Bob Iger Reveals That He Wrote a Six-Page Letter to Josh D’Amaro and Left It In His Desk

When Bob Iger officially stepped aside as CEO of The Walt Disney Co. earlier this year to hand the keys to the kingdom to Josh D’Amaro, he decided to take a cue from an Oval Office tradition.

“I decided I would write my successor a letter and leave it in his desk, as we’ve heard Presidents of the United States have done recently. And I wanted it to be short. It ended up being six pages long,” Iger said in an interview published by the Harvard Business Review on Thursday. “One of the things that I did write is be aware of how much influence you have over the company. You’re inheriting a company that’s 103 years old, and you think, well, maybe there’s nothing that any one leader can do to change it or influence it.”

“But be aware of the fact that you have enormous influence over it, and you can exert that influence quickly and sometimes almost inadvertently just by having the title,” he added. “That there’s a tremendous amount of responsibility. And I think if you are aware of the influence you have, then you act more responsibly, because you are aware of just how powerful that influence can be. It’s just so important.”

Iger, of course, was exiting for the second time in the last decade. His previous retirement in February of 2020 was short-lived, with Disney’s board asking him to return in late 2022 after they expressed discontent with his chosen successor, Bob Chapek.

Chapek, as it happens, has a new memoir releasing this month where he gives his side of that story.

In the HBR interview, Iger doesn’t mention Chapek by name, though he did say that, “Looking back, perhaps it wasn’t as thorough as we thought, in part because we thought we knew the person extremely well.”

“I’m not suggesting that we discounted the weaknesses, but in our zeal to check a box with succession and enable me to move on, first as executive chairman and ultimately to leave, I’m not suggesting that we ignored some of the issues, but I think we discounted them a bit more,” he added.

But Iger also revealed that he believes the current environment for CEOs is, quite frankly, different than it was pre-COVID.

“We now live in an age where I think this crisis is almost omnipresent. We live in a state of almost perpetual crisis, or an environment in which a crisis can occur almost on a very regular basis,” Iger told HBR. “Now, this is, in a way, hindsight, but I realize today that leadership needs to be capable of managing an environment in perpetual crisis. So what does that mean? I think it puts even more emphasis on stamina. It puts even more emphasis on someone’s ability to, one, admit the crisis and deal with it, but never lose hope and optimism and balance that optimism and hope with realism.”

And it was that factor that came into play when Disney’s board was contemplating who should replace him this time.

“But as we approach succession this next time around, choosing my successor this past February, we asked ourselves some of these very questions about that person,” Iger said. “Is he resilient? Does he have the stamina? Does he choose a good team? Is he someone who can call it what it is, meaning we’re in a real crisis, but then deal with it in a reasonable and sane and steady way, mature way?”