The Ride of a Lifetime — Key Lessons Learned

Robert Iger is the CEO of Walt Disney. He was CEO and Chairman from 2005 to 2020 and returned back in executive role in November 2022. The book “The Ride of a Lifetime” is not a biography but shares the key leadership and management lessons.

A true leader should have key traits:

• Optimism: A pragmatic enthusiasm for what can be achieved
• Courage: True innovation occurs only when people have courage
• Focus: Allocating time, energy, and resources to important tasks
• Decisiveness: All decisions should be made in a timely way
• Curiosity: Enables the discovery of new people, places and ideas
• Fairness: Fair and decent treatment of people
• Thoughtfulness: Taking the time to develop informed opinions
• Authenticity: Be genuine, be honest
• Perfection: Refusal to accept mediocrity or ‘good enough’
• Integrity: The way you do anything is the way you do everything

Some of the key lessons learned are as follows:

1. Nothing is worse to an organization than a culture of fear. Innovate or die, and there’s no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new or untested.
2. Shokunin (Japanese word) — the endless pursuit of perfection for some greater good.
3. It is a delicate thing, finding the balance between demanding that your people perform and not instilling a fear of failure in them.
4. Sometimes, even though you’re “in charge”, you need to be aware that in the moment you might have nothing to add, so you don’t wade in. You trust your people to do their jobs and focus your energies on some other pressing issue.
5. Excellence and fairness don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
6. Life’s an adventure. If you don’t choose the adventurous path, then you’re not really living.
7. Know what you don’t know and trust in what you do.
8. You have to 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. There’s nothing less confidence-inspiring than a person faking knowledge they don’t possess. True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.
9. You can’t erase your mistakes or pin your bad decisions on someone else. You have to own your own failures.
10. Don’t invest in projects that would sap the resources of your company and not give much back.
11. Managing your own time and respecting others’ time is one of the most vital things to do as a manager.
12. 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 learn and absorb. You have to hear out other people’s problems and help find solutions. It’s all part of being a great manager.
13. The best way to nurture ambition — both one’s own and that of the people you manage. As a leader, you should want those around you to be eager to rise up and take on more responsibility, as long as dreaming about the job they want does not distract them from the job they have. You can’t let ambition get too far ahead of opportunity.
14. It is 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, that your bosses feel they have to turn to when an opportunity arises.
15. If you are a boss, these are the people to nurture — not the ones who are clamoring for promotions and complaining about not being utilized enough but the ones who are proving themselves to be indispensable day in and day out.
16. Good leadership isn’t about being indispensable; it’s about helping others be prepared to possibly step into your shoes — giving them access to your own decision-making, identifying the skills they need to develop and helping them improve, and, as I have had to do, sometimes being honest with them about why they are not ready for the next step up.
17. Micromanaging is under-rated. The success or failure of something so often comes down to the details. “Great” is often a collection of very small things.
18. As a leader, you can’t communicate pessimism to the people around you. It’s ruinous to morale. It saps energy and inspiration.
19. Optimism in a leader, especially in challenging times, is so vital. Pessimism leads to paranoia, which leads to defensiveness, which leads to risk aversion.
20. Optimism sets a different machine in motion. Especially in difficult moments, the people you lead need to feel confident in your ability to focus on what matters, and not to operate from a place of defensiveness and self-preservation.
21. 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.
22. 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.
23. If leaders don’t articulate their priorities clearly, then the people around them don’t know what their own priorities should be. Time and energy and capital get wasted. People in your organization suffer unnecessary anxiety because they don’t know what they should be focused on. Inefficacy sets in, frustration builds up, and morale sinks.
24. 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.
25. You will never get the admiration of the public (client) unless you get it from your own people first. The way to get the people working for us to admire the company and believe in its future is to make products they’re proud of. It’s that simple.
26. 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. The decision-making has to be straighter and faster, and I need to explore ways of doing that.
27. Never let the negativity being expressed by people who know little about you affect the way you feel about yourself.
28. You can’t overstate how important it is to keep blows to the ego, real as they often are, from occupying too big a place in your mind and sapping too much of your energy. It is 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 being challenged.
29. I could control what I did and how I comported myself. Everything else was beyond my control.
30. Don’t let your ego get in the way of making the best possible decision.
31. A little respect goes a long way, and the absence of it is often very costly.
32. If you approach and engage people with respect and empathy, the seemingly impossible can become real.
33. It is hard to know who exactly you are without this attachment and title and role that has defined you for so long.
34. People sometimes shy away from taking big swings because they assess the odds and build a case against trying something before they even take the first step.
35. Is this right or isn’t it? Nothing is a sure thing, but you need at the very least to be willing to take big risks. You can’t have big wins without them.
36. A lot of companies acquire others without much sensitivity regarding what they’re really buying. They think they’re getting physical assets or manufacturing assets or intellectual property. In most cases, what they’re really acquiring is people. In a creative business, that’s where the value truly lies.
37. “The Man in the Arena” — It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.
38. There’s no good playbook for how to fire someone, though I have my own internal set of rules. You have to do it in person, not over the phone and certainly not by email or text. You have to look the person in the eye. You can’t use anyone else as an excuse. This is you making a decision about them — not them as a person but the way they have performed in their job — and they need and deserve to know that it’s coming from you. You can’t make small talk once you bring someone in for that conversation.
39. Surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do. You can’t always predict who will have ethical lapses or reveal a side of themselves you never suspected was there.
40. Management by press release — meaning that if I say something with great conviction to the outside world, it tends to resonate powerfully inside our company.
41. Why companies fail to Innovate. It’s tradition. Tradition generates so much friction, every step of the way.
42. A company’s integrity depends on the integrity of its people.
43. It is not always good for one person to have too much power for too long.
44. No matter who we become or what we accomplish, we still feel that we’re essentially the kids we were at some simpler time long ago. Somehow that’s the trick of leadership, too, to hold on to that awareness of yourself even as the world tells you how powerful and important 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.
45. To tell great stories, you need great talent.
46. 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.
47. Value ability more than experience, and put people in roles that require more of them than they know they have in them.
48. 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.
49. 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.
50. It should be about the future, not the past.
51. If something doesn’t feel right to you, it won’t be right for you.
52. 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 effort and support and examples of so many people, and to twists of fate beyond my control.

Hi, I am Jaspal Singh, Founder of Mobility Innovation Lab (MIL) and Host of the Mobility Innovators Podcast. I am also Included VC 23 Fellow. I love to talk about startups, mobility, and technology.