Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Ari Gold, yeah. That’s Michael Ovitz. So he comes into Disney and it is just a disaster. Incredible culture clash. Bob is now under Michael Ovitz. Remember, Bob is like Warren Buffett, Tom Murphy, Dan Burke school of manager. He’s now reporting to super-heated Michael Ovitz. Eisner really has a foot in both worlds here. He’s an incredible guy himself, but Disney is Disney. It is not an agency. And when you say a foot in both worlds, Eisner had that creative gift that Walt had. Bob talks about how Eisner would go through parks and be able to spot issues with line of sight and things like that, that are taking away from the experience being magical. You can imagine that also leads to micro management (which was true), but on the other hand, isn’t so far from the Capital Cities world of, figure out what’s core to a business, make it really lean, make it really operationally sound. I think Iger did a little bit more of that than than Eisner did, but Ovitz certainly had no notion of that. Yeah, and put a foot in both worlds. Eisner, to maybe try and put ourselves in his mindset at this time a little bit, Jeffrey Katzenberg is very much extremely, extremely talented, but more of the Michael Ovitz type of personality and creative genius than the Warren Buffet operational style. Eisner’s gift was he recognized that talent out there. He recognized it in Katzenberg and it led to this great, great flourishing within the company. He probably hoped that Ovitz would be able to bring that spirit back to Disney. It didn’t work out, though. Ovitz only last 14 months at the company and leaves after 14 months. This in the mid- to late-90s, leaves with $140 million golden parachute. This is the $1.7 billion Adam Newman pay out of its day and leaves the company in shambles behind him and Eisner’s reputation having gone from turned around this iconic American company and produced with Katzenberg—The Lion King, Alladin, all these great movies—to this Disney is the laughing stock of the business world at this point in time. Eisner goes back after this. He’s wounded in more ways than one. He goes back to running the company solo and consolidating all authority and responsibility with himself. This actually becomes really prescient. He assigns Bob to what seems like, I was going to use a Siberian outpost. Actually he’s a Siberian outpost to go run international for the company. Disney was not huge internationally at this time and Bob actually learns a lot by going and operating Disney’s business. This is when Euro Disney was getting set up in the theme park side, which was a disaster at first, famously, until they figured out that European parents want wine at lunch to deal with their toddlers running around, and that turned it around. Different countries are different. American parents probably also want wine at lunch to be able to deal with their kids.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.