"The Ride of a Lifetime" review
The Ride of a Lifetime is a self-written biography about and by Robert Iger. Robert Iger was the CEO of Disney while he was writing it and had been working in the media industry for 40 years. The book tells the tale of his journey to and as Disney CEO and what lessons he learned in the industry that led him to that point.
The book has been on my backlog of books I have wanted to read for a long time but it has become even more important as Iger enters his second tenure as CEO of the Walt Disney Company. As the current company goes through its ups and downs, it is interesting to read the origin of how current Disney thinks about the creative process, from the man at the top. The book describes Iger's ideas about being a creative CEO and how he believes in one thing over anything: innovate or die.
The book starts with Iger dealing with the most recent crisis to the book's writing. In 2016 two crises happened in Orlando as Iger was in China for the opening of the first Chinese park Shanghai Disneyland. Both crises do a good job of introducing what kind of person Iger is throughout the book and set a somber tone in the beginning. The intro makes Iger very likable even as a big CEO. It can be easy to accidentally make a person like Iger larger than life and less believable, the book does a good job of avoiding that. This leads into the first part of the biography where he is starting as a small timer on network TV.
The parts about his biography are the best part because they show how someone so small time ended up in such a big position. Iger slowly makes connections through his work at ABC and is mentored by a person who seems larger than life. This mentor instills Iger’s biggest rule that becomes a throughline of the book: innovate or die. The book and Iger live by this rule and it becomes the reasoning for many of the choices Iger made throughout it. Part of the conflict of the book is Iger trying to live by this rule while also not stepping on people's toes or ruining what people love.
Throughout the section before Iger was CEO of Disney Iger thoroughly describes situations with certain people in the past like being at a Frank Sinatra concert and being a producer of the the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. The imagery is simple but gives the reader a good idea of what it would be like to be in the room if you were Iger himself. The simplicity of it adds more emphasis to the dialogue and drama of the scenes as we look closer at how these situations affected Igor and his outlook.
As the Biography starts to get into how he moved up the food chain to run ABC, the book becomes more about Iger's thoughts and feelings and less about physical imagery. It tends to lean into internal dialogue and talks about how these kinds of acquisitions happen and how he ended up in all of it. The book glances over it, but it brings up how his upward trajectory upended his life more than once and made drama with his family and kids. I think this drama is interesting, but the book only spends a little bit of time talking about it.
The book's second half goes into depth about how he became CEO of the Walt Disney Company, his struggles during the process, and how he rescued the company by taking many risks. The drama behind how he became CEO was particularly fascinating as the book built up characters involved and talked about the drama and stress behind him trying to become the CEO. The book tries to make the acquisition drama interesting and palpable for the reader to understand but it ends up being less interesting as it goes on.
The book describes the big three acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars and Iger tries to show his reasoning for buying them throughout the chapters. The Pixar chapter had some great imagery of their studio and was a welcome change up from the more corporate drama chapters that had come before it. The chapter was also very heartfelt as it talked about how Igor dealt with Steve Jobs before his passing when he bought Pixar from him. The chapters after that, while thematically consistent with the book's goal, are less interesting overall.
The chapters about Marvel and Star Wars have interesting characters but do not do a good job of engaging. They describe how the leaders of both Marvel and LucasFilm eventually cede to the money and let themselves be acquired. Iger tries to explain why each of the companies would do this but it's less interesting than most of the content that came before. Maybe because it involved less drama but it would have made sense if they had combined both chapters since both have relatively similar themes and do not interest past how the owners reacted to how Iger was trying to acquire them.
Overall, Ride of a Lifetime is a great book that has some diminishing returns close to the end. Readers find this book enjoyable because of its look into the world of Disney, its good messages, and the character studies of some of the biggest media CEOs in history. The book is not perfect but it is good for anyone looking to get a deeper look into the media industry or a look into a successful CEO’s journey and mindset.
