5 Leadership points

Jeremy Connell-WaiteJeremy Connell-Waite • Following • FollowingGlobal Communications Designer 👁️🐝Ⓜ️Global Communications Designer 👁️🐝Ⓜ️

A simple 3x5" record card helped Bob Iger to become CEO of Disney, Barack Obama to get elected, Steve Jobs to take on IBM, and JFK to write better speeches.

When Bob Iger was in the running to become the CEO of Disney in 2005 the board didn’t want to elect him. Some people thought he was a lightweight and represented too much of a carbon copy of former CEO Michael Eisner.

So Bob worked with Scott Miller who had previously helped Steve Jobs to mount an “insurgency campaign” to battle IBM in the 1980's.

Their strategy was to write a “stump speech” which contained all the reasons why Bob was the best candidate for the job, and then summarise it onto a 5x3" record card which Bob took everywhere with him.

The 6 statements Bob wrote on his record card became the foundation of every conversation he had during his leadership campaign:

1. Our job is to find the magic, wherever it is in the world.
2. We must restore our relationship with young families and especially young moms.
3. We must stand for family fun.
4. We must restore our relevance for and relationship with teens.
5. We must be agnostic about how our customers consumer our information / entertainment.
6. We must restore the quality of the Disney brand.

You can read about the full strategic process in Miller's “The Leadership Campaign” or read Bob’s take on the campaign in his autobiography “The Ride of a Lifetime”. Both excellent reads. 📚

Next time you are running a campaign of your own – a pitch, a presentation or a promotion – maybe start by writing down what differentiates you from everyone else, and what you want to stand for 5x3” record card? 📝

⬇️

"If you can't explain something simply, you don't know it well enough". Steve Jobs favourite Einstein quote 🖍️

⬇️

“That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.” Walt Disney 🎬