Creating Business Magic. David Morey
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magic.” This prompted him to commandeer every decision, soon sending the company’s frightened shareholders into revolt. So by the time Bob Iger asked our advice about the job, things had gotten relatively ugly.
“Do you really want the job?” Scott asked him.
“Yes,” Iger replied. “I want the job.”
“Well, okay, you’ve been selected,” Scott replied. “But now you must be elected.”
Morey and Miller understood Disney’s plight. In kid’s entertainment, Disney was the long-established “incumbent” player and had been for seventy-five years of the soon-to-end twentieth century. Like all too many incumbents, however, Disney had forgotten its original dreams. To recover its magic, the company needed done for it precisely what magicians do for their audiences. Disney needed its aspirations rebooted. The metaphor is appropriate. When any digital device runs too long, it tends to slow down and even seize up. The only thing you can do to fix it is to reboot. Often, this means pulling the power plug, plugging it back in, and starting all over. Similarly, when a company is an incumbent for too long, it slows down or seizes up and finds itself in need of radical intervention in the form of an aspirational reboot. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison on January 30, 1787, “and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”17 Rather more savagely, Jefferson wrote to William Stephens Smith on November 13, 1787, “[T]he tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, it is its natural manure.”18 Incumbency requires an assault from insurgency. And that is precisely what Bob Iger delivered.
He conducted nothing less than an insurgent political campaign, beginning what would be one of the most successful runs of any American CEO, a trajectory that continues to this day. He aimed to reboot and satisfy the aspirations of the company’s stakeholders. He set out to recapture the aspirations of customers whose loyalty had made Disney legendary for over eighty years. With a keen understanding of perceptions, he took control of his stage and focused his performance to win over the dissident Disney factions he faced coming into the leadership role: dissatisfied shareholders, disaffected young parents, and alienated teens and tweens, as well as demoralized division heads, employees, and partners in the global creative community. His objective was to define himself in such a way that all stakeholders would come to feel that his leadership selection had been their idea all along. He wanted to be perceived as their choice for CEO, fulfilling their aspirations.
A tall order? Absolutely. And we told him that he had to pull it off within the space of no more than a year.
We worked with Bob to put into action a strategic approach that we have found rarely fails. It consists of defining three things:
1.Yourself
2.The aspirations of your leadership
3.The future
Using this approach, Bob quickly differentiated himself from his predecessor. Whereas Eisner had firmly believed that only he understood the “Disney magic,” Bob met with his top managers in his corner suite at Team Disney Burbank, a Michael Graves building adorned on its façade with the Seven Dwarves. Facing his management team, he spread his fingers and placed his palm flat against his chest.
“The magic is not in here,” he said. After taking a beat, he continued: “It’s not in this building. It’s not in Burbank.”
Now he met the eyes of each executive. “The magic,” he said, is out there. Our job is to find it.”
Successful magicians possess the knowledge and skills of their craft, but they know that the “magic” is not theirs at all. It belongs to their audience. Some call it a capacity for wonder and astonishment. We call it aspiration. Without aspiration, there is no magic because there is no motive for magic. “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” the American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Doubtless, he was inspired in this thought by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, of whom he was a great admirer. “Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion,” Hegel wrote. We believe this declaration can support at least two more variations: “Nothing great was ever achieved without aspiration” and “Nothing great was ever achieved without magic.”
At Disney, Bob Iger has consistently defined himself as an executive who leads people to discover and act upon their aspirations, which if they are thinking like magicians, are parallel to and even coincide with the aspirations of their customers. Through this approach, Iger did a brilliant job of restoring the company’s relationship with young families and moms and resetting its relationship with teens and tweens. The aspiration he expressed for Disney was as iconic as Mickey’s ears: “We will define family fun everywhere in the world.”
The Non-Miracle of Net-a-Porter
Magic looks miraculous. It isn’t. And Bob Iger worked no miracles at Disney. Yes, the company was in trouble when he took it over, but let us acknowledge that when Iger took the helm, the Disney organization already had a formidable brand. The good news is that any company—anyone in business—can learn to create brands that not only imagine consumer aspirations, but imagine those aspirations achieved.
Consider the story of Net-a-Porter, a London-based high-fashion retailer founded in 2000 by Natalie Massenet. She pioneered the Web as a platform on which consumers could achieve their most fashionable aspirations. Born Natalie Rooney in Los Angeles to an American journalist/film publicist father and a British model for Chanel mother, Massenet spent her early childhood in Paris. She grew up in close contact with the fashion industry and became a fashion journalist for Women’s Wear Daily and Tatler. This experience not only gave her a unique perspective on the fashion industry, it also inspired her to develop the concept of a magazine-format website capable of converting readers into consumers with a mouse click on clothing items they encountered while browsing. In 2000, this concept was met with a great deal of skepticism, but Massenet was convinced of the power of the concept: a magazine platform that created interest and functioned as a retail store, providing the means of instantly acting on interest. Massenet was among the early generation of e-retailers who recognized the magic of the digital platform, which could variously anticipate, create, and shape consumer aspiration while enabling the effortless transformation of aspiration into reality.
The naysayers notwithstanding, Massenet launched her company from a flat in Chelsea, London. Remember, this was 2000, a year in which “dot-coms” were being lavishly overvalued and recklessly overfunded. Often, what they promised far exceeded the state of Internet technology at the time, and many dot-coms turned into dot-bombs. Massenet walked straight into this situation with Net-a-Porter. Not only were overly hyped dot-coms imploding all around her, the concept of selling exclusively online was almost unimaginable. Most computer users were still literally dialing into this thing called the World Wide Web. Designers as well as investors were justifiably wary of putting merchandise, money, and reputation into an enterprise that lacked the brick-and-mortar presence of a Saks Fifth Avenue or Barneys. Whenever Massenet tried to pitch her business ideas, there was always the same question: “But where is the actual store located?”
Her persistence, however, paid off. In 2001, she persuaded up-and-coming new designer Roland Mouret to sell his first collection on her site. That was sufficient to overcome inertia, and by 2004, Net-a-Porter was turning a profit. A fashion discount site, The Outnet, followed in 2009, and Massenet sold Net-a-Porter to the Swiss-based luxury goods holding company Richemont in 2010, remaining as the company’s executive chairman as well as a prime investor. Today, Net-a-Porter grabs the attention of over five million women a month, who read, browse, and shop the latest runway looks from the season’s most sought-after collections. Not only does Net-a-Porter act as an online retailer, it also presents the latest fashion news, trend reports, and style advice to women around the world. Endorsements from celebrities like Victoria Beckham (in WWD, April 18, 2012) further strengthen its appeal: “I do like using style apps on my iPad and I also like to shop online. I love Net-a-Porter in particular. Being a working mum with four children, having the ability to shop online
is wonderful.”
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