Bob Iger Quotes

wherever you are along the path, you'r the same person you've always been.

Bob Iger, Disney's chief operating officer, had to step in and do damage control. He was as sensible and solid as those around him were volatile. His background was in television; he had been president of the ABC network, which was acquired in 1996 by Disney. His reputation was as an corporate suit, and he excelled at deft management, but he also had a sharp eye for talent, a good-humored ability to understand people, and a quiet flair that he was secure enough to keep muted. Unlike Eisner and Jobs, he had a disciplined calm, which helped him deal with large egos. " Steve did some grandstanding by announcing that he was ending talks with us," Iger later recalled. " We went into crisis mode and I developed some talking points to settle things down.

You can't let ambition get too far ahead of opportunity.

I thought there was only one lesson in this story, the obvious one about the importance of taking responsibility when you screw up. That's true, and it's significant. In your work, in your life, you'll be more respected and trusted by the people around you if you honestly own up to your mistakes. It's impossible not to make them; but it is possible to acknowledge them, learn from them, and set an example that it's okay to get things wrong sometimes. What's not okay is to undermine others by lying about something or covering your own ass first.

Disney’s Bob Iger, #60 on our list, is the highest paid among our 100, with a total package of $34.3 million.

Even in a dress-down gray sweater, Bob Iger looks a bit mechanical. His mouth is almost geometrically straight, his face constructed of some cool alloy. His hair, of course, is perfect.

if not anyone else—that what we’d created at Pixar could work outside of Pixar. Both the run-up to the acquisition and its execution provided the ultimate case study, and as such, it was enormously exciting to be a part of. First, I’ll talk about how the merger came to pass in the first place, because I believe we did several things in the very early stages that put our partnership on a strong footing. “GET TO KNOW Bob Iger,” Steve had said. So a few weeks later, I did.

I don't think when you are telling stories and attempting to be a good citizen of the world that that's political.

Many in Hollywood view Disney as a soulless, creativity-killing machine that treats motion pictures like toothpaste and leaves no room for the next great talent, the next great idea, or the belief that films have any meaning beyond their contribution to the bottom line. By contrast, investors and MBAs are thrilled that Disney has figured out how to make more money, more consistently, from the film business than anyone ever has before. But actually, Disney isn’t in the movie business, at least as we previously understood it. It’s in the Disney brands business. Movies are meant to serve those brands. Not the other way around. Even some Disney executives admit in private that they feel more creatively limited in their jobs than they imagined possible when starting careers in Hollywood. But, as evidenced by box-office returns, Disney is undeniably giving people what they want. It’s also following the example of one of the men its CEO, Bob Iger, admired most in the world: Apple’s cofounder, Steve Jobs. Apple makes very few products, focuses obsessively on quality and detail, and once it launches something that consumers love, milks it endlessly. People wondering why there’s a new Star Wars movie every year could easily ask the same question about the modestly updated iPhone that launches each and every fall. Disney approaches movies much like Apple approaches consumer products. Nobody blames Apple for not coming out with a groundbreaking new gadget every year, and nobody blames it for coming out with new versions of its smartphone and tablet until consumers get sick of them. Microsoft for years tried being the “everything for everybody” company, and that didn’t work out well. So if Disney has abandoned whole categories of films that used to be part of every studio’s slates and certain people bemoan the loss, well, that’s simply not its problem.

J.J. [Abrams] and I had dinner soon after he decided to take on the project. We'd known each other from back in the ABC days - he'd made Alias and Lost for us, among other things -

Hollywood studios, which made movies in order to make money from movies, simply couldn’t justify using their parent companies’ funds to let indie darling James Gray re-create a doomed voyage up the Amazon River and Gillian Robespierre portray a fractured family in 1990s New York. As Bob Iger had said about Miramax: “That’s an awful business. Awful.” But Amazon didn’t make movies primarily to make money from movies. It used movies to draw attention, to increase engagement, and to dominate people’s time and digital behavior so they would ultimately buy more stuff from the company. The solution Ted Hope had long wanted, one that would keep feeding intelligent moviegoers and the culture at large with truly artful cinema, had finally revealed itself. All he needed was a company that, at its core, couldn’t care less about movies.