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

I N JUNE 2016 I made my fortieth trip to China in eighteen years, my eleventh in the past six months. I was there to oversee the final preparations before the opening of Shanghai Disneyland. Id been CEO of the Walt Disney Company for eleven years at that point, and my plan was to open Shanghai and then retire. It had been a thrilling run, and the creation of this park was the biggest accomplishment of my career. It felt like the right time to move on, but life doesnt always go the way you expect it will. Things happen that you cant possibly anticipate. The fact that Im still running the company as I write this is a testament to that. Much more profoundly, so are the events of that week in Shanghai.

We were opening the park on Thursday, June 16. That Monday, the first wave of VIPs was scheduled to arrive: Disney board members and key executives and their families, creative partners, investors and Wall Street analysts. There was a huge international media contingent already there and more coming in. Id been in Shanghai for two weeks and was running on adrenaline. Since my first location-scouting trip to China in 1998, I was the only person who had been involved in the project from day one, and I couldnt wait to show it to the world.

In the sixty-one years since Walt Disney built Disneyland in Anaheim, California, wed opened parks in Orlando and Paris and Tokyo and Hong Kong. Disney World in Orlando remains our largest, but Shanghai was of a different order than all the others. It was one of the biggest investments in the history of the company. Numbers dont really do the park justice, but here are a few to give some sense of its scope. Shanghai Disneyland cost about $6 billion to build. It is 963 acres, about eleven times the size of Disneyland. At various stages of its construction, as many as fourteen thousand workers lived on the property. We held casting calls in six cities in China to discover the thousand singers, dancers, and actors who perform in our stage and street shows. Over the eighteen years it took to complete the park, I met with three presidents of China, five mayors of Shanghai, and more party secretaries than I can remember (one of whom was arrested for corruption and banished to northern China in the middle of our negotiations, setting the project back nearly two years).

We had endless negotiations over land deals and partnership splits and management roles, and considered things as significant as the safety and comfort of Chinese workers and as tiny as whether we could cut a ribbon on opening day. The creation of the park was an education in geopolitics, and a constant balancing act between the possibilities of global expansion and the perils of cultural imperialism. The overwhelming challenge, which I repeated to our team so often it became a mantra for everyone working on the project, was to create an experience that was authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese.

In the early evening on Sunday, June 12, I and the rest of my team in Shanghai received news of a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, fifteen miles from Disney World. We have more than seventy thousand employees in Orlando, and we waited in horror for confirmation that some of them were at the club that night. Our head of security, Ron Iden, was with us in Shanghai, and he immediately began calling his network of security contacts in the States. It was twelve hours earlierjust before dawnin Orlando when we first heard the news. Ron told me hed have more information when I got up in the morning.

My first event the next day was a presentation to investors over breakfast. Then I had to shoot a long interview with Robin Roberts of Good Morning America, which included touring the park and riding attractions with Robin and her crew. Then there was a meeting with Chinese officials about protocol for the opening ceremonies, a dinner with members of our board and senior executives, and finally a rehearsal for the opening-night concert that I was hosting. Ron periodically gave me updates as I moved through the day.

We knew that more than fifty people had been killed and nearly as many injured, and that the shooter was a man named Omar Mateen. Rons security team ran Mateens name through our database and found that hed visited the Magic Kingdom a couple of months before the shooting, then again the weekend before. There was closed-circuit television footage of him on that last visit, pacing outside a park entrance near the House of Blues, in Downtown Disney.

What we learned next shook me in a way few things have over the course of my career. It wouldnt be made public until nearly two years later, during the trial of Mateens wife as an accomplice to the murders (she was later acquitted), but federal investigators informed Ron that they believed Disney World had been Mateens primary target. Theyd found his phone at the scene of the shooting, and determined that it had been pinging off one of our cell towers earlier that night. They studied the CCTV footage and saw him, again, walking back and forth in front of the entrance near the House of Blues. There was a heavy metal concert there that night, which meant extra securityfive armed police officersand after a few minutes of casing the area, Mateen could be seen walking back to his car.

Security cameras picked up two weapons in Mateens possession, a semiautomatic rifle and a semiautomatic pistol, hidden inside a childs stroller, along with a baby blanket that hadnt yet been taken out of its packaging. Investigators suspected that his plan was to cover his weapons with the blanket and wheel them up to the entrance before pulling them out.

Our head of Parks and Resorts, Bob Chapek, was also in Shanghai, and he and I consulted throughout the day as Ron passed on more news. We were still anxiously waiting to hear if any of our people had been at the nightclub, and now we were concerned that the news of our being a target would soon be leaked. It would be a big story and would take a difficult emotional toll on the community there. The bond you form in high-stress moments like this, when youre sharing information that you cant discuss with anyone else, is a powerful one. In every emergency Ive encountered as CEO, Ive been grateful for the competence and cool heads and humanity of the team around me. Bobs first move was to send the head of Walt Disney World, George Kalogridis, back to Orlando from Shanghai, to give his people on the ground more executive support.

The data on Mateens phone showed that once he got back to his car, he typed in a search for nightclubs in Orlando. He drove to the first club that came up, but there was construction going on in front of the entrance, and traffic was backed up. The second result was Pulse, where he ultimately committed his massacre. As the details of the investigation trickled in, I felt horror and grief for the victims of the shooting, and at the same time a sickening there but for the grace of God relief that hed been deterred by the security we had in place.