The Ride of a Lifetime - Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Betting on Talent

ABC was bought by Tom Murphy and Dan Burke from Cap Cities. Despite ABC being a bigger company than Cap Cities, Tom’s close friend Warren Buffett, was a large shareholder in the $3.5 billion deal and the deal could, therefore, go through. 

At first, Iger did not like the fact that his boss changed and was genuinely thinking of leaving the company. However, working for his new boss, Dennis, became one of the best career decisions he ever made. Dennis turned out to be a funny guy with lots of energy and optimism and, “crucially, he knew what he didn’t know.”

Appropriately, as Iger expressly recited: “We would sit in meetings and something would come up and rather than bluffing his way through it, Dennis would say he didn’t know, and then he’d turn to me and others for help. He regularly asked me to take the lead in conversations with higher-ups while he sat back, and he took every opportunity to extol my virtues to Tom and Dan.” Essentially, Dennis would “never put himself ahead of anyone else.”

Correspondingly, Iger described the characters of Tom and Dan, which was that they were two of the most genuine and authentic people he ever met. They did not have an ego and they treated everyone with honesty and forthrightness, irrespective of their ranking within the company. “They were shrewd businesspeople (Warren Buffett later called them ‘probably the greatest two-person combination in management that the world has ever seen or maybe ever will see’). From Tom and Dan, Iger received the important lesson that “genuine decency and professional competitiveness weren’t mutually exclusive.” Iger also put it best in the following passage: “In fact, true integrity—a sense of knowing who you are and being guided by your own clear sense of right and wrong—is a kind of secret weapon. They trusted in their own instincts, they treated people with respect, and over time the company came to represent the values they lived by. A lot of us were getting paid less than we would have been paid if we went to a competitor. We knew they were cheap. But we stayed because we felt so loyal to these two men.” 

Accordingly, the business strategy of Tom and Dan was simple because they were focused about controlling costs, and they allowed other people to make key decisions in the company as well. Their hiring policy was smart, decent and hardworking people. Due to their characters, “executives working for them always had a clear sense of what their priorities were" and their focus reflected on the rest of the employees being focused as well.

Lastly, Iger points out that one of his career principles was to say yes to every opportunity and therefore, he took the opportunity to become the new head of ABC Entertainment.