Disney CEO Robert Iger’s Testimonial to Empathy

Real Leaders, January 6, 2020

by Theodore Kinni




In June 2016, Bob Iger (above left, with Georoge Lucas) was in China overseeing preparations for the opening of Shanghai Disneyland. It was the culmination of an 18-year effort and a $6 billion investment that the CEO calls “the biggest accomplishment of my career.” The day before the opening, as Iger was leading a VIP tour of the new park, he was informed that a two-year-old boy had been killed in an alligator attack at Walt Disney World in Florida.

A highly capable Disney crisis team was already on the scene and Iger dictated a public statement. Everything that could be done was being done, but the CEO felt compelled to try to speak to boy’s parents. Once he got on the phone with the boy’s father, Iger told him that he was a father, too, and a grandfather, but even so, he “couldn’t fathom what they must be going through.”

Sobbing, the boy’s father asked Iger to promise this would never happen to another child. He promised. “I sat there shaking on the edge of my bed,” Iger writes in his book, The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company. “I’d been crying so hard that both my contact lenses had come out.”

When you visit Disney World, you can see one result of that promise: There are ropes, fences, and warning signs around the lagoons and canals on the property. They were installed within twenty-four hours of the phone call, across an area twice the size of Manhattan.

It’s a gut-wrenching story—an odd one to find anywhere in a CEO’s memoir, let alone in its prologue. Being the skeptical type, I wondered about Iger’s motives for telling it. He is as polished and professional an executive as I have ever seen, and a welcome contrast to two flavors of leaders that we see too often these days: posturing, blurting assholes who seem to have no self-control whatsoever; and cold, amoral automatons whose sole concern seems to be the value of their stock options.

Iger definitely isn’t the former. He could be a particularly well-disguised example of the latter—I don’t know him personally and can’t say for sure. But I suspect from reading The Ride of a Lifetime and following Disney’s fortunes over the past 20 years that he is not.

It’s also odd that the empathy that Iger demonstrated during that call isn’t one of the ten principles “necessary to true leadership” that he lists a few pages later. The closest he gets to it is the principle of fairness, which he says, requires empathy and accessibility. Yet, Iger’s tenure at Disney is such a compelling testament to the power of empathy that both veteran and aspiring leaders should study it. Read the rest here.