Robert Iger’s autobiography “The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned From 15 years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company” came out last year to critical acclaim. I think that anyone in a leadership position or aspiring to be in a leadership position should get familiar with this book.

Prominent reviews of Iger’s work abound. The most  impressive for me was Bill Gates’ review which he entitles as “A Business Book I’d Actually Recommend: Unlike Most Books On Leadership This One is Actually Worth Your Time” from May 18, 2020. 

John Gapper from the Financial Times has a review “The Ride of a Lifetime: Life At the Top of Disney” which focuses on Iger’s “studied amiability, forged over years of getting the best out of talented but capricious figures, conceals not only an inner toughness but a wily talent for strategic persuasion.” Gapper is also keen to note that, “Like the priest or rabbi of the Magic Kingdom, Iger preaches respect for others — “A little respect goes a long way and the absence of it can be very costly,” he writes.”

Forbes’ Magazine had several writers discussing the book. Readers may like Frances Bridges’ 5 Career Lessons From Disney CEO Bob Iger’s New Book, ‘Ride Of A Lifetime’ and Stephanie Denning’s Ten Leadership Lessons From Disney’s Bob Iger. For discussion of recent books comparable to Iger’s, see Carmine Gallo’s These Four CEOs Wrote The Best Business Books Of 2019 For Aspiring Leaders.

For me, the most important part of the book is on pages 99 to 100 when Iger is in pursuit of the CEO position at Disney, but is struck by a comment that Scott Miller, “a highly regarded political consultant and brand manager”, brought up to get Iger looking to the future of the company. Namely, Miller asked Iger to provide strategic priorities as a CEO. Iger goes on to discuss five or six priorities, which he finds warrants an immediate interruption from Miller.

Miller’s point is that too many items makes a leader appear unfocused and those items are too numerous to actually be priorities. The magic number of priorities for Miller is just three. Iger ends up focusing on emphasizing the need to create high quality branded content, embracing technology to the fullest extent, and envisioning Disney becoming a truly global company.

The three points are again used for what Iger hopes to accomplish in his early days as CEO. In concrete teams these were; repairing the relationship with Roy Disney, improving interactions with Pixar as well as Steve Jobs, and changing decision making by reanalyzing the Strategic Planning (“Strat Planning”) department that Michael Eisner relied on.

The leadership quality that Iger stresses which had the most impact on me was Decisiveness followed by what I interpret as the Importance of Succession Planning. Readers will find that the book’s Prologue lists Iger’s Ten Leadership Lessons (Again see Forbes writer Stephanie Denning’s Ten Leadership Lessons From Disney’s Bob Iger for the listing) and the Appendix from pages 225 to 233 lists Iger’s Lessons to Lead By.

My favorite quotes on these topics are as follows:

Decisiveness:  From Page 100 to 101, “You can do a lot for the morale of the people around you (and therefore the people around them) just by taking the guesswork out of their day to day life. A CEO must provide the company and its senior team with a road map. 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. Once those things are laid out simply, so many decisions become easier to make, and the overall anxiety of an entire organization is lowered. ”

Importance of Succession Planning: From Page 232, “It’s not good to have power for too long. You don’t realize the way your voice seems to boom louder than every other voice in the room. You get used to people withholding their opinions until they hear what you have to say. People are afraid to bring ideas to you, afraid to dissent, afraid to engage. This can happen even to the most well-intentioned leaders. You have to work consciously and actively to fend off its corrosive effects.”