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For decades, we've been talking about productivity all wrong. That's how we ended up with the hustle bros and endless to-do lists and days filled with meetings and meetings about those meetings. It just can't be the answer. So this month on The Verge Cast, in a series brought to you by Amazon Business, we're exploring a different way.
The tools that you can use to get things done without burning out and without spending so much time on menial tasks. Different ways of thinking about what productivity means and how we might measure it. All in service of trying to get a little more done in a better way. All that on The Verge Cast, wherever you get podcasts. In February 2020, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that he was, finally, stepping down as CEO. Well, sort of.
On the day of the announcement, CNBC sat down with Iger and his freshly named successor. You are signed on to continue through the end of 2021 overseeing all the creative elements of the company. But at the same time, Bob Chapek is going to be running the day-to-day business. Yes, a new Bob would be CEO, a man named Bob Chapek. But the old Bob would remain as executive chairman of the board, managing nothing major, just all the creative decisions at a company defined by its creativity.
CNBC's Julia Boorstin asked Iger a simple question about what sounded like a messy arrangement.
Will that create confusion about who's in charge? How do you address those concerns and potential conflict while you're executive chairman? Well, we've worked together extremely well. In terms of confusion, we're not really concerned about that. The goal here during the period of time that I will be executive chairman is to create a transition process that is smooth and functioning and effective, and we're not concerned at all about creating any confusion.
But less than two months later, there was confusion. Plenty of it. In April 2020, the New York Times published an article about how Disney was faring one month into the pandemic and nationwide shutdown. The answer? That Iger had, quote, "...effectively returned to running the company."
The article quoted exactly one Disney employee, Bob Iger, who said, quote, "A crisis of this magnitude and its impact on Disney would necessarily result in my actively helping Bob Chapek and the company contend with it, particularly since I ran the company for 15 years." Chapek reads the article like anybody else. This is Alex Sherman, who covers the media for CNBC.
He wrote an in-depth piece about what allegedly went down during the Chapek-Iger era, including this phone call. When Chapek reads this article, he's furious. And he calls Iger and tells him he doesn't need a savior. He swears at him a few times. He no longer feels like he is on firm footing as the CEO of this company, given the fact that it appears as though he's sort of being passively taken over by Iger through this article.
Iger would go on to tell colleagues or friends of his that he had never been spoken to like this before, ever in his life by anybody. And both men, Chapek and Iger, point to that article and that subsequent phone call as the key fracture point of their relationship. Within two years, Chapek would be out at Disney and Iger would be back on top.
with a fundamental question looming over the company. Is there anyone else who can rule the wonderful world of Disney?
Disney has been led by eight different men in its century of existence. But few would object to the idea that only three have really mattered, have made a lasting impact on the company. At Disney, it's really much easier to sort of think about their products and their eras, really, as sort of being tied to certain executives. That's Robbie Whelan, a media reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He's also currently working on a book about Disney. You've got the Michael Eisner era of Disney. You've got the
Walt Disney era of Disney, you've got the Bob Iger era of Disney, and all of them are very different and very tied to the personalities of the men, it's always men in this case, who have run the company. The way each of these guys led Disney is still impressed upon the company's shape today, the company's culture, the kinds of films it makes, and the various interconnecting layers of its business. But how these executives went out also left an important impression on the company.
Each of them has found it hard to leave, and in the process, made it even harder to find a replacement. This is Land of the Giants, and I'm Joe Adalian. Today, the circle of life of a leader at Disney, and why it's so hard to let it go. We've got a period of more than 40 years uninterrupted where one man and his force of personality, his vision for creativity, his decisions about who to hire and what stories to invest in,
was guiding this company. I'll give you a hint. His first name rhymed with malt. Here's Gary Wilson, former CFO and board member of Disney. From all the stories I've heard, I've heard many. He was a dictator.
Maybe not suitable for an HR department in 2024, but the company overall flourished under Walt. It's Walt's flywheel that is still taught at the Harvard Business School. It was Walt who had the idea to expand movies into parks, and it was Walt's daring and exacting vision of animation and film that made them great.
Walt operated like a god at Disney, but unfortunately for the company, he was mortal. When you have a leader with the singularly creative mind and leadership that Walt Disney had, it like goes away and disappears, and you're left with a rudderless ship, and they're not very competent people running that ship. I mean, you can expect what will happen.
Walt was only 64 when he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer and died about a month later. He left behind a company that was created in his image and ran to his exacting and maybe mysterious standards. But he did not leave a plan of what to do next. And they were in chaos. No one could be Walt. Not even his brother Roy, who took over the company after Walt died.
His strategy was mostly just to finish up what Walt had started, not to lead Disney into a new era. When he died in, I think, 1966, for 20 years, the company just had terrible performance because there was no leadership. And it lost its magic. Over that period of time, the CEOs were former friends or family of Walt, people who were used to functioning as extensions of him.
Card Walker, who held the position of CEO the longest, also served as chairman of the board, wielding his veto power to nix things that seemed unwalt.
And so what we had was sort of a posthumous founder syndrome, where even in death, Walt was still looming large over the company. His power was still active. CEOs came and went and were mostly ineffective. Disney was directionless, and the flywheel was stuttering. Because you truly cannot have a dead CEO. Steve Jobs still looms large at Apple, but Tim Cook was hot to go with Jobs' blessing. Eventually, Disney found someone who could turn the company around –
Michael Eisner ended the interregnum dysfunction in 1984, and part of his plan? To be like Walt. But not in the living-in-Walt's-shadow way. Eisner wanted to absorb some of that legacy for himself. I do think Eisner, having worked with him for years, I think he wanted to be the new Walt Disney. And the singular thing I remember is there was a Sunday night TV show called The Wonderful World of Disney.
And it used to be that they showed Walt giving the introduction to the show every Sunday night. Now this may seem to be an odd place to open a show. It's not as bad as it seems. When Walt died, the TV show kept going, but no one dared replace him as host. No one could match his charisma, his authority, the right to host his namesake show. And so Eisner decided that he was going to do that. We all disagreed with that.
in management, but he did it. I'm here with some of the Disney gang. We're getting ready for Christmas holidays. Hello, I'm Michael Eisner. During the first 10 years of Eisner's term, he really did ascend to a heroic, dare we say godlike status. Stock prices grew astronomically, the company entered its golden era of animation, and Eisner made the deal of the century by buying Capital City's ABC. Finally, Disney had found someone to replace Walt.
As for his succession plan, for a while that was all neatly taken care of, because his president and COO was Frank Wells, an excellent number two who could have easily been a number one.
Here's longtime Hollywood journalist and editor at The Hollywood Reporter, Kim Masters. Frank could have been a chairman and CEO of Disney, and Michael knew that. And I think that kept Michael somewhat in check or largely in check. And this didn't seem to bother Eisner because Wells had achieved something pretty rare.
Michael, I don't think, ever trusted me. I was always very loyal to him, but I don't think he ever trusted me. But he did trust Frank. There was no one who commanded his respect. I think Frank Wells was the only one who really commanded his respect. But in 1994, Wells suddenly died in a helicopter accident. When Frank died, I think things started to come apart.
All of a sudden, there was no number two, at least no number two suitable to Michael Eisner, someone who could step up to the plate when the time came. Not long after Wells died, Eisner had emergency quadruple heart bypass surgery. He survived, was nursed back to good health, but no one quite lived up to Wells. And so even as the board and others started to get antsy, Eisner put off the succession issue. Michael was not interested in solving that particular problem. In fact...
He became an obstacle to creating a plan. Michael became more and more convinced that everything he wanted to do was right, and it was almost like he was snakebitten. He became to me sort of more isolated, more Nixonian, you know, kind of sitting there, and I'm in charge. We asked Michael Eisner to speak with us for this episode. He declined the invitation and also declined to comment.
One by one, Eisner made it clear to his top executives that they weren't going to succeed him. Especially, Masters says, those who seemed a little too eager to take his place. If you fly too close to that sun, you're going to fall in the ocean. Your wings will melt.
And so maybe this was the other side of being a hero god CEO crafted in the image of Walt Disney. Try for mortality and plan to never leave. Not exactly a great takeaway when the last hero god left the company in chaos when he died. In 2001, Kim Masters published a book called The Rise of Michael Eisner and the Fall of Everybody Else. I think being the head of Disney is a very strong drug, you know, very hard to let go. Leaving Disney, it's a big deal.
It's a very identity-defining thing. And he had had so much success, and he was like this ultimate CEO. Eisner ended up running the company for 21 years, which is basically a biblical lifespan in CEO years. But unlike Walt, it lasted longer than people wanted. Eisner went from being the savior of Disney to being resented by a lot of people. After years of growth, stock prices started falling. But it wasn't just the whims of Wall Street.
In 2002, theme park revenues were down and Disney movies were in a slump. It started to feel like a Michael Eisner problem. And some inside the company thought it was time for the one group who could check Eisner to do something about it. The board.
But Disney's board had a history of deferring to the CEO, and the makeup of the board made keeping the CEO in check hard, too. Well, I joined the board in 1985 when I joined the company as the chief financial officer. Good for Wilson, but not necessarily good for corporate governance. From a management perspective, you would like to be on the board, but from a governance point of view, I think that's the wrong thing to do. Because the board is responsible for selecting management,
And if, in fact, the management is the board, it's a total conflict of interest. And the chairman of the board, the ultimate check on executive power at Disney, was Michael Eisner. Michael had no curbs, so to speak. His board was weak. You know, he had a rubber stamp board. Because it wasn't just a C-suite that was on the board. Michael had, I think she was principal of his kids' school on the board. Yeah.
And then he also had his architect that he liked. And, you know, it's all in the family, right? One corporate governance expert at the time described Disney's board as, quote, living in the dark ages. The thing is, all these boardroom no-nos might have got ignored had Disney's shareholder value kept growing, the way it did during the first 10 years of Eisner's term. But by 2002, the stock prices had been falling for two long years.
I think Michael Eisner should have stepped down earlier. And the reason he didn't was because he was also the chairman of the board. So he was his own boss and he'd appointed most of the board members. So he was a dictator. And if he didn't want to leave, he wasn't going to leave.
The King didn't want Succession to happen. That's the problem. And neither Gary Wilson nor the rest of the Disney board ever did make Succession happen. I've become concerned with the direction in which the Disney company is moving.
I believe it's time to take action and we could use your help. That's Roy E. Disney, Walt Disney's nephew. He served on the Disney board nearly continuously from 1967 to 2003. But that year, 2003, he'd had enough and stepped down. Or maybe he quit before he could get fired. Looking at the declining shareholder value, the unhappiness of employees, the lackluster movies, Roy Disney started to agitate for Eisner to resign as CEO.
Eisner didn't like that and planned to remove Roy freaking Disney from the board. I was shocked when I heard that Roy Disney and Michael were at odds. I thought the Michael I knew would never do something that foolhardy. That was foolhardy.
If you're a Disney shareholder, in my view, the best way to help save Disney is to vote no on the re-election of Michael Eisner, George Mitchell. And I remember going to the fateful shareholder meeting in Philadelphia where there was this full-on revolt underway led by Roy. And I could see a line around the block of shareholders. And these were like literally the old and the young, babies in strollers, people with canes.
And it looked like it was the opening weekend of Star Wars. And I thought, oh, my God, Michael, this is trouble. He's really in trouble. Led by Roy E. Disney, the shareholders helped remove Eisner as chairman of the board. And by the next year, he was out as CEO.
While Gary Wilson admits that the Disney board, the one he was on, was overly deferential to Eisner, he does give his cohort credit for one thing. We had recruited an enormous amount of talented people. Tons of people who might one day take over for Eisner. And then a new guy showed up. I remember people saying to me, you're going places. I think, like, what do they know? Bob Iger had worked his way up at ABC and came to Disney via the Capital City's acquisition.
Before the acquisition, he was in line to become the CEO of that company. Those dreams were dashed when Disney bought Capital City's ABC. But Iger still felt like it was his turn to be king. I thought if I played my cards right, if I performed well, I could potentially run the Walt Disney Company at some point. But when he got to the Magic Kingdom, he was considered a long shot for the job. Eisner did badmouth him to some board members once, saying he lacked creative brilliance. Ouch!
But that was fairly mild compared to the fate of other CEO hopefuls of that past. Iger outlasted them, and Eisner ended up throwing his weight behind Iger to be his successor. In 2005, when Eisner left, Iger was named CEO of the Walt Disney Company. Here's CNBC's Alex Sherman again. Remember when he was named CEO?
Ister was picked because he'd been a star at ABC and ingratiated himself to top investors and media executives.
And the idea that he was some sort of technocrat? Iger quashed that right out of the gate. Here's Jessica Reeferlich, longtime media analyst for B of A Securities. When Bob came in, he really surprised the street and the world by being so decisive very, very quickly. Nobody started coming. Iger immediately bought Pixar, repairing damage Eisner had done to that key partnership and attempting to breathe new life into Disney's animation portfolio.
He also did something early on in his tenure that was in direct contrast to Eisner and certainly Walt. He started talking about leaving, making a succession plan to prevent the petty tyranny of his direct predecessor and the chaos left behind by the company's founder. Disney was finally going to get succession right after decades and decades and decades of struggle. So I think that Bob Iger will go down as one of the great
media CEOs and American CEOs in history. At this stage, his one major blemish is succession. When we come back, how good is a CEO who can't or won't be replaced?
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For decades, we've been talking about productivity all wrong. That's how we ended up with the hustle bros and endless to-do lists and days filled with meetings and meetings about those meetings. It just can't be the answer. So this month on The Verge Cast, in a series brought to you by Amazon Business, we're exploring a different way.
The tools that you can use to get things done without burning out and without spending so much time on menial tasks. Different ways of thinking about what productivity means and how we might measure it. All in service of trying to get a little more done in a better way. All that on The Verge Cast, wherever you get podcasts.
On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.
In March 2017, Bob Iger sat down for a lengthy interview with Willow Bay, former ABC anchor and dean of the University of Southern California's journalism school.
So we have just a couple minutes left, and we promised a little update on your news. She's also his wife of many years. I thought you were going to be hanging around the house come 2018, and apparently that's not the case. So I announced today that I'm extending as CEO, but for one year beyond my tenure. Iger, as CEO and, yes, chairman of the board, might have set out to have a succession plan early, but having a plan and executing a plan are two different things.
In 2011, only a few years into his regime, the board announced that Iger would retire by 2015. Not because he was doing a bad job. He was doing a great job. Everyone loved him. The idea was that, finally, Disney would see a CEO step down while on top with a rock-solid plan in place. Kim Masters. I mean, look, the company had been through a big public mess. So you have to assume, let's not do that again. At first, everyone applauded the plan.
But as 2015 crept closer, the board signaled they weren't ready to let go and extended Iger's contract into 2016. Then they did it again. He'd leave in 2018. Even with the delays, the coverage was glowing. The New York Times basically congratulated him on the succession accomplishment even before he'd left. And a Disney insider boasted that the company had an embarrassment of riches of possible successors to choose from when Iger did end up leaving. This was not Michael Eisner's Disney anymore.
Except right in the middle of those delays, something familiar started to happen.
If you look in-house, anybody, again, who flew too close to Bob Iger's son fell into the ocean. The obvious choices for people who could replace Iger began to, let's say, leave the company. He did this whole thing with Tom Staggs and Jay Russulo, and one of them is the successor, and they then try to kill each other, of course. Tom Staggs and Jay Russulo were the top execs in line to take over.
Masters says Iger played them off each other until one came out the clear winner. Staggs stayed. Rizzullo left. It seemed like the problem was finally solved. Air chosen. No need for Iger to delay retirement any longer. Once again, it did not work. In 2016, Staggs abruptly resigned. No more air apparent. Not a lot of people left in line after the succession deathmatch era either. It kind of looked like Iger had just been a sly version of Eisner all along.
It's kind of a joke at this point how many times Bob has kicked it down the road.
Succession is a complicated thing and we felt, meaning the board and I felt we could use more time to not only spend on succession but to create a better transition. But I'm serious this time around. This is Iger telling Willow Bay and the world that he would not be retiring in 2018. To be fair, succession at Disney is a complicated matter. It's an enormous, baroque company with business interests that span several diverse industries.
So he needed a tiny bit more time to get it just right. The time finally came in February 2020. A full five years after he'd originally promised to leave, Iger announced that Bob Chapek would take over as CEO immediately. Right away, it was a bit of a head-scratcher. Iger had cut a very specific figure as CEO. Bob is an incredibly attractive executive. He's got great demeanor. He's got this kind of cashmere, elegant attitude.
presence. You know, he's the one. J. Peck had a different reputation. He doesn't have that charm. He doesn't have that skill with people. He's kind of a ruthless businessman. His whole M.O. was wrong for the job. A Disney CEO not only has to run the business, they have to hobnob with celebrities and, like, go to premieres. Alex Sherman.
JPEG kind of doesn't really look or act like Iger. Like he doesn't kind of look like a celebrity. He doesn't really know Hollywood. I think it's fair to say he's just not really all that interested in that side of the business. So it was a challenge, I think, for him to like attend all these, you know, premieres for movies and red carpet events. And like Iger loves that stuff. I mean, eats it up.
You know, it's just it's not who JPEG is. And so I think there were some initial concerns right off the bat that like, OK, is this guy like going to be able to fill Iger's shoes? Hmm. I wonder why Bob Iger, who reportedly prided himself on being an emotionally intelligent, people-oriented CEO, chose someone so ill-cast for the job. Well, JPEG had been at Disney for 27 loyal years, most recently with the company's largest and most important business, The
The Parks. And he'd made a name for himself during the opening of Shanghai Disney, when he helped save the company some money and stay on schedule.
But Masters has another theory on why Iger picked Chapek. First of all, he had gotten rid of anybody who had been considered the successor, right? I have this sort of hypothesis that the board was getting more and more stressed out. What is the plan? What is the plan? You're 70. What is the plan? And I think Bob, and I've asked him this and he has denied it, but I feel like it was in a bit of
That's one, albeit cynical, interpretation.
But we do know that when Iger put forward Chapek, he had no plans to fully step aside right away. He'd stay on as chairman of the board for two years, continuing to oversee creative, something that was never defined but understood, vaguely, as managing talent in the movies and TV shows. So perhaps Iger wanted to choose someone he thought he'd be able to work with. Bob Chapek.
was thought of as a nice guy, kind of mild-mannered, had always said yes to Bob Iger. And I think Bob Iger saw him as a steady hand on the company who wouldn't really make too many enemies along the way and, frankly, would take orders from Bob Iger just like he had done for the last 20-plus years.
Whether Iger gave the rest of the board Chapek out of spite, or he wanted to choose someone he could control, Ida amounts to the same thing. Which is that it seemed like he was not choosing someone who would break away from Iger and leave his own lasting impression on this storied company. But Chapek did not see himself as playing a supporting role in Iger's multi-part epic, which Bob Iger found out after their fatal phone call. We reached out to both Iger and Chapek to see if they'd speak to us for this episode. They declined.
We also asked both of them to comment on specifics. Iger declined and Chapek did not respond. After the phone call, the relationship soured. So Iger looked elsewhere to flex his influence.
For instance, he was ready and able to lend a support to other executives at Disney when they balked at Chapek's decisions, like splitting business power away from creative leads. Behind the scenes, as these creative leaders are kind of bitching to Iger about the decision, Iger is sympathetic toward them. And it's like, look, I wouldn't do this if I were running the company. But, like, I'm not running the company anymore. And eventually, Iger found a use for people outside the company as well. For a long time, he wouldn't even talk to me at all. And now...
It doesn't happen every day, but we do chat and communicate. So I think that when Chapek was there, he sort of decided that actually having more friends in the press might be a good idea. So after years of ignoring Kim Masters while he was CEO, Iger suddenly found her number. And he kept it, even after he made good on his promise to finally, fully leave the company.
Iger stepped down from the board and his kind of shadow management job inside the company at the end of 2021. Chapek didn't want his help? Well, now he was really going to have to go it alone. What followed was not a great time for Bob Chapek. He made one mistake after another, each worse than the last. He allowed a contract feud with Scarlett Johansson to mushroom into a lawsuit, and then a scandal. And then he failed to respond to a Florida bill nicknamed the Don't Say Gay Law.
People expected Disney to speak out, given its enormous and influential presence in the state. But Chapek didn't. You know who did? Bob Iger. He tweeted out a condemnation that said, if passed, this bill will put vulnerable young LGBTQ people in jeopardy.
Masters took that to Chapek's chief of corporate affairs. And I go, well, so what are you going to do? And he says, well, why do we have to do anything? And I'm like, you know, as Bob Iger just basically put the arrow pointing at Bob Chapek. And he then says, they're going to give me a statement. And he sends me this statement, which is basically, you know, we're not a political company.
The statement said Chapek was not an activist with a partisan agenda. He was a, quote, custodian of a unifying brand. I was poised to publish that. And he said to me, so are you happy with the statement? And I was like, oh, yeah, I'm happy with it. I'm not so sure it's going to work.
But I knew, I knew when we published that story, the match had now met the gas fumes and the explosion was going to follow it. And that's exactly what happened. Many cast members have been doing mini walkouts every day during their breaks. And Bob Chapek, Disney's CEO and business thumb, then made things worse, putting out a statement defending Disney's silence on the bill. But aside from the public and internal backlash, the issue quickly became a proxy for Chapek and Iger's power struggle.
Chapek tried to scrape back some cred by taking a swipe at Iger, writing in a company-wide email that Disney's movies and TV shows were their corporate statements, and that they were, quote, more powerful than any tweet. It didn't work. Within days, Chapek was on cleanup duty at the shareholders' annual meeting. I know that many are upset that we did not speak out against the bill. I understand our original approach, no matter how well intended, didn't quite get the job done.
In the wake of Chapek's mess, Iger was more than happy to graciously step in and give the statesman-like interview to CNN that Chapek never could. To me, it wasn't politics. It was what is right and what is wrong. And that just seemed wrong. When you're dealing with right and wrong, or when you're dealing with something that does have a profound impact on your business, then I just think you'd have to do what is right and not worry about the potential backlash to it.
There was one guy who looked like a capable CEO in charge of a unifying message through this mess, and it was not Bob Chapek. But still, why was Iger cosplaying as CEO at all in this moment? He had left, on purpose, but it sure looked like he hadn't let go. Chapek had marched the company into several PR nightmares, but the business was, for the most part, still solid. So the board renewed Chapek's contract.
But in the midst of the renewal process, Wall Street was changing its mind. You couldn't just grow your streaming service anymore. It had to be profitable. But as the market made a hairpin turn, JPEG kept going straight. Here's Alex Sherman again with what he reported happened next. JPEG, from what I was told, kind of like...
either didn't understand or buried himself in the sand a little bit and was like, don't be so doom and gloom about this. In September 2022, JPEG and Disney's CFO, Christine McCarthy, sat down with the board of directors before an earnings call to lay out the state of the company, particularly how it was doing on streaming. These meetings are usually highly scripted presentations, but McCarthy had different plans. McCarthy goes off script.
And she starts saying, this is like the worst quarter I've ever seen in like 10 years of this job. And she does it to try to purposefully jar J.P. back into reality that he needs to pivot here. In front of the board of directors, J.P. was totally exposed. He was the CEO of Disney, but it looked like he was doing it all alone.
abandoned by his very own CFO. The board starts talking to other senior executives around the company and starts asking them about JPEG's leadership. The board meets with the head of the studios, the head of the parks, the head of TV. And one after another, all of these senior executives tell the board, we don't have any faith in this guy that's running the company anymore. Like, he shouldn't be the CEO.
So there's, in essence, like a behind-the-scenes coup against JPEG. At the time, publicly, people focused on that bad quarter as the reason JPEG was fired. That isn't why he was fired. He was fired because the board realized he had lost the faith of all of the other senior executives at the company. Faith that maybe he never really had to begin with.
Faith that Bob Iger undermined from the very start. There's all this thing, oh, Chapek is Bob Iger's hand-picked successor. I always rolled my eyes when I saw that. Hand-picked? Yeah, hand-picked to fail. That was my opinion. And Bob would argue with me, Bob Iger, but I feel like I see what I see. The board fired Bob Chapek in November 2022. And then they made an offer to the man who would become the next CEO of Disney.
I think the board feels like the only person that can run this company is Bob Iger. And so that's why we just keep renewing his contract and keep asking him to renew his contract. And the reason that the only person who can run this company is Bob Iger is that Bob Iger sort of engineered this company. And so the reason it is so big today in many ways is Iger was the one that led all of these different acquisitions.
Iger can juggle the sprawling Disney kingdom because he built it. He has a history of navigating Wall Street curveballs with charm and business acumen. He's a good CEO, and he's a good CEO of a multifaceted company with one of the most recognizable brands. A company that has to balance preserving its culture, its identity, while adapting to a quickly changing industry that is increasingly dominated by tech. That's all great for now. Not so great for a future in which Bob Iger is no longer available to run the company.
So the pressure to find a successor is perhaps greater than it ever has been. And the person in charge of solving the problem is Bob Iger.
So the succession issue is not just on Iger. It's also on the Disney board, but it's connected because Iger basically handpicked everybody on the Disney board and the Disney board has given Bob Iger carte blanche to just run the company as he sees fit. But everyone knows now that Disney has not gotten succession right.
and that the board needs to make sure that it gets succession right. So I do think that while this is still going to be Iger's choice,
The board is very involved, and the board is going to make sure that they do the right vetting process to make sure that they can cross all their T's and dot all their I's on this, and that it's a much more robust process than JPEG. And part of that has been not giving Iger the chair of the board again. Perhaps a lesson learned, finally, even if he does still wield incredible influence over its decisions.
Iger has until the end of 2026 to find a new successor. A few names have been circulated as contenders for the top job. But as we know, succession bake-offs at Disney tend to be filled with surprises. One thing has changed in the years since Iger announced his full retirement in 2020. The stakes for him. I think he knows he has to leave. I do. I will probably lose a bet if he stays. But I think he knows. And look, he is concerned about legacy, too.
Since he's returned to Disney, he's had to face one crisis after another, including a stock price that's been halved since 2021. And now, his trouble letting go has put his legacy as one of the great CEOs in jeopardy. You know, his reputation means the world to him. And if he can pull Disney back from a bad situation, set it on its feet...
and gracefully find a successor, he will have locked up his legacy and it will be good, you know? And he will have been a hero who came back as opposed to a guy who can't leave. That Disney ending. Finally, a CEO who's happily ever after would come from leaving instead of rolling for life or until they're kicked out. So far, that's been a fairy tale at Disney.
Whether it can become a reality is now up to Bob Iger. Next time on Land of the Giants, the company that Bob Iger leaves will be fundamentally different than the one he initially took over. In the era of streaming, the entertainment giant is now a tech giant too. But the path to get there wasn't always clear. We would do these models where we would say, if we were to completely pivot, what would we have to charge and how many subscribers would we have to have?
It was a very scary thing to look at. And when you looked at it, you were like, hmm, that is not going to happen. Next week for our final episode, how Disney survives its next hundred years.
land of the giants the disney dilemma is produced by vulture and the vox media podcast network this episode included clips from cnbc abc nightline cnn plus the david rubinstein show disney the university of southern california marshall school of business last week tonight with john oliver savedisney.com and bloomberg tv charlotte silver is our lead producer joely myers is our editor claire cronin is our fact checker
Brandon McFarlane composed the theme and mixed and scored this episode. Neil Janowitz is the editor-in-chief of Vulture. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kerwa is our executive producer. And I'm Joe Adalian. If you liked this episode, tell a friend. And follow us to hear our next episode when it drops next Wednesday.
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