Month: July 2024

The Ride Of A Lifetime 

Robert Alan Iger chronicles his ascend to power from his beginnings in television to running the Disney entertainment conglomerate.


The Ride of a Lifetime is partitioned into ‘Learning’ and ‘Leading’. Each part contains seven chapters. While the subtitle implies an autobiography or account of leadership, it is written as a collection of stories that nearly all center around mergers and acquisitions. The historical order is somewhat chronological, but Iger often jumps ahead in time and references the outcome as he builds his storyline. Iger heavily relies on the interactions with Steve Jobs to capture the reader’s interest, but it frequently feels like a detractor from his own story. The detractions persist throughout the book. How did Disney Animations lose its creative edge? What management decisions attempted to prop up Disney Animations, but failed? Why was buying Pixar preferable over buying other (smaller) studios or making investments into proprietary creative labs?  

To my surprise, very few sections in this book deal with personal crisis management, managing reports, and details about the grand strategy behind his actions. This conveys the notion that Iger and Iger alone created Disney as we know it today. Buying Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, and Fox must have come with complex problems, power struggles, or setbacks. Yet, Iger presents a colorless, passionless account with few details on stalemate negotiations, stubborn opposition, and how the leadership team solved these situations. When he does mention a tricky situation (take the failed purchase of Twitter), he often resolves it by compromise or quitting. This might be the one, great lesson of Iger’s career as depicted in this book: his true career was not in leadership but in closing deals. Like a shark, Iger kept pushing forward, expanding, and growing Disney. The few leadership lessons he did outline are found in the appendix; they are often repetitive and to an extent obvious, which in summary leaves the reader a bit unsatisfied. To some readers, this book will feel like an insightful account of corporate consolidation; to other readers, this book will feel like a bland account of someone who is driven by ulterior motives with a lack of humility and integrity. To me, it felt like an interesting story that could have been great if it included more personal reflection, struggle, and failure. To anyone reading this book, it will show the power of corporate consolidation and the importance of quality connections to make deals happen.  

Embrace The Joy Of Being Wrong

Questioning our beliefs and value systems is hard, but regularly revisiting, reimagining, and reconsidering our established patterns, protocols, and perspectives may help us understand why we do what we do and why it is so important to us that we do it. To think again means to retain an open mind and invite opportunities to grow. 


Think Again surprised me with an incredibly clean writing style. With it, Adam Grant truly demonstrates rethinking in practice and how it makes the reading experience so much more captivating. Think Again is partitioned into individual, interpersonal, and collective rethinking. Among the many intriguing ideas in this book, his ideas around “modes” stand out. In essence, the author believes, we are all subject to four modes that govern or at least influence our actions. We are either preachers, politicians, prosecutors, or scientists. Sometimes we will find ourselves channeling a combination of different modes for no good reason other than to make a point. In the view of the author, however, we have an opportunity to grow if we keep the preacher, politician, and prosecutor in us at bay and leverage our inner scientists to test hypotheses, seek evidence, and revise our convictions. 

On its face, Think Again states the obvious. But I can’t remember a recent book that had a greater impact on my own modus operandi. As I write these lines, I can’t help but think about my protocol or approach to book reviews, social media, and blogging. How do I read books? What are my lessons? And am I carrying each lesson forward? What happens to my notes? Is this blog an excuse for taking fewer notes? Or engage in less reflection of the content? Grant acknowledges a state of paralysis or feelings of discomfort may be a side-effect of rethinking and unlearning. These feelings can quickly become unsettling and depressing. While he advocates for a metrics-based method to mitigate paralysis, basically measuring everything like a scientist would and comparing the before and after, we are not scientists in our daily, real lives – at least most of us. Moreover, we are fallible humans. Therefore his advice to simply break down processes, measure their components, and embrace the uncertainty that arises from rethinking isn’t convincing enough because it places us at the hands of discipline, for those of us who can summon it, or the subject of our whims, for those who can’t. 

This book will find a permanent home on my desk within reach. Even if it only serves as a reminder that our established protocols and patterns sometimes need adjustment or justification.