Certainly, the shows were what he cared about at Paramount — ‘a business based on ten to twelve decisions a year’, as he once described it, where his creative talents enabled him to produce a string of movie and television hits. But dealing with ‘all this shit’, every day, is what the CEO of a $30 billion multinational enterprise needs to do — whether that involves developing new leaders, planning for succession, managing financial risks, negotiating with partners and suppliers, or simply paying appropriate amounts of attention to all divisions of the company. Rewarding though it may be, reading scripts and tinkering with TV schedules is not the CEO’s job.
Today, the Walt Disney Company stands on the threshold of its post-Eisner era. In March, a month after the publication of DisneyWar in the United States, Eisner agreed to step down a year ahead of schedule, and will hand over the CEO position to president Robert Iger in September. Iger will have an immense task on his hands: running a company that possesses an unparalleled heritage and a vast array of intellectual assets, but which is also afflicted by a cancerous culture of executive ambition and paranoia, as Stewart so vividly describes. Since Iger himself is a product of that culture, perhaps his best start would be to read this book — just not in front of Michael Eisner.
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