He Was Promotable

This is a rather interesting interview with Robert Iger (link may require free registration for access) because it also revealed another aspect of his career that I didn't know before. While I've known previously that he is a morning person (like me), what I didn't know that one of his bosses very early in his career didn't think that he was promotable.

Q. Tell me about your best and worst bosses.

A. I’ve worked for some great leaders. Roone Arledge was a consummate perfectionist. He drove everybody to levels of perfection or to come as close as possible to it. You exhausted every possibility there was to make something great or make something better.

Tom Murphy and Dan Burke taught me the importance of trust and managing people. You could learn from them but you also had the opportunity to go out and take those learnings and actually apply them on your own. There was a decentralized approach to the way they ran the company.

Michael Eisner brought me into different types of creativity. I had been mostly a television executive and he taught me about creativity on almost every level, in every direction, from theme-park attractions to stage plays.

My first boss at ABC told me I wasn’t promotable, so I’d have to put him in the category of “bad boss.” Clearly he had poor judgment.

I'd say! I wonder where that person is now....

Zz.