One Last Time

Robert Iger was less than a year into his retirement when he got an urgent phone call from the chairperson of Disney's board: would he be willing to return to his job as the CEO? Finances were shaky, leadership was flagging, morale was dangerously low and the brand was tarnished. They needed him back.

It wasn’t going to be easy this time around. The entertainment industry was facing existential threats: movie theatres had suffered in the pandemic, traditional TV was fading, and audiences were moving, at alarming speed, toward streaming platforms and short-form content. It was harder to deliver profit, let alone growth. Legacy media everywhere was being split up, getting swallowed by other companies, or simply running itself into the ground. When Iger agreed to return, he did so with one goal in mind: to put Disney back on a firm footing. To survive, the company—and Iger himself—would have to become more resilient, innovative, and above all, creative.

Iger would also have to learn to be a new kind of leader, and he would be challenged in ways he never imagined. How do you lead through periods of adversity? How do you regain the trust of employees, customers, and shareholders? Iger would have to develop a new playbook, for a new era, and he would make his share of mistakes along the way.

One Last Time is the story of the sometimes bumpy, never boring journey to reconnect a great company to its core values, while building a new, lasting foundation in a highly disruptive and rapidly changing world.