The Ride of a Lifetime

Bob Iger's 2019 memoir of running Disney for fifteen years: a four-decade climb from ABC studio hand under Roone Arledge and Cap Cities' Tom Murphy and Dan Burke, through the succession fight after Eisner, to a CEO decade defined by a relationship-first acquisition run — Pixar (2006), Marvel (2009), Lucasfilm (2012), Fox (2019) — plus Shanghai Disneyland and the streaming pivot. His ten leadership principles open the book: optimism, courage, focus, decisiveness, curiosity, fairness, thoughtfulness, authenticity, the relentless pursuit of perfection, integrity.

"Unlike most books on leadership, this one is worth your time," Gates writes — pointed praise from someone who has read the genre. The founder value is in the deal mechanics: Iger bet Disney's future on acquisitions most boards would have called overpriced, and he won them the way creative acquisitions are actually won — by managing the founders. His account of repairing Disney's relationship with Steve Jobs to make Pixar possible, and of personally winning over Ike Perlmutter and George Lucas, is a manual for buying creative assets without killing them.

The most useful stretch for a young founder is the least glamorous one: Iger spent decades as a number two inside companies being bought (ABC into Cap Cities into Disney) and treated each acquisition as an education rather than a threat. The pattern inverts at the top — the buyer becomes the seller of a vision — and his post-mortems of what integration nearly broke, especially at Pixar, are the book's real operating content.