economic Great Depression of unprecedented severity, amputated dreams, locking people into the financial and emotional equivalent of the boxes, cells, and vaults from which Houdini had routinely escaped. A fascinating article published in the August 1932 edition of Popular Aviation asked the age-old question, “Can Man Propel Himself Through the Air by His Own Power?” The article’s author, W. I. Oliver, “[n]oted student of aviation history and ornithopter flight,” cited the Greek myth of Icarus, who flew on magical waxen wings his father Daedalus had fashioned for him as well as for himself to escape from the impenetrable labyrinth of the monstrous Minotaur. Young Icarus, exhilarated by the freedom of flight, sheered away from his father to fly higher and higher until, having approached too near the sun, the wax began to melt, and he fell back to earth and his death. This end notwithstanding, Icarus had realized—for a time, at least—the dream of human-powered flight.
Turning from mythology and the heat of the sun, Oliver went on to explore a more practical limitation of animal-powered flight. He invited his readers to “picture a sparrow and an eagle in a pen,” forty feet square, with no top, and with walls four feet in height. “The small sparrow rises vertically at the rate of nine to ten feet per second and could easily clear the walls. The eagle, on the other hand, could not escape, because the
eagle requires a wing flapping run of sixty feet to clear the four-foot fence.…the same rule applies to the condor, buzzards, seagull and other large heavy birds…” 16
In the 1930s, Popular Aviation advertised itself as having the “Largest Sale of Any Aviation Magazine.” That was really saying something, since the early thirties were a golden age of aviation. As the Great Depression threatened to drag everyone down, the wonders of flight promised to lift everyone up. The dream of escape and transcendence that Houdini had offered in the 1920s, flying machines offered in the 1930s. Too bad Houdini had succumbed in 1926 to peritonitis following a ruptured appendix, which may or may not have been aggravated by multiple gut punches delivered (all in good fun) by a fan. If anything, the 1930s offered an even bigger market than the 1920s for the kind of magical aspirations to which Houdini catered. As for W. I. Oliver’s practical mathematical calculations concerning the aerodynamics of birds and the human beings who sought to emulate them, perhaps the more important point is nature’s instinctive belief that we all need lots of room to take off, to aspire to bigger dreams, to escape from our version of the forty-foot-square pen. Houdini, it turns out, was not all about mere entertainment any more than the myth of Icarus and Daedalus was just a good story or Oliver’s fascination with bird flight was no more than an aerodynamic calculation. All these things were and are about the magic of aspiration.
“The Magic Is Out There”
In 1999, Michael Eisner handpicked Bob Iger to succeed him as CEO of The Walt Disney Company. During this time, Iger happened to be a client of David Morey’s company, and David’s business partner, Scott Miller, asked him a critical question. Do you really want the job?
The thing is, Iger was doing very nicely, thank you, as president and CEO of ABC, Inc., which Disney had purchased in 1996. Disney itself? Not so much. In fact, the company was in sharp decline. It was no longer delivering on the aspirational promise founder Walt Disney had invented way back in 1923. No, the parks, movie business, broadcast and cable television, and retail operations were all sliding. As for the Disney digital and gaming business, it never even got off the ground. To add proverbial insult to proverbial injury, the company seemed to be doing its damnedest to destroy its aspirational relationship with young parents by over-licensing the Disney brands, putting its beloved characters on everything from pasta to toilet paper, and generally abusing moms and dads with an ill-conceived Disney Store concept guaranteed to turn even the sweetest little kid into a spoiled rotten undersized tyrant.
As for tweens and teens, core Disney mainstays since the mid-1950s, the company was neglecting if not undoing these all-important consumer relationships. Half-hearted efforts to revive the classic 1950s Mickey Mouse Club TV show in 1977 (The New Mickey Mouse Club) and 1989-1994 (The All-New Mickey Mouse Club) were about as imaginative as the “New” and the “All-New” prefixes tacked onto the original name. True, Michael Eisner had performed like the bona fide business genius he was when Roy E. Disney and others brought him on board as CEO and Chairman in 1984. But by the 1990s, by many accounts he had become a manager who had challenges delegating, and he was attracting significant criticism. The trouble was his sincere conviction that he and only he possessed the secret of the “Disney magic.” This prompted him to commandeer every decision, soon sending the company’s frightened shareholders into revolt. So by the time Bob Iger asked our advice about the job, things had gotten relatively ugly.
“Do you really want the job?” Scott asked him.
“Yes,” Iger replied. “I want the job.”
“Well, okay, you’ve been selected,” Scott replied. “But now you must be elected.”
Morey and Miller understood Disney’s plight. In kid’s entertainment, Disney was the long-established “incumbent” player and had been for seventy-five years of the soon-to-end twentieth century. Like all too many incumbents, however, Disney had forgotten its original dreams. To recover its magic, the company needed done for it precisely what magicians do for their audiences. Disney needed its aspirations rebooted. The metaphor is appropriate. When any digital device runs too long, it tends to slow down and even seize up. The only thing you can do to fix it is to reboot. Often, this means pulling the power plug, plugging it back in, and starting all over. Similarly, when a company is an incumbent for too long, it slows down or seizes up and finds itself in need of radical intervention in the form of an aspirational reboot. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison on January 30, 1787, “and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”17 Rather more savagely, Jefferson wrote to William Stephens Smith on November 13, 1787, “[T]he tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, it is its natural manure.”18 Incumbency requires an assault from insurgency. And that is precisely what Bob Iger delivered.
He conducted nothing less than an insurgent political campaign, beginning what would be one of the most successful runs of any American CEO, a trajectory that continues to this day. He aimed to reboot and satisfy the aspirations of the company’s stakeholders. He set out to recapture the aspirations of customers whose loyalty had made Disney legendary for over eighty years. With a keen understanding of perceptions, he took control of his stage and focused his performance to win over the dissident Disney factions he faced coming into the leadership role: dissatisfied shareholders, disaffected young parents, and alienated teens and tweens, as well as demoralized division heads, employees, and partners in the global creative community. His objective was to define himself in such a way that all stakeholders would come to feel that his leadership selection had been their idea all along. He wanted to be perceived as their choice for CEO, fulfilling their aspirations.
A tall order? Absolutely. And we told him that he had to pull it off within the space of no more than a year.
We worked with Bob to put into action a strategic approach that we have found rarely fails. It consists of defining three things:
1.Yourself
2.The aspirations of your leadership
3.The future
Using this approach, Bob quickly differentiated himself from his predecessor. Whereas Eisner had firmly believed that only he understood the “Disney magic,” Bob met with his top managers in his corner suite at Team Disney Burbank, a Michael Graves building adorned on its façade with the Seven Dwarves. Facing his management team, he spread his fingers and placed his palm flat against his chest.
“The magic is not in here,” he said. After taking a beat, he continued: “It’s not in this
