It’s About the Future
Bob Iger had a very successful corporate career culminating in the CEO job at Disney, a position he held for 15 years. In his bestselling book, The Ride of a Lifetime, Bob describes his story and provides many great insights on the principles of leadership.
One of my favorite chapters in the book is Chapter 7 — It’s About the Future. In it, Bob describes the dilemma he was in when he was running for the CEO job. As the COO, he was number two in command under Michael Eisner. The board was considering a single insider candidate, Bob, and several outsiders — they believed they needed someone that could drive change at Disney.
How could Bob convince the board that he was the change agent that they were looking for without criticizing his boss in the process? Michael had made some decisions that Bob disagreed with, but Bob respected Michael and was grateful for the opportunities Michael had given him. As the COO, he didn’t want to be hypocritical and blame all the problems on someone else. The answer to Bob’s predicament came from a political consultant and brand manager by the name of Scott Miller with whom Bob had worked in the past. Scott helped Bob understand that he was embarking on a political campaign. He also told Bob he was going to need some strategic priorities.
He is an excerpt from the book describing the exchange between Scott and Bob:
Then he [Scott] added, “You’re going to need some strategic priorities.” I’d given this considerable thought, and I immediately started ticking off a list. I was five or six in when he shook his head and said, “Stop talking. Once you have that many of them, they’re no longer priorities.” Priorities are the few things that you’re going to spend a lot of time and a lot of capital on. Not only do you undermine their significance by having too many, but nobody is going to remember them all. “You’re going to seem unfocused,” he said. “You only get three. I can’t tell you what those three should be. We don’t have to figure that out today. You never have to tell me what they are if you don’t want to. But you only get three.”
This is the exact same advice we give in our book, The Exponential Era. In Chapter 8, Feedback-Based Strategic Decisions, we describe the prioritization process devised from our SPX methodology, and illustrate the point with the following quote from Donald Rumsfeld:
“If you don’t know what your top three priorities are, you don’t have priorities.”
From his consultation with Scott, Bob understood that he needed to articulate his priorities clearly. Otherwise, a lot of energy and capital would be wasted. People would suffer unnecessary anxiety because they wouldn’t know where to focus. As inefficiency set in and frustration built up, morale would suffer. In his own words, here is how Bob described it:
“A company’s culture is shaped by a lot of things, but this is one of the most important — you have to convey your priorities clearly and repeatedly. In my experience, it’s what separates great managers from the rest. If leaders don’t articulate their priorities clearly, then the people around them don’t know what their own priorities should be.”
There is so much wisdom in Bob’s words and so much synergy with what we teach in The Exponential Era. If you like Bob Iger’s The Ride of a Lifetime, you will love The Exponential Era.
It also became very clear to Bob that he didn’t have to rehash the past, defend Michael’s decisions, or criticize him. It’s only about the future. When answering reporters that insisted on asking questions about what went wrong at Disney over the past years, he would simply state:
“I can’t do anything about the past. We can talk about lessons learned, and we can make sure we apply those lessons going forward. But we don’t get any do-overs. You want to know where I’m going to take this company, not where it has been. Here is my plan.”
Bob ended up defining three strategic priorities which he states have guided the company since the moment he was named CEO:
1) Create high-quality branded content.
2) Embrace technology to the fullest extent.
3) Become a truly global company.
The three priorities that Bob defined for Disney more than 15 years ago are crisp, clear, and long-lasting. We could take these same three strategic priorities and apply them to just about any company today, from S&P 500 conglomerates to small startups.
In his pitch to the board during the CEO interview process, Bob shared his concerns that Disney’s strategic planning practices were overly analytical resulting in decision-making processes that were painstaking and slow. Here is what he told the board:
“The world is moving so much faster than it did even a couple of years ago. And the speed with which things are happening is only going to increase. Our decision making has to be straighter and faster, and I need to explore ways of doing that.”
We couldn’t have said it better. In the Exponential Era, being afflicted by analysis paralysis can be fatal. If you don’t move at the speed of technological change, you end up becoming a Flash Boiled Frog. Luckily for Disney, they selected a CEO that understood that the world had changed and that if they wanted to succeed in the Exponential Era, they needed to embrace its chaotic changes and disruptive forces.
For a continued discussion about Bob Iger’s leadership at Disney, see: Innovate or Die.
You can learn more about The Exponential Era at: https://TheExponentialEraBook.com/
You can get both books from Amazon through the links below:
