You ready? Hi ho! Alright, a little Disney theme there; Hi-ho hi-ho it's off
the film we go we've got bad sound and then we've got someone
That's why I don't sing for a living people
Hey it's number one best-selling author
and motivational speaker Erik Qualman and most of you know me as Equalman
I'm super excited to get 7 Super Tips from Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger
Now this particular episode is near and dear to my heart as most of you know my
laughable goal out there is to have the next Disney World that's right a
physical location where families can go for "edutainment" they go for
entertainment but they leave with an education
I'd say a few things that a few things that I've
learned and what served me well first of all nothing beats good hard hard work
I know that sounds really trite but I came to my adult life were my career
with a modest intellect but a tremendous work ethic and that served me extremely
well with that came a real desire to to do well but I knew in order to do that I
had to be well-prepared too so I'm a student I learned a lot to this day I
try not to go into anything cold I try to learn it also by the way one of the
most helpful things in terms of making decisions is accumulating knowledge is
making a decision not a from just by shooting from the hip not by winging it
but by learning enough about something to either form a knowledgeable opinion
or to make a decision based on dark knowledge that's accumulated and I think
along the way more than anything else that has probably contributed to where I
am today
I think leaders failed for a number of reasons
Arrogance is a sure way to create failure sometimes in leadership
positions in positions of power particularly when success ensues it's
easy for people to allow success to go to their heads and to get arrogant
sometimes they fail because leadership can be an isolating experience and in
isolation you lose the ability for whatever reason to hear differing
opinions sometimes with leadership comes a power that intimidates people to even
express themselves in honest ways and I think the last thing with leaders which
probably is a collection of all the things I just said is it can go to your
head the old power corrupts I think is an apt truly apt statement our concept
As long as you can imagine when you when you manage a company that is as complex
as this in so many businesses there's an interesting challenge to manage for
today and manage for tomorrow I talk about it in terms of using your hands
you you have to have one hand in the future in one hand in the president if
you have to in one place then you fail if you have to in the future then you're
not managing a business day-to-day and that's a big problem operationally and
if you're just managing today then you're gonna miss out on opportunities
or you're gonna completely ignore consists significant threats and not
prepare yourself for that so this notion of protecting the present is something
that I talk about a lot at the company David Puttnam sir David Puttnam gave a
speech in the UK a couple of weeks ago and he said protectionism is much more
digestible than innovation so it was very well put
so as the CEO of the company I feel that it is my role to make sure everybody's
got a hand in the future and a hand in the present and that we are mindful of
the value the president is delivering but not so overly protective of it that
we're ignoring you know a world that is changing right before our eyes
First of all there's a Japanese word which he didn't teach me I discovered in
a documentary about a sushi chef in Tokyo called Jokinen which is the
relentless pursuit of perfection the I I've never worked with anyone or seen
anyone up close that embodied that then Steve Jobs he believed that perfection
mostly in the product that they created had incredible value and that was a core
value to Apple as a for instance he had talked about guts and the ability to
take chances phenomenal yeah phenomenal and the perseverance often required
particularly in the face of tremendous pessimism
he was quite something there he you know he also had an incredible designer's eye
and I've worked with people before who have taste but he could hone in on the
most minut detail and understand that even the smallest detail if well done
contributes a tremendous amount of value to the whole
You can make decisions on people pretty quickly in terms of whether there's someone you
want to hire or not but in terms of whether they have absolute leadership
capabilities the only thing you really know immediately is whether they look
the part whatever that means and people have different definitions of what that
means but I think you need time to really see someone and get to know them
better to determine whether they're a leader see them in action see them
interacting with people listening to whether they're open-minded how
passionate they are you know whether they have the ability to take risks the
quote you you threw back at me earlier I think there are a lot of things you have
to see before you can actually stamp leader on a person's forehead
Disney having been founded in 1923 by Walt Disney still had a an abnormal
adherence to its legacy to its heritage to its past it was they were it was a
religion and what was clear to me is that if that adherence or the reverence
that people had within the company for that heritage continued it would get in
the way of innovation we would not be able to adapt quick enough we would not
be able to look at change with an open mind and an ability to seize the
opportunity as opposed to just looking at his threat and so I started
articulating in the succession process that need to balance heritage with
innovation and what I ultimately concluded was that we need to respect
our past because there were a lot of qualities about the past the brand
attributes what Disney stood for a number of other things attention to
quality and that were had that had value and that should be basically carried
forward into the future but let's not revere it because if we Revere something
then we might as well just put it in a glass case and in a museum and let
people look at it and say wow look at look at that and there's a big
difference but there were a lot of folks in the company that were more on the
reverential side than the respect side and I had to break I had to really
attack that in some cases it meant changing our personnel in some cases it
may it meant taking some big bold decisions that felt anti brand to some
people that in my in my opinion warrant at all it was more about being Pro
present and future than it was about anything that would be against the past
or you know with a brand
I'm fond of reminding people at our company that honest mistakes deserve
second chances that in effect it's okay to fail it's okay to make a mistake if
it's the result of an honest error or trying hard working hard to fulfill a
dream or to fulfill an instinct and learning over time that it doesn't work
it doesn't necessarily mean the career is over a reputation is killed when a
reputation is killed is when failure comes as a result of loss of integrity
thorough lapse of judgment breaking of rules standards laws for instance so
there's it's very black-and-white for me in that regard one type of failure
doesn't deserve a second chance in terms of failing in for legitimate
reasons or business obviously there are degrees abject failure on a sustained
basis is obviously something that unfortunately the environment doesn't
allow us to tolerate initial failure whether it's mine or someone else's you
know for reasons that it could be varied but don't necessarily are not
necessarily rooted in called tremendous personal error I think it's important to
give to give people an opportunity to learn from that and to give them a
chance to try again in some other form
That's it for today's 7 Super Tip show. Those were 7 Super Tips from
Disney's Bob Iger. My hope is it helped unlock and unleash your inner superpower
To make sure you get the next episode hit that subscribe button below and
remember until next time it's not what we take for the world it is what we leave behind
I'll try not to look at you guys too, so it' be good
What kind of animal was that? A bird?