The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company, 2019

This is one of those books I couldn’t put down. It is additive partly because of the business gossip stories everybody enjoys, partly because (it confirms my hypothesis) there are indeed lots of simliarity in the challenges people face at work, regardless of the level, place and time.

I am surprised to find that me, being a small tech lead on the other side of the planet in the late 2010s, could share many similar experience and thinking as the CEO of a major media company in the world, who rised decades before I was born. I am sure anyone climbing the coporate ladder who reads the book would feel the same. How Iger handled all those challenges is a gem for us all. Reading this book, we can confirm what strategy could work, and get some advice when we are in doubt.

Here are just a few lessons I learned or confirmed from Iger’s story:

1. Priority

In my eagerness to demonstrate that I had a strategy for solving all of Disney’s problems and addressing all of the issues we were confronting, I hadn’t prioritized any of them.

You have to convey your priorities clearly and repeatedly. In my experience, it’s what separates great managers from the rest. … Inefficiency sets in, frustration builds up, morale sinks.

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.

Priority is often underrated because it is already in the good employee 101 book. When Iger writes about it while he is late in his career running for CEO, I can assure you it is not a new concept to him at that time. But people just took it granted.

It took 5 minutes in my career to learn priority is important. Maybe 5 days to learn some ways to prioritize things at work. But it took 5 years to realize what priority is about and the cost of it. It is not just about being smart or focused in allocating resource. It is about boldness and decisiveness. It is a bet that costs your ego and everybody’s money.

When you are busy enough, it is natural to fall into the trap of satisfying everyone, especially when you can still push for it. But making everyone happy only brings in a false sense of achievement. It does not bring good end result. It takes courage and confidence to say no to people or to yourself. You need to really give up something in exchange of a future you bet on. Being productive but greedy is often being mediocre.

2. Management

I have heard a lot of management methodologies in my career, many of which are contradicting each other. Now I am starting to believe that there is no such thing as management methodology. Management is the art of balance. The content is often changing and sometimes going in totally different directions under different scenarios.

Here is an excerpt of Iger on pressure management:

There’s no rule book for how to manage this kind of challenge, but in general, you have to try to recognize that when the stakes of a project are very high, there’s not much to be gained from putting additional pressure on the people working on it.

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.

It makes a lot sense, though I have also seen some managers doing the opposite and get things done.

★★★★☆