The Memoir That Events Overtook Twice: "The Ride of a Lifetime" by Bob Iger

This is a book about how to leave well, written by a man who then did not leave.

The Ride of a Lifetime was published in 2019, as Bob Iger prepared to hand over the Walt Disney Company after fifteen years as chief executive. It is a genuinely excellent book on running a large creative business. It is also, read today, an accidental case study in the one thing it does not cover — because the succession it anticipates went wrong, Iger came back, and only this year did he finally hand the company to someone else.

Read it with that in mind and it becomes far more interesting than it was on publication.

What the book actually covers

Iger's route to the top was long and unglamorous. He joined ABC in 1974 in a junior production role and spent more than two decades there, arriving at Disney only when Capital Cities/ABC was acquired in 1996. He became president in 2000 and succeeded Michael Eisner as chief executive in 2005.

The heart of the book is the acquisition sequence, and it is the reason to read it. Pixar in 2006. Marvel in 2009. Lucasfilm in 2012. Twenty-First Century Fox in 2019. Then Disney+, launched into a market everyone said was already taken.

What makes his account useful is that he explains the reasoning rather than the outcome. Buying Pixar was not a purchase of a film library — it was a purchase of a culture Disney had lost the ability to reproduce internally, from a company run by a man his predecessor had spent years fighting with. He is clear that the deal was as much a repair of a relationship as an allocation of capital.

The framing device is a set of leadership principles — optimism, courage, focus, decisiveness, curiosity, fairness, thoughtfulness, authenticity, the pursuit of perfection, integrity. Taken as a list it is unremarkable. Taken as annotations on specific decisions involving billions of dollars, it is considerably better.

Why you should read it

Read it for the acquisition chapters, which are the best plain-language account of buying intellectual property that a sitting chief executive has written. Iger is specific about what he thought each asset was, what he was willing to pay, and what he was prepared to leave alone afterwards.

Read it as the other half of the Ovitz story. Michael Ovitz was president of Disney for fourteen months under Eisner and left in acrimony; Iger arrived from ABC in the same period and eventually got the job Ovitz never did. Two memoirs, one institution, two men who could not have been less alike. Read them in either order.

And read it now rather than in 2019, because the ending has changed. The book closes with a man preparing to hand over. He did — to Bob Chapek in 2020 — and the board removed Chapek inside two years and asked Iger back. He returned in November 2022 and stayed until this spring. The most valuable thing in the book turns out to be everything it says about succession, tested against what actually happened next.

Key takeaways

• Buy the culture, not the catalog. The Pixar rationale was that Disney could no longer make what Pixar made. The library was the smaller part of the purchase.
• Decide with incomplete information, then commit. Iger's account of the Fox negotiation is a study in moving before the picture is complete.
• Leave acquired companies alone. He is explicit that the discipline after the deal mattered more than the terms of it.
• Curiosity is an executive function, not a personality trait. Iger treats it as a working obligation — which is why he is one of the most credible voices on Brian Grazer's book, also covered here.

Meet the author

Robert Iger joined ABC in 1974 and rose through the network over twenty-two years, arriving at Disney when the company acquired Capital Cities/ABC in 1996. He became Disney's president in 2000 and its chief executive in 2005, succeeding Michael Eisner.

Across that tenure he acquired Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Twenty-First Century Fox, and launched Disney+. He stepped down as chief executive in 2020, remained executive chairman through 2021, and retired — briefly. In November 2022 the board removed his successor and asked him to return, and he ran the company for a second time until March 2026.

The Ride of a Lifetime, written with Joel Lovell, was published by Random House in 2019 and became a substantial bestseller. It was written during the first departure, which is the fact that makes it worth rereading now.

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The Ride of a Lifetime

Bob Iger

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