This article from CNBC tells the inside story of the absolute mess that was CEO succession at Disney. Bob Iger was CEO of Disney for 15 years, from 2005 to 2020. After pushing back his retirement four times, he finally stepped down on 25 February 2020. Less than two years later he was CEO once again, retaking the role on 20 November 2022.
That two year period, with the COVID pandemic as a backdrop, was marked by infighting, petty turf wars and as the now-ousted CEO Bob Chapek described to a friend, an “unrelenting fear that Iger wanted his job back”.
Since retaking the CEO reigns, Iger has reportedly told friends and colleagues he had to return to correct one of the biggest mistakes of his career – appointing Bob Chapek as CEO.
Clearly there isn’t a lot of love lost between the two Bob’s. And this article from CNBC lays it out in all its detail. From the personal disagreements that soured the two Disney leader’s relationship just days after the transition to the changes that Bob Chapek tried to implement and how Iger worked against them. It is a fascinating story, and will quickly become a business school case study about how not to manage leadership succession.
The biggest irony of all, Bob Iger wrote about the risks of dysfunctional relationships at the top of a company in his 2019 autobiography, The Ride of a Lifetime.
“When the two people at the top of a company have a dysfunctional relationship, there’s no way that the rest of the company beneath them can be functional,” Iger wrote in his autobiography, “The Ride of a Lifetime.” “It’s like having two parents who fight all the time.”
Except Iger wasn’t describing his relationship with Chapek. He was writing about former Disney CEO Michael Eisner and his relationship with his deputy Michael Ovitz in the 1990s.
History may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.
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