Work in Progress [antikvár]

Foreword By the time we gathered for our annual executives' retreat in the summer of 1993, Frank Wells and I had been at Disney for nearly a decade. We were enjoying success on a variety of fronts—movies, television, theme parks, and consumer products. It was tempting to keep doing things exactly the way we had. But rather than a sense of confidence, we felt a growing apprehension. The problem, we sensed, was that some of our executives were feeling not just complacent and self-satisfied but bored and restless. The business equivalent of the seven-year itch was setting in. I had been in this situation twice before—first as an executive at ABC, and then at Paramount. In both instances, I was part of the group who helped turn the companies around, but in neither case were the successes sustained. Now I was running a company that was prospering much as ABC and Paramount once had. It was our responsibility at Disney to prevent a slide—to survive success in part by continuing to risk failure. Writing a book, I suggested to Frank, my partner and Disney's president, might be one more way to keep our focus on the challenge at hand. If we committed our intentions to paper—and faced a deadline— we'd feel more compelled to implement significant changes, even if they proved unsettling to the company in the short term. A book was also a i X