The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company

Curiosity. A deep and abiding curiosity enables the discovery of new people, places, and ideas, as well as an awareness and an understanding of the marketplace and its changing dynamics. The path to innovation begins with curiosity.

His mantra was simple: "Do what you need to do to make it better." Of all the things I learned from Roone, this is what shaped me the most. When I talk about this particular quality of leadership, I refer to it as "the relentless pursuit of perfection." In practice that means a lot of things, and it's hard to define. It's a mind

I went off to meet the dignitaries. We rode rides and posed for pictures. I struggled to smile and go on with the show. It was a stark example of the truth that what people see on the outside so often doesn’t reflect what’s happening on the inside.

You can do a lot for the morale of the people around you (and therefore the people around them) just by taking the guesswork out of their day-to-day life. A lot of work is complex and requires intense amounts of focus and energy, but this kind of messaging is fairly simple: This is where we want to be. This is how we're going to get there.

Decisiveness. All decisions, no matter how difficult, can and should be made in a timely way, Leaders must encourage a diversity of opinion balanced with the need to make and implement decisions. Chronic indecision is not only inefficient and counterproductive, but it is deeply corrosive to morale.

Don't let ambition get ahead of opportunity. By fixating on a future job or project, you become impatient with where you are. You don't tend enough to the responsibilities you do have, and so ambition can become counterproductive. It's important to know how to find the balance-do the job you have well; be patient; look for opportunities to pitch in

but I was determined not to live a life of disappointment. Whatever shape my life took, I told myself, there wasn’t a chance in the world that I was going to toil in frustration and lack fulfillment.

When the unexpected does happen, a kind of instinctive triage kicks in. You have to rely on your own internal "threat scale." There are drop-everything events, and there are others when you say to yourself, This is serious, I need to be engaged right now, but I also need to extricate myself and focus on other things and return to this lat

"Avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil. You may become the greatest trombone-oil manufacturer in the world, but in the end, the world only consumes a few quarts of trombone oil a year!" He was telling me not to invest in projects that would sap the resources of my company and me and not give much back.