It’s no secret that former Disney CEO Bob Iger didn’t end up loving his first choice successor, Bob Chapek, following Chapek’s very public firing and Iger’s rehiring. But now that Iger has left the top post for good and handed over the reins to former parks head Josh D’Amaro, he’s got some specifics notes on exactly what made one a better fit for the job than the other.
“We had a process back in 2019 and ’20 when we chose my successor. Looking back, perhaps it wasn’t as thorough as we thought, in part because we thought we knew the person extremely well,” Iger tells Nitin Nohria, former dean of Harvard Business School, in an interview published by the Harvard Business Review Thursday. “He’d worked for the company for a very long time and for me directly. And we knew his strengths and we knew some of his weaknesses as well.”
Formerly a parks exec, Chapek took over the Disney CEO job in February 2020 as Iger’s chosen successor. Two years later, the Disney board ousted Chapek in November 2022 after a series of missteps and brought Iger back to the role until he stepped down as CEO this March and handed things off to D’Amaro.
Iger says he now realizes “leadership needs to be capable of managing an environment in perpetual crisis” and that “puts even more emphasis on stamina.”
“I don’t think people want fearless leaders, but they don’t want fearful leaders,” Iger says. “They want somebody that’s going to show some vulnerability, but never show that they’re frightened. We didn’t ask ourselves those questions, though maybe it would have been premature to do so. This was before COVID hit, right before COVID hit, for instance.”
Iger says this led to a change in strategy when he was choosing his second-round replacement, new Disney CEO D’Amaro.
“But as we approach succession this next time around, choosing my successor this past February, we asked ourselves some of these very questions about that person,” Iger says. “Is he resilient? Does he have the stamina? Does he choose a good team? Is he someone who can call it what it is, meaning we’re in a real crisis, but then deal with it in a reasonable and sane and steady way, mature way?”
Iger’s remarks come as Chapek is promoting the release of his upcoming book, “Behind the Castle Walls: My Thirty Years at the Happiest Place on Earth,” which is set to detail Chapek’s side of the failed succession.
In the Harvard Business Review interview, Iger also gave guidance on how he believes a CEO should approach social and political issues and making their personal stances public information.
“I tried to speak up on issues that I thought were really relevant to the company,” Iger says. “What’s interesting about that is I look back, is I was accused often of partisanship or bringing my own politics to work. And I actually think that that was a misperception, meaning it wasn’t about my politics. It was about what I thought was right for the company.”
Iger says people believed he was a “staunch environmentalist” — which “happens to be true” — but he ultimately “cared about the environment because I cared about Disney’s ability to succeed.” Iger says he similarly “took a position on immigration because we are a large employer.”
“We hire from countries all over the world,” Iger says. “We seek to attract the best talent in the world, no matter where people come from. And you need a very sound immigration policy in order to achieve that. And again, that was viewed as political. It wasn’t. It was because what I believed was in the best interest of Disney.”
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