In his memoir
“The Ride of a Lifetime”, Disney’s ex-CEO Robert Iger shares inspiring leadership
lessons. When I was reading his memoir, I found his real-time experiences very
beneficial. For instance, there was a case about integrity that impacted me, and
I converted it into a blog post. If you are interested, you can also read it: Volkan
Yorulmaz: No Price on Integrity
In the end of his book, Robert Iger spares a section for his leadership advice.
Robert states that they are the lessons that shaped his professional life.
When I googled Robert’s leadership lessons, there are a number of lessons
listed in different sources but trust me, these are the original ones highlighted
by Robert.
You can also find my highlights from this book in my blog:
https://myhighlightz.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-ride-of-lifetime-robert-iger.html
Lessons to Lead By
To tell great
stories, you need great talent.
Now more than
ever: innovate or die. There can be no innovation if you operate out of fear of
the new.
I talk a lot
about “the relentless pursuit of perfection.” In practice, this can mean a lot
of things, and it’s hard to define. It’s a mindset, more than a specific set of
rules. It’s not about perfectionism at all costs. It’s about creating an environment
in which people refuse to accept mediocrity. It’s about pushing back against
the urge to say that “good enough” is good enough.
Take
responsibility when you screw up. In work, in life, you’ll be more respected
and trusted by the people around you if you own up to your mistakes. It’s
impossible to avoid them; but it is possible to acknowledge them, learn from
them, and set an example that it’s okay to get things wrong sometimes.
Be decent to
people. Treat everyone with fairness and empathy. This doesn’t mean that you
lower your expectations or convey the message that mistakes don’t matter. It
means that you create an environment where people know you’ll hear them out,
that you’re emotionally consistent and fair-minded, and that they’ll be given
second chances for honest mistakes.
Excellence
and fairness don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Strive for perfection but
always be aware of the pitfalls of caring only about the product and never the
people.
True
integrity—a sense of knowing who you are and being guided by your own clear
sense of right and wrong—is a kind of secret leadership weapon. If you trust
your own instincts and treat people with respect, the company will come to
represent the values you live by.
Value ability
more than experience, and put people in roles that require more of them than
they know they have in them.
Ask the
questions you need to ask, admit without apology what you don’t understand, and
do the work to learn what you need to learn as quickly as you can.
Managing
creativity is an art, not a science. When giving notes, be mindful of how much
of themselves the person you’re speaking to has poured into the project and how
much is at stake for them.
Don’t start
negatively, and don’t start small. People will often focus on little details as
a way of masking a lack of any clear, coherent, big thoughts. If you start
petty, you seem petty.
Of all the
lessons I learned in my first year running prime time at ABC, the acceptance
that creativity isn’t a science was the most profound. I became comfortable
with failure—not with lack of effort, but with the fact that if you want
innovation, you need to grant permission to fail.
Don’t be in
the business of playing it safe. Be in the business of creating possibilities
for greatness.
Don’t let ambition
get ahead of opportunity. By fixating on a future job or project, you become
impatient with where you are. You don’t tend enough to the responsibilities you
do have, and so ambition can become 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, whom your bosses feel they have
to turn to when an opportunity arises.
My former
boss Dan Burke once handed me a note that said: “Avoid getting into the
business of manufacturing trombone oil. You may become the greatest
trombone-oil manufacturer in the world, but in the end, the world only consumes
a few quarts of trombone oil a year!” He was telling me not to invest in small
projects that would sap my and the company’s resources and not give much back.
I still have that note in my desk, and I use it when talking to our executives
about what to pursue and where to put their energy.
When the
people at the top of a company have a dysfunctional relationship, there’s no
way that the rest of the company can be functional. It’s like having two
parents who fight all the time. The kids know, and they start to reflect the
animosity back onto the parents and at each other.
As a leader,
if you don’t do the work, the people around you are going to know, and you’ll
lose their respect fast. You have to be attentive. You often have to sit
through meetings that, if given the choice, you might choose not to sit
through. You have to listen to other people’s problems and help find solutions.
It’s all part of the job.
We all want
to believe we’re indispensable. You have 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 step into your shoes—giving them access to your own
decision-making, identifying the skills they need to develop and helping them
improve, and sometimes being honest with them about why they’re not ready for
the next step up.
A company’s
reputation is the sum total of the actions of its people and the quality of its
products. You have to demand integrity from your people and your products at
all times.
Michael
Eisner used to say, “micromanaging is underrated.” I agree with him—to a point.
Sweating the details can show how much you care. “Great” is often a collection
of very small things, after all. The downside of micromanagement is that it can
be stultifying, and it can reinforce the feeling that you don’t trust the
people who work for you.
Too often, we
lead from a place of fear rather than courage, stubbornly trying to build a
bulwark to protect old models that can’t possibly survive the sea change that
is under way. It’s hard to look at your current models, sometimes even ones
that are profitable in the moment, and make a decision to undermine them in
order to face the change that’s coming.
If you walk
up and down the halls constantly telling people “the sky is falling,” a sense
of doom and gloom will, over time, permeate the company. You can’t communicate
pessimism to the people around you. It’s ruinous to morale. No one wants to
follow a pessimist.
Pessimism
leads to paranoia, which leads to defensiveness, which leads to risk aversion.
Optimism
emerges from faith in yourself and in the people who work for you. It’s not
about saying things are good when they’re not, and it’s not about conveying
some blind faith that “things will work out.” It’s about believing in your and
others’ abilities.
People
sometimes shy away from big swings because they build a case against trying
something before they even step up to the plate. Long shots aren’t usually as
long as they seem. With enough thoughtfulness and commitment, the boldest ideas
can be executed.
You have to
convey your priorities clearly and repeatedly. If you don’t articulate your
priorities clearly, then the people around you don’t know what their own should
be. Time and energy and capital get wasted.
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 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.
Technological
advancements will eventually make older business models obsolete. You can
either bemoan that and try with all your might to protect the status quo, or
you can work hard to understand and embrace it with more enthusiasm and
creativity than your competitors.
It should be
about the future, not the past.
It’s easy to
be optimistic when everyone is telling you you’re great. It’s much harder, and
much more necessary, when your sense of yourself is on the line.
Treating
others with respect is an undervalued currency when it comes to negotiating. A
little respect goes a long way, and the absence of it can be very costly. You
have to do the homework. You have to be prepared. You certainly can’t make a
major acquisition, for example, without building the necessary models to help
you determine whether a deal is the right one. But you also have to recognize
that there is never 100 percent certainty. No matter how much data you’ve been
given, it’s still, ultimately, a risk, and the decision to take that risk or
not comes down to one person’s instinct.
If something
doesn’t feel right to you, it won’t be right for you.
A lot of
companies acquire others without much sensitivity toward what they’re really
buying. They think they’re getting physical assets or manufacturing assets or
intellectual property (in some industries, that’s more true than others). But
usually what they’re really acquiring is people. In a creative business, that’s
where the value lies.
As a leader,
you are the embodiment of that company. What that means is this: Your
values—your sense of integrity and decency and honesty, the way you comport
yourself in the world—are a stand-in for the values of the company. You can be
the head of a seven-person organization or a quarter-million-person
organization, and the same truth holds: what people think of you is what
they’ll think of your company.
There have
been many times over the years when I’ve had to deliver difficult news to
accomplished people, some of whom were friends, and some of whom had been
unable to flourish in positions that I had put them in. I try to be as direct
about the problem as possible, explaining what wasn’t working and why I didn’t
think it was going to change. There’s a kind of euphemistic corporate language
that is often deployed in those situations, and that has always struck me as
offensive. If you respect the person, then you owe them a clear explanation for
the decision you’re making. There’s no way for the conversation not to be
painful, but at least it can be honest.
When hiring,
try to surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at
what they do. Genuine decency—an instinct for fairness and openness and mutual
respect—is a rarer commodity in business than it should be, and you should look
for it in the people you hire and nurture it in the people who work for you.
In any
negotiation, be clear about where you stand from the beginning. There’s no
short-term gain that’s worth the long-term erosion of trust that occurs when
you go back on the expectation you created early on.
Projecting
your anxiety onto your team is counterproductive. It’s subtle, but there’s a
difference between communicating that you share their stress—that you’re in it
with them—and communicating that you need them to deliver in order to alleviate
your stress.
Most deals
are personal. This is even more true if you’re negotiating with someone over
something he or she has created. You have to know what you want out of any
deal, but to get there you also need be aware of what’s at stake for the other
person.
If you’re in
the business of making something, be in the business of making something great.
The decision
to disrupt a business model that is working for you requires no small amount of
courage. It means intentionally taking on short-term losses in the hope that a
long-term risk will pay off. Routines and priorities get disrupted. Traditional
ways of doing business get slowly marginalized and eroded—and start to lose
money—as a new model takes over. That’s a big ask, in terms of a company’s
culture and mindset. When you do it, you’re saying to people who for their
entire careers have been compensated based on the success of their traditional business:
“Don’t worry about that too much anymore. Worry about this instead.” But this
isn’t profitable yet, and won’t be for a while. Deal with this kind of
uncertainty by going back to basics: Lay out your strategic priorities clearly.
Remain optimistic in the face of the unknown. And be accessible and fair-minded
to people whose work lives are being thrown into disarray.
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.
You have to
approach your work and life with a sense of genuine humility. The success I’ve
enjoyed has been due in part to my own efforts, but it’s also been due to so
much beyond me, the efforts and support and examples of so many people, and to
twists of fate beyond my control.
Hold on to
your awareness of yourself, even as the world tells you how important and
powerful you are. The moment you start to believe it all too much, the moment
you look at yourself in the mirror and see a title emblazoned on your forehead,
you’ve lost your way.
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