“…people close to Mr. Iger and the company said in interviews that the real question wasn’t whether he saw the crisis coming — but whether his focus on burnishing his own legacy and assuring a smooth succession left him distracted as the threats to the business grew. No big media company is more dependent on its customers’ social and physical proximity than Disney, with its theme parks and cruise lines. Few have been hit harder by the pandemic.”
(New York Times) The former C.E.O. thought he was riding into the sunset. Now he’s reasserting control and reimagining Disney as a company with fewer employees and more thermometers.
The Walt Disney Company turned franchises like Marvel and “Star Wars” into the biggest media business in the world, and last fall it was putting the finishing touches on the image of a storied character: its chief executive, Bob Iger.
In late September, Mr. Iger, 69, published “The Ride of a Lifetime,” an engaging work of self-hagiography. The handsome executive, who seriously considered running for president this year, spent the next month on the kind of media tour that Disney is known for: he reveled in the successful start of a streaming service that immediately rivaled Netflix, was hailed as “businessperson of the year” by Time and described as “Hollywood’s nicest C.E.O.” in an article in the The Times by Maureen Dowd. Even his friends wondered if the soft-focus Instagram ads produced for his MasterClass on leadership were a bit much.
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