The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons in Creative Leadership from the CEO of the Walt Disney Company
Praised by Bill Gates as one of the finest business books he's read in years, and named a Sunday Times Book of the Year, Robert Iger's memoir charts his remarkable tenure at the helm of The Walt Disney Company with candour and quiet conviction. When Iger took over as CEO in 2005, Disney was under real pressure. Rivals were circling, and technology was shifting the ground beneath the company's feet faster than anyone could comfortably manage. His response wasn't complicated. Focus on quality. Embrace new technology rather than resist it. And think bigger, internationally, ambitiously, with a long view. What followed was extraordinary by any measure. Under his stewardship, Disney absorbed Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox, while its overall value grew nearly fivefold. It's now widely regarded as the most admired media company on the planet. But this isn't simply a victory lap. Iger uses the book to explore what he believes genuine leadership actually looks like in practice, across a workforce of more than 220,000 people. He organises his thinking around a handful of core principles: optimism (finding the best available path rather than catastrophising), courage (taking risks even when failure is a real possibility), decisiveness (making tough calls promptly rather than letting them fester), and fairness (treating people with empathy and remaining genuinely accessible to them). Running beneath all of this is a thread of persistent curiosity, the kind that kept Iger questioning, listening, and adapting throughout his career. He writes warmly about his close friendship with Steve Jobs in Jobs's final years, and about his genuine affection for the Star Wars universe. There's a decency to his approach, a sense that doing right by people and doing well commercially aren't opposing forces. Steven Spielberg puts it well: Iger moved the Disney brand far beyond what anyone anticipated, and he did it with both grace and audacity. This book shows you exactly how.
- Author: Robert Iger
- Publisher: Penguin (Transworld)
- Genre: Industry-Specific Business
- ISBN: 978-0552174305
- Pages: 272 pages