherent global strategy or even structures in place that made sense. In Japan, for instance, we had a studio office in one part of Tokyo, a consumer-products business in another, a TV business somewhere else. None of them spoke with another. There was no coordination around back-office functions like accounting, say, or IT. That kind of redundancy existed everywhere. More important than that, though, we didn’t have people in any of our territories whose job was to manage our brand in that place and look for unique opportunities. It was all a very passive, Burbank-centric approach.

  Michael saw the problem and knew that it needed to change. He knew we needed to grow internationally. Years earlier, he’d set his sights on building a theme park in China. Frank Wells, Michael’s number two for the first decade that he ran Disney, had made some overtures to Chinese officials in the early ’90s, but he’d never made much progress. From those initial meetings, though, China was aware that we were interested in a park there, and they’d recently signaled that they wanted it to happen.

  I was one of the few Disney executives with international experience, from my time working for ABC Sports and Wide World of Sports, and I was the only one who knew anything about China, having managed to get some ABC children’s programming on the air there in the pre-Disney days. So Michael made me president of Walt Disney International and tasked me not just with forming an international strategy but with finding a place to build a theme park in China.

  We had an initial discussion about where, and for a com
bination of factors—weather, population, available land—we soon concluded that Shanghai was the only workable location. In October 1998, as Willow was entering her ninth month of pregnancy with our first child, I traveled to Shanghai for the first time for Disney and was taken around and shown three pieces of property. “You can have any one of these,” the Chinese officials said, “but you need to decide quickly.”

  We settled on a property in Pudong, outside of downtown Shanghai, although on our first visit to what was a small farming village on the outskirts of a then-rising city, it wasn’t exactly easy to envision a Disney castle in the middle of a fully developed Disneyland. Canals ran throughout the village, with little children and stray dogs walking about. Small vegetable patches were sprinkled among ramshackle houses and occasional general stores. Bicycles far outnumbered cars, and what we would consider “modernity” was nowhere in sight. It was, however, perfectly situated between Shanghai’s soon-to-be-opened international airport and what would become “downtown” to one of the world’s largest and most vibrant cities. Thus began what would become an eighteen-year journey, which would bring me back to that same spot more than forty times.

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  MEANWHILE, IN MY other domain, ABC entered the early stages of what would be a long downward slide. The hit shows we’d developed back when I was running prime time had gotten long in the tooth, and we’d become complacent and unimaginative in our development process. NYPD Blue was still in the top 20, and we had a couple of others—Home Improvement, The Drew Carey Show—that did well. But the rest of our lineup, with the exception of the perennial juggernaut that is Monday Night Football, was largely uninspiring.

  We were briefly saved in 1999 when we launched Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which we’d initially said no to and then reconsidered when the creator came back to us with Regis Philbin as host. It turned out to be a godsend at the time, and later a crutch. Its numbers were astounding when it first aired, not just for a game show but for any show. That first season, it pulled in about thirty million viewers per night, three nights a week, numbers that were all but inconceivable at that point in network TV. It was number one in the ratings for the ’99–2000 season, a network savior, but it couldn’t totally mask our deeper problems.

  There was one other bright spot that year. In the middle of 1998, I’d begun thinking in earnest about our coverage of the upcoming millennium. I felt strongly that people around the world would be fascinated with this moment, and that the entire company, led by ABC News, should turn its attention and resources to it. Eighteen months in advance, I called a meeting with the senior executives from News, Entertainment, and Sports and told them what I envisioned—that we would provide wall-to-wall, twenty-four-hour coverage as midnight moved across the globe and each time zone rang in the new millennium. I remember saying enthusiastically that we should “own the event,” then looking at Roone sitting silent and expressionless across the table. He clearly hated the idea. The meeting ended, and I pulled him aside. “Do you think I’m crazy?” I asked.

  “How are we going to make a calendar change visually interesting for twenty-four hours?” he said.

  I could have answered in any number of ways (it was actually an interesting challenge), but something in Roone’s tone and body language told me his problem wasn’t really with the visuals. It was that he was being asked to execute a big idea that wasn’t his, by the guy who used to say “How high?” when Roone said “Jump.”

  I’d been Roone’s boss since 1993, when Tom and Dan made me president of the network. We’d worked well together over those years. He was proud that I’d risen to the top of the company, but he still thought of me as his understudy—that I’d cut my teeth under him and I was his ally in the front office who would protect him from corporate meddling and allow him to do his thing. I was less blindly devoted to Roone than he wanted to believe, but there was no harm in his thinking it, and no real reason for me to ever disabuse him of the notion. He was at his best when his ego was least threatened.

  But I also needed him to execute the thing I was asking him to execute. It’s a tricky thing, moving people over to your side and enlisting their enthusiastic engagement. Sometimes it’s worth talking through their reservations and patiently responding to their concerns. Other times you simply need to communicate that you’re the boss and you want this done. It’s not that one approach is “nice” and the other isn’t. It’s just that one is more direct and nonnegotiable. It really comes down to what you believe is right for the moment—when a more democratic approach is useful both in getting to the best outcome and in building morale, and when you have enough certainty in your opinion that you’re willing to be an autocrat even in the face of disagreement.

  In this case, I absolutely believed I was right, and I wasn’t going to let anyone, even the vaunted Roone Arledge, dissuade me. Of course he could have easily sabotaged it, undermining it through lack of effort and enthusiasm and communicating that to his people. Like many people I’ve worked or negotiated with over the years, Roone didn’t respond well if he felt he was being big-footed. So I resorted to a kind of “soft autocracy,” showing respect but also communicating that this was going to happen no matter what. “Roone,” I said, “if there was ever an idea that people would assume came from you, this is it. It’s big and bold. It could be impossible to execute, but when has that ever stopped you?”

  I wasn’t exactly sure if it was the idea he didn’t like, or if at that point he just didn’t feel he had the energy for a big production like this. But I knew he couldn’t walk away from a challenge, so I was playing to his pride to get him on board. He didn’t say anything, but he smiled and nodded, as if to say Okay, I got it.

  In the end, we created something that will go down as a great achievement. It took months of prepwork by Roone’s team to get it done, and he came in at the end, as he had countless times, and lifted the whole thing to another place. Peter Jennings anchored our millennium coverage from Times Square. We were there on the scene when the clock struck midnight in Vanuatu, in the first time zone to welcome the new millennium. Over the next twenty-four hours we were live from China and Paris and Rio de Janeiro, from Walt Disney World and Times Square and finally from Los Angeles before we went off the air. Peter was brilliant, sitting in a tuxedo in a studio overlooking the thousands of party-goers below, guiding viewers through this experience shared by everyone around the globe, which would never happen again in any of our lifetimes. No network committed as many resources as we did, and no one came close to the size of our audience.

  I visited the studio a few times throughout that day. It was clear early in the broadcast that our coverage was going to be a huge success, and you could feel the excitement in the studio as the day went on. The most satisfying moment for me came as I watched Roone presiding over the whole production, sending instructions out to the teams in the field, talking into Peter’s earpiece to introduce a story line into the coverage, calling for different camera angles and anticipating transitions. It felt like watching the master conductor I’d first laid eyes on a quarter of a century earlier at the Frank Sinatra concert in Madison Square Garden.

  About twenty hours into the day, I met him in the control room. He had a huge smile on his face and grabbed my hand and gave it a long, warm shake. He was proud of himself. He was proud of me. He was grateful that I’d given him the chance to do this. He was nearly seventy years old at that point, and this was the last big event he would produce in a lifetime of them.

  Two years later, Roone would die after a protracted battle with cancer. The week before he passed, I was in New York for Thanksgiving weekend, and that Saturday night I was home watching the USC–Notre Dame game on ABC. My phone rang at 10:00 P.M., and when I answered, the ABC operator said, “Mr. Iger, Roone Arledge is calling for you.” If you had the number and it was an emergency, you could call the ABC switchboard and an operator wou
ld track down the person you needed to talk to. Roone still had the number, and something urgent was on his mind.

  The operator connected us. “Roone?”

  “Bob, are you watching?”

  “The football game?”

  “Yes, the football game! Have you noticed the audio is all off?”

  The announcers weren’t making any sense, he said. It was all gibberish. I was aware that Roone’s condition had worsened recently and that he’d been hospitalized. I knew he must have been hallucinating, but some old, sentimental sense of duty kicked in. Roone was saying something was wrong, and I had to try to make it right.

  “Let me check, Roone,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

  I called the control room and asked if there were any complaints about the audio. “No, Bob. Nothing” was the response I got from ABC’s Master Control Center in New York.

  “Can you call the switchboard and check if they’re hearing anything?”

  After a few moments I heard back: “Nope. Nothing.”

  I called Roone. “I just checked with the control room. They made sure there’s nothing wrong.” Before we could linger on what he thought he was hearing, I asked, “How are you doing, Roone?”

  His voice was a whisper. “I’m in Sloan Kettering Hospital,” he said. “How do you think I’m doing?”

  I asked if he was seeing visitors, and the next day I went to see him. When I walked into his room, he was lying in bed, and I knew the moment I saw him that he wouldn’t live much longer. There was a figure-skating competition on the television, and he was watching intently. I went over and stood near him. He looked up at me, and then at the skater onscreen. “It’s not the same as it used to be,” he said. “Is it?”