Word: disneywar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...annual disney shareholders' meeting last week in Minneapolis, Minn., the hefty document that attendees were most eager to get their hands on was not an annual report. It was James B. Stewart's DisneyWar (Simon & Schuster; 572 pages), which chronicles how CEO Michael Eisner--who announced last year that he would step down in 2006--turned their pop-culture institution into a Tragic Kingdom...
Bookstores around Minneapolis' Convention Center reportedly did not have it in stock, which was one scrap of good news for Disney president and COO Robert Iger. A leading candidate to replace Eisner, Iger cannot be helped in his bid by his portrayal in DisneyWar as Eisner's beaten cur--a disrespected, whiny No. 2 with poor judgment, serving a CEO who wanted a nonthreatening deputy to "take all the s___" of running a company. And Eisner says more than once that Iger is unfit to take his job. Iger, he says, "can never succeed...
...this for Iger: at least he is not Eisner, who is to DisneyWar what Cruella De Vil was to 101 Dalmatians. Amazingly, Stewart--Pulitzer-prizewinning author of the insider-trading exposé Den of Thieves--had the cooperation of Eisner and Disney, having approached them in early 2003 to do a book on how Disney was adapting to the changing media world. Eisner granted him interviews; Stewart even wore a Goofy costume at Walt Disney World. But within a few months he had ringside seats as Roy Disney, nephew of founder Walt Disney, launched a shareholder revolt against...
...major events in DisneyWar are familiar: Eisner's fallings-out with lieutenants Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Ovitz, the turbulence at the acquired ABC network. But Stewart gleans fantastic fly-on-the-wall reportage from his inside access, interviews and Eisner's revealing notes and e-mails. Some of these incidents put Iger in a bad light just as the Disney board is considering CEO candidates. At the end of an argument between him and ABC chairman Lloyd Braun, Iger gets so agitated that he accidentally hits a waiter, who spills coffee down Iger's shirt. Not that Iger...
Last week's shareholder meeting ended quietly, but the nasty succession drama is far from over. Eisner calls the intrigue at Disney "Shakespearean," and Stewart likens the CEO to Lear and Richard III--though the literary comparison undeservedly puffs up DisneyWar and Eisner. A media leader squandering his company's worth, a tyrannical boss, a failure clinging to power--these are dog-bites-man stories that Stewart simply bundles up in a deliciously toxic, if underanalyzed, package. It's not a tragedy worthy of the Bard, but it is a lusty roll in greed and spite. In other words...
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