carl allen

“That’s why signing kids up for piano lessons or sports is so important. It has nothing to do with creating a good musician or a five-year-old soccer star,” said Heatherton. “When you learn to force yourself to practice for an hour or run fifteen laps, you start building self-regulatory strength. A five-year-old who can follow the ball for ten minutes becomes a sixth grader who can start his homework on time.”
― Charles Duhigg, The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business

“Michael went out of his way during those years to be solicitous with Roy and show him deference and respect. This wasn’t easy to do. Roy could be very difficult at times. He viewed himself as the keeper of the Disney legacy. He lived and breathed and bled Disney, operating as if any break from tradition was a violation of some sacred pact he’d made with Walt himself (who supposedly never showed his nephew much respect). Roy tended to revere the past instead of respecting it, and as a result he had a difficult time tolerating change of any sort. He hated Michael’s acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC, because it meant introducing non-Disney brands into the company’s bloodstream. On a lesser but maybe more illustrative note, he got very angry one Christmas season when we decided to sell pure white Mickey Mouse plush dolls in our Disney stores. “Mickey is only these colors, black and white and red and yellow, and that’s it!” Roy raged in emails to Michael and me. He wanted the “albino Mickeys,” as he called them, taken from the shelves, which we didn’t do, but it was a huge distraction.”
― Robert Iger, The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company

“You can’t wear your disdain for people on your sleeve, though. You end up either cowing them into submission or frustrating them into complacency. Either way, you sap them of the pride they take in their work. Over time, nearly everyone abdicated responsibility to Peter and Strat Planning, and Michael was comforted by the analytical rigor they represented.”
― Robert Iger, The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company

“It’s not, at least as I have internalized it, about perfectionism at all costs (something Roone wasn’t especially concerned about). Instead, it’s about creating an environment in which you refuse to accept mediocrity. You instinctively push back against the urge to say There’s not enough time, or I don’t have the energy, or This requires a difficult conversation I don’t want to have, or any of the many other ways we can convince ourselves that “good enough” is good enough.”
― Robert Iger, The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company