But Roy did. At the end of the day, Roy understood without the customer being happy with the product, there is no company and then there would be no shareholders.
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You’re right. After I posted I felt like I should take it back when I said they won’t. They can and that person is the ideal candidate for that job.
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I hadn’t followed the stories of Jay Rasulo and Tom Staggs very closely. But in the article recently reposted in a different thread about the creation of the Magic Band and My Disney Experince (and other stories I recall) it sounded like Iger was constantly testing these two to see who would win the title, and then he didn’t leave!
So maybe Iger’s biggest mistake was creating an environment where they both walked.
Also from that article, it is interesting to see how rhe pendulum swings - in the early 2000’s they realized Disney had become too transactional and the guest experience was suffering. Hopefully they realize this is an issue again.
I call Kevin Feige as a dark horse contender for the future. Walt came from films. He has successgully navigated both streaming and movies, he knows business, creative, and talent.
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I agree. Drivers should always have an eye to the long game. Short term profits and numbers can’t replace the need for long term customer satisfaction.
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In the 80s and early 90s there was Michael Eisner and Frank Wells. Wells died in a plane crash and that is when Eisner (who I think was overall a great leader) floundered.
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I agree with you. Business care about money, not sentiment. As long as people keep spending their money, Disney will continue on the path that they are currently taking. My family isn’t going back until things change.
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I was just going to say basically the same things - Eisner went on a bender at the end of his term, but he was essentially the creative at the beginning of his term and we all benefited from a lot of the early projects that started under his eye.
At the time I wasn’t much of an Eisner fan, but after finishing the book Disney War years ago I realized that while he obviously was no Walt, Eisner brought at least some of that Walt - “Let’s do this!” energy to the process.
I liked Iger in a kind of medium way in this fashion - but he never really seemed to push as much of the creativity so much as make business decisions with a “just LOOK at ALL THIS CREATIVITY!” spin on them. Guess I’ll see how much my Iger perception is correct when someone finally does a more comprehensive book on his tenure. (I read his own book and while interesting, was much more spin than detail, as one would expect.)
The Disney board needs to make the next change a pair up of a creative + a business person partnership. Will they? Do they even have that sort of vision? Probably not, if their Chapek extension is any indication.
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It’s amazing to me that people always look at the person on top as “The Reason Things Are the Way They Are”, when in reality the person at the top almost never does anything alone. Even when decisions rest in their hands alone they always have a lot of advisers and subordinates feeding them the info (which is usually biased in some way) and data they use to make those decisions. Unless that person is a real narcissist megalomaniac type, they’re partly a product of the people they trust.
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This was the CEO during my time as a CM.
I would see him in the parks occasionally, trying to learn the day to day operations. And while he never shied away from the camera (that I saw), I also never saw him looking for a photo-op on those particular days. He was there to learn and assess. I never heard a bad thing about him from anyone I worked with.
I loved that very same “let’s do this” energy and familial unity he brought to the organization.
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Um, yup.
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I would think CEOs would in some way have some say in hiring those that are closest to them. Or at least weed out the ones they don’t like. If you set things up so that the people you work with think a lot like you or present information they think you want, then yes, the man on top has a lot to do with it.
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SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP ELOIN MUNSK WILL BE THE BENEVOLENT GOD-EMPEROR OF MARS AND YOU WILL BE LAUGHING OUT OF THE OTHER SIDE OF YOUR PERSONAL FACE.
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Working in DC for 20 years, this is 100% true for the President. All of them. Some know it, some do not. And the longer they are there the more isolated they become and the more they rely on those people they have chosen to bring them the right (or full) information.
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I really don’t remember all this love for Iger when he was the actual CEO. It frustrated the Disney board and investment analysts to no end that he refused to make any move to groom (ZOMG) a successor. As if he was going to move directly from the CEO chair to the U.S. presidency.
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This is my experience in every single company I have worked at.
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In the Future Year of Our Lord Elon it will be illegal to conjure his name and not mention the Sacred Crypto.
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Yes.
And yes.
We ended up in Vegas because the brand new COO of the casino we were at back east wanted “his guys” in there instead.
So he fired a bunch of us. Hired a bunch of them. Killed a bunch of incentive programs and focused on green column numbers instead of guest satisfaction. And was fired himself a few years later.
We ended up starting our own company and now that same casino is our biggest client.
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Listen you…you…you whatever! God-Emperor Eloin was going to liberate the Tweeter and we would all enter a golden age of Freeze Peach. I will not hear your blasphemy that it was nothing but a pump-and-dump scheme for Tesla! STONKS!
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