重塑迪士尼：鲍勃·艾格谈权力、接班人危机与动荡中的领导力

NITIN NOHRIA: The main argument that I make in my book is that CEOs matter, not because they do or control everything, but because they shape everything that matters. You had a predecessor who also had a very long tenure. You'd waited a long time to become CEO. You were very ready for it when you got the job. One of the first things that you had to do was to tell the very storied part of Disney, which was the animation business, that they needed a reset. And you brought in Pixar as a way to help the company reimagine its future. Can you walk us through how you had Disney confront this reality, and what it took to get people to get on board?

ROBERT IGER: The signs were all there that Disney Animation was faltering, and that its importance to the company was rather significant and therefore had to be fixed and fixed fast. It wasn't that the company was in denial, but I think because they had no solutions in terms of how to fix Disney Animation, there wasn't any real movement to try to do so. They were kind of stuck in neutral in that regard, knowing there was a problem, but not knowing how to get out of it. I studied the company very carefully. It was very clear to me that at least in 2004, 2005, when I became CEO, the animation business to the company, and animation in particular, was probably more important than any other business in terms of not just the bottom line, but the perception of the company. And so I felt a sense of urgency, and I acted very quickly to address it. And that was to buy Pixar and to not only bring Pixar into Disney, but bring the leadership of Pixar into Disney Animation to turn Disney Animation around. And fortunately, it paid off. The people at Pixar that came in, John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, in fact, turned Disney Animation around and relatively quickly. And the rest is history. The success of Disney Animation since then, with movies like Moana and Frozen and Tangled and Zootopia has been very, very obvious not just to the bottom line, but to the overall perception of Disney.

NITIN NOHRIA: One of the tasks that CEOs have to do is to both build on the heritage of the company, and you inherited-- we teach courses at Harvard Business School about Disney, about the extraordinary flywheel of how Disney for years had built amazing IP that it was able to leverage through theme parks and everything else. And yet CEOs have to also grow the company into new areas. How did you balance both the exploitation of the core of Disney as well as its movement into new areas? You made some very big bets. How did you think about that balance?

ROBERT IGER: Many people, Disney, even into the 2004, 2005 period, were still stuck in its past in many respects, stuck in the past that really was Walt Disney's past. And what I found interesting about that is that Disney, Walt Disney himself, was a real futurist and an innovator, and someone that was willing to challenge the status quo all the time and move forward, create new rules, break boundaries, et cetera, and so on. But there was this belief that he was so larger than life and so iconic and so successful that almost everything that he created should not necessarily stand still, but be honored to a fault, actually. I talk often about it being revered. And I actually determined that that was way too powerful in terms of adherence to the past and it should be respected. Meaning, let's respect what he did. Let's respect who he was. Let's not relegate it to a museum case of some sort to be looked at and appreciated. Let's use it to build on it and to change from it, which is exactly what Walt would have done. So it was immediately basically emphasizing the need not to ignore our past, to respect it, but again, not to revere it to a fault and to enable us to bring the qualities forward, but also maintain a culture of innovation and risk taking.

NITIN NOHRIA: One of my own observations has been that people forget that traditions were once innovations, that you could not have a tradition that wasn't innovation once. And the obligation of a leader, as you did, is to innovate today something that then has the opportunity to become a tradition tomorrow.

ROBERT IGER: We get criticized at times for changing out older attractions in our theme parks that sometimes were built in the 1950s and 1960s, and no one likes us to do that. And they say, well, Walt created that. How can you touch it? Well, Walt himself would have changed it. They forget that he wasn't wedded to his past or to Disney's past. He was always looking ahead and always willing to essentially create change, even if it was unpopular initially.

NITIN NOHRIA: Say a word about how you influenced the culture of Disney. Because lots of people understand the word, but they don't quite understand how a CEO actually has an impact on the culture of a company.

ROBERT IGER: I wanted to be a collaborative environment, a collaborative company. Not everything should be top down. But I also wanted everybody to know that as CEO, I was an authority figure and that I had the final say. And kind of a balance between being an autocrat and being a democrat of sorts. Allowing a process to be collaborative and with many people engaged and a lot of people and hearing input from many different sources, but at the same time, everybody knowing at the end I could dictate what we wanted to do or when the debate should be shut off, that opinion should be shut off, and we should proceed or move forward. So that certainly was one. I loved accessibility. I say I love it because I thought it was important. I was someone people could engage with. And so I made sure that, for instance, in time allocation, that I was there a lot. I cut off most extracurricular activities. I was only on one outside board. I attended very few conferences. I didn't give that many speeches. I spent my time at the company, with our people and with our people at all levels. That was really important. One, it gave me an ability to influence. Two, it gave people an ability to feel respected and appreciated, because I had the opportunity by seeing them to actually express appreciation and support. And I think it also gave me an ability to demonstrate enthusiasm and optimism and also to preach to them what I thought was the most important about the company and its future.

NITIN NOHRIA: One of the CEO's scarcest resources is their time. My colleague Mike Porter and I did a study of how CEOs manage their time, because new CEOs would say to us, oh my God, I've been a good person at managing my time my entire career, but this job is challenging me in ways that I never could have imagined. So talk a little bit about how you dealt with what seemed to be the infinite and myriad demands on a CEO's time, and yet it's not like-- the job expands, but the hours in a day don't.

ROBERT IGER: I was fortunate to have been COO for five years before I became CEO, and I was able to observe how my predecessor managed his time. And I quickly discovered that as CEO of Disney, particularly for an extended period of time, you're drawn outside the company constantly. You're asked to speak and appear and you can easily, either wittingly or unwittingly, become distracted and your time gets even more challenged. And so I promised myself when I came in, particularly in the early stages, first maybe five years of being CEO, I would devote 99% of my non-family time to Disney. Now, how do you allocate the 99% of your time? One, there are things a CEO must do. You have to preside over board meetings and earnings calls and meet with critical constituents or constituencies, investors and employees and your senior team. So that's very, very clear. Second, anything that required either significant capital allocation or could have a significant impact on the perception of the company and its brand, as a CEO, you must be involved with those matters. Really important. The third bucket was where could I make a difference? In other words, if I was asked to engage in something and I really didn't think that my involvement mattered, then I shouldn't be spending my time doing it. I should delegate and rely on other people to do that. And the company got more successful. I had the freedom to choose things that I actually enjoyed doing. Now, that discretionary bucket was small. But for instance, even though I mentioned I thought I could have a positive influence on the creative process, there were days when I had no engagement in creative processes, because I was drawn in so many other directions. Those were days that I left work not happy, and so I made sure that there was something creative in every single one of my days.

NITIN NOHRIA: It's rare to have a CEO who both at some point voluntarily decided to step down and then had to come back in. What have you learned about the succession process from your own experience of having done it once, didn't go as you hoped for, now you've thoughtfully done it again? What lessons could you share for someone else who thinks about making sure that succession, which is the last act of a CEO, goes as well as it possibly could?

ROBERT IGER: We had a process back in 2019 and '20 when we chose my successor. Looking back, perhaps it wasn't as thorough as we thought, in part because we thought we knew the person extremely well. He'd worked for the company for a very long time and for me directly. And we knew his strengths and we knew some of his weaknesses as well. I'm not suggesting that we discounted the weaknesses, but in our zeal to check a box with succession and enable me to move on, first as executive chairman and ultimately to leave, I'm not suggesting that we ignored some of the issues, but I think we discounted them a bit more. I think the other thing that we missed is the environment was changing dramatically. We now live in an age where I think this crisis is almost omnipresent. We live in a state of almost perpetual crisis, or an environment in which a crisis can occur almost on a very regular basis. I think that requires a different kind of leadership, and I don't think we realize that at the time. Now, this is, in a way, hindsight, but I realize today that leadership needs to be capable of managing an environment in perpetual crisis. So what does that mean? I think it puts even more emphasis on stamina. It puts even more emphasis on someone's ability to, one, admit the crisis and deal with it, but never lose hope and optimism and balance that optimism and hope with realism. It requires someone to have a really good team of people to either take up the slack while the leader is dealing with the crisis, or to help the leader contend with the crisis as a team. Extremely important. And who does the people choose as those that-- who does the person choose as those that he or she is closest to? The ability to, I think, in a crisis, presence becomes even more important. You can't retreat to a bunker. And I think you have to be-- I don't think people want fearless leaders, but they don't want fearful leaders. They want somebody that's going to show some vulnerability, but never show that they're frightened. We didn't ask ourselves those questions, though maybe it would have been premature to do so. This was before COVID hit, right before COVID hit, for instance. But as we approach succession this next time around, choosing my successor this past February, we asked ourselves some of these very questions about that person. Is he resilient? Does he have the stamina? Does he choose a good team? Is he someone who can call it what it is, meaning we're in a real crisis, but then deal with it in a reasonable and sane and steady way, mature way?

NITIN NOHRIA: Bob, I know it was not on your wish list, but it's rare for someone to become a CEO again, and you returned to Disney for the second time. What was different about being CEO for the second time around?

ROBERT IGER: I came back with an agreement to stay for two years, and that's interesting unto itself, because when you become CEO initially, you think, well, I don't know. I'm not going to be there forever, but I could be here a long time. And so you want to get certain things done right away, but your decision making can stretch over a period of time. Suddenly you're back and there's a clock ticking that's louder than you ever experience. And you think, well, I got to get a lot done in a very short period of time. And you immediately have to come to grips with, am I going to be a short term CEO managing more for the present or am I going to think long term and leave the company with a momentum or strategy or a pathway into the future? Very, very different than the first time around. And we talked about balancing being an autocrat and essentially running a process that is all inclusive and democratic of sorts. If you don't have as much time, then you're going to have to show up to pay earlier, and in effect, become more of an autocrat. And I didn't really want to do that, but I thought, OK, no messing around here. We'll have a collaborative process and discussion and make sure everybody feels part of it all, part of the decision making process. But the time to act was much faster and had to be. And I had to balance that again with not trying to basically come in and just order everybody around to do things very, very quickly. That was challenging.

NITIN NOHRIA: CEOs, of course, have to make the decisions that only they can make, but there are thousands of decisions that get made in a company, and you have to create the context to allow those decisions to be made well. Disney is a creative company. There's lots of people who are very attached to the decisions that they want to make about a film, or greenlighting something, or moving forward with something. How did you get involved in the creative process of the company to ensure that you allow the great decisions to be made, and yet intervened when it was necessary?

ROBERT IGER: So the first thing you have to do is you have to stress or even stress the importance of creativity to the company from a commerce perspective, and also obviously from a brand perspective and the overall perception of the company and its position in the world. Second, what does it really mean to be a creative company, and what are the standards you want to apply to that? Well, first, it means that almost all of your capital supports creativity. That's people's time and the company's money, all of its resources. A second, it's not just about any creativity, and it's not about a volume of creativity. It's about being selective and actually being demanding in terms of quality. I talked often about the relentless pursuit of perfection. And what I meant by that is let's relentlessly pursue high quality and perfection when it comes to creativity. Let's never let volume get in the way of quality.

NITIN NOHRIA: Did you learn that there was a cadence, or the right timing of when to intervene in the creative process? It seems to me that one of the real challenges that leaders have is that if you intervene too early, people start to pay attention to what you said and you don't benefit from what their thinking might be. If you intervene too late, sometimes that feels like you overrule the decision. So how did you learn how to intervene in this process to both set the standard and at times, I imagine, when you thought something was really going off the rails, to be able to say that?

ROBERT IGER: It's not as much about when I intervened as it was more about how much I intervened, I guess. You can over-intervene, if there's such a term. Well, first of all, hear the idea. If it was a project that was likely to become important, I engaged early. What is the idea? And pitch the idea. Tell me why it's an idea that deserves our time and our attention and our resources. And then you let the idea gestate. In other words, let the creative entity essentially form it in its earliest stages. And when they are ready, get involved in their process to make sure that you're providing them with some perspective, some criticism of sorts, or critique, some advice on how to take it forward, and then let it happen again. So it's a come in, come in, come out to the process. And then if it is going well, then you slowly disengage as the project nears completion. And if it's not, then you deeply engage. Sometimes we call them Hail Mary passes where you're throwing everything that you've got at trying to fix something, including, by the way, committing my own time to it. A culture of creativity is also a culture that is accepting of failure. Because as I said earlier, creativity is not a science. You can't possibly bat 1,000, as they say in baseball. There are inevitable failures, and it's really important to know as a culture how to process failure so that when you do, it doesn't destroy people's ability to continue to create, which is basically protecting their ability to take risks and not be risk averse, because creativity is ultimately a risk.

NITIN NOHRIA: CEOs have a very important external facing role. They become the face of the company. And these days, we live in an environment in which the CEO is required to weigh in on all manner of issues. Political issues, social issues. And these are not things that anybody trains a CEO to do necessarily before they get the job, and yet there is this increasing demand to speak up on issues. During your time, there were many a matter in which you were asked to speak up. How did you think of navigating this terrain and when to speak, when not to speak, how to speak, how to be the public face of Disney?

ROBERT IGER: I tried to speak up on issues that I thought were really relevant to the company. What's interesting about that is I look back, is I was accused often of partisanship or bringing my own politics to work. And I actually think that that was a misperception, meaning it wasn't about my politics. It was about what I thought was right for the company. So, for instance, people thought I was a staunch environmentalist. I cared deeply about it. Which happens to be true, by the way. And as you know, some people today consider that to be a political position. In reality, I cared about the environment because I cared about Disney's ability to succeed. For instance, people won't go to a theme park if you can't breathe the air. So as Disney, we should care about that. We have businesses on coasts. We have a theme park on the coast of Japan, or in Hong Kong, for instance, or actually Disneyland in California is not that far from the California coast. You should care about global warming and the impact on rising seas, et cetera and so on. So that's probably one example of it. I took a position on immigration because we are a large employer. We hire from countries all over the world. We seek to attract the best talent in the world, no matter where people come from. And you need a very sound immigration policy in order to achieve that. And again, that was viewed as political. It wasn't. It was because what I believed was in the best interest of Disney. So I actually think that today, given how difficult the environment is or how hard it is to speak up, I think as a CEO, you have to really define it's not what the position is but why you are taking the position and tie it right back to doing it on behalf of the company and its shareholders and its people.

NITIN NOHRIA: In the final section of the book, I talk about some of the personal challenges of being a CEO. And one of the challenges I talk about is it's a job in which my colleague, Rakesh Khurana, calls it there's a risk of structurally induced narcissism, which is everybody gives you bad news, everybody puts you on a pedestal. You get surrounded with the trappings of power, prestige. And if anybody has experienced that, probably being in a company like Disney in Hollywood, you must have had the greatest such forces at play. And yet I have met you. You have managed to stay deeply grounded through this entire process. Help us understand what are the practices that a CEO can undertake to make sure that they keep their feet in the ground, even though everything about the job runs the risk of getting them disconnected from the reality around them?

ROBERT IGER: I followed a celebrity CEO. Michael Eisner, became a real celebrity CEO. And I didn't appreciate the fact that it wasn't his fault. Meaning if you are the CEO of Disney over a prolonged period of time, it's very, very hard not to become well known, because Disney touches so many people around the world. The brand is so well known and appreciated and beloved in so many places that if you're running that company, it's inevitable that you're going to become famous. The key here is, one, not let that go to your head. Constantly remind yourself that it's not your company. You're renting the title. You're renting your office. You're just passing through. You are a steward of the brand and the company for a period of time, but not forever. And so it's always Disney first. And I remember reading an article that said something Iger's Disney such and such. No, it's not. That's a terrible way to describe the company. So I think it's appreciating the fact that there's an inevitability to it, but making sure you do everything you possibly can to lean away from that. How do you do that? Well, firstly, you surround yourself with people that are constantly going to remind you or basically stick their elbow in your rib and say, hey--

NITIN NOHRIA: And who are those people? Because sometimes I've learned that getting those people on your own team is hard. So who are those people who will keep you grounded, poke you in the ribs when they think you're getting too big for your boots, tell you the Truth when It's inconvenient? Who were some of those people? I'm not looking for names. I'm just looking for what's the nature of those kinds of people.

ROBERT IGER: Well, first of all, I think you have to remind your team or tell your team that that's one of the roles you want them to play. Keep my feet firmly planted on the ground. Tell me when I'm getting too arrogant, too big for my britches, too conceited, leaning too much into my own fame and notoriety. Typically, I did it the most with my head of corporate communications, who, in a way, managed my image as well. CFO, general counsel, chief of staff. It was mostly those people. And including telling me when I'm seemingly too imperious, too dismissive of opinions, too short with people, that sort of thing. And then, of course, your personal life as well. Now, in my case, I've got a spouse that's always been great at reminding me that my title is emblazoned on my forehead. She didn't marry the CEO of the Walt Disney Company. I still have to empty the dishwasher and take the garbage out and make the beds on occasion. And by the way, it's how I try to behave with my kids as well.

NITIN NOHRIA: Very few people who have the experience and the wisdom that you've had in your career. If you were writing a one page note to a first time CEO, what responsibility would you tell them not to underestimate? What is the responsibility that there's some risk that CEOs would underestimate, but that you would say, this is one that you might underestimate, but it's really important that you prioritize?

ROBERT IGER: So I decided I would write my successor a letter and leave it in his desk, as we've heard Presidents of the United States have done recently. And I wanted it to be short. It ended up being six pages long. One of the things that I did write is be aware of how much influence you have over the company. You're inheriting a company that's 103 years old, and you think, well, maybe there's nothing that any one leader can do to change it or influence it. But be aware of the fact that you have enormous influence over it, and you can exert that influence quickly and sometimes almost inadvertently just by having the title. That there's a tremendous amount of responsibility. And I think if you are aware of the influence you have, then you act more responsibly, because you are aware of just how powerful that influence can be. It's just so important.

NITIN NOHRIA: Bob, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. It's been just a privilege to talk to you, to learn from your leadership, and to have this opportunity to talk to you about your leadership of Disney. Thank you.

ROBERT IGER: My pleasure. Thank you.