Outgoing Disney CEO Bob Iger says he wrote Josh D'Amaro a six-page farewell letter modeled on the presidential tradition, warning his successor about the weight of leading a 103-year-old company.
Iger, who officially stepped aside as chief executive earlier this year, sat down with Harvard Business Review for a wide-ranging interview published Thursday. He described borrowing from the custom of outgoing U.S. presidents leaving a personal note in the Oval Office desk for their successor, though his version ran considerably longer than the typical presidential one-pager. The Hollywood Reporter detailed the interview's key revelations, including Iger's candid reassessment of how Disney's board handled succession the first time around.
The letter, the admission of past mistakes, and a new framework for choosing leaders in what Iger calls an era of "perpetual crisis" form a tidy package. But they also raise a question that shareholders and Disney employees have been asking for years: why did it take a failed succession, a boardroom intervention, and a two-year encore for Disney to learn lessons that should have been obvious the first time?
Iger told Harvard Business Review he intended to keep the letter brief. It did not cooperate.
"I decided I would write my successor a letter and leave it in his desk, as we've heard Presidents of the United States have done recently. And I wanted it to be short. It ended up being six pages long."
The central theme, at least the portion Iger shared publicly, was a caution about executive influence, how quickly and sometimes unintentionally a CEO can reshape a company just by holding the title.
"One of the things that I did draft is be aware of how much influence you have over the company. You're inheriting a company that's 103 years old, and you think, well, maybe there's nothing that any one leader can do to change it or influence it."
Iger went further, framing the warning as a matter of institutional responsibility rather than personal ego.
"But be aware of the fact that you have enormous influence over it, and you can exert that influence quickly and sometimes almost inadvertently just by having the title. That there's a tremendous amount of responsibility. And I think if you are aware of the influence you have, then you act more responsibly, because you are aware of just how powerful that influence can be. It's just so important."
That advice reads differently when set against the backdrop of what happened the last time Iger handed someone the keys.
Iger first retired as CEO in February 2020, handing the role to Bob Chapek. By late 2022, Disney's board had grown so dissatisfied with Chapek's tenure that directors asked Iger to come back. The company never fully aired its internal grievances in public, but the reversal was one of the most dramatic boardroom interventions in modern corporate history.
In the HBR interview, Iger did not mention Chapek by name. He did not need to. His reflections on what went wrong with the prior succession were pointed enough to leave no ambiguity about whom he meant.
"Looking back, perhaps it wasn't as thorough as we thought, in part because we thought we knew the person extremely well."
He then offered a more specific concession, one that amounts to an admission that the board, and Iger himself, saw warning signs and chose to minimize them.
"I'm not suggesting that we discounted the weaknesses, but in our zeal to check a box with succession and enable me to move on, first as executive chairman and ultimately to leave, I'm not suggesting that we ignored some of the issues, but I think we discounted them a bit more."
That is a remarkable sentence from a man known for careful public messaging. Stripped of its hedges, it says: we knew there were problems, and we talked ourselves past them because we wanted the transition done. Disney's shareholders, employees, and theme-park visitors lived with the consequences of that impatience for more than two years.
Chapek, for his part, has a memoir releasing this month in which he reportedly gives his own account of the period. Iger's interview landed just ahead of that book, timing that may or may not be coincidental.
Iger described the criteria Disney's board used when evaluating D'Amaro as a direct product of the Chapek experience and the broader operating environment that followed COVID, streaming upheaval, and successive rounds of corporate restructuring.
"We now live in an age where I think this crisis is almost omnipresent. We live in a state of almost perpetual crisis, or an environment in which a crisis can occur almost on a very regular basis."
From that premise, Iger outlined what he believes modern CEO selection demands.
"Now, this is, in a way, hindsight, but I realize today that leadership needs to be capable of managing an environment in perpetual crisis. So what does that mean? I think it puts even more emphasis on stamina. It puts even more emphasis on someone's ability to, one, admit the crisis and deal with it, but never lose hope and optimism and balance that optimism and hope with realism."
He confirmed that Disney's board applied those standards directly to D'Amaro before making its choice earlier this year.
"But as we approach succession this next time around, choosing my successor this past February, we asked ourselves some of these very questions about that person. Is he resilient? Does he have the stamina? Does he choose a good team? Is he someone who can call it what it is, meaning we're in a real crisis, but then deal with it in a reasonable and sane and steady way, mature way?"
D'Amaro, 54, came to the CEO role after leading Disney's theme park division since 2020, a unit that the New York Post reported had crossed $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time under his watch. His chief rival for the job, entertainment co-chairman Dana Walden, was reportedly damaged by the public controversy surrounding Jimmy Kimmel's on-air suspension over comments about Charlie Kirk.
Iger's candor about the Chapek-era failure is welcome, as far as it goes. But the interview also reveals a pattern that should concern anyone who owns Disney stock or cares about the company's long-term governance.
Iger retired in 2020. The succession failed. He came back. He spent roughly two more years running the company, years marked by layoffs, early retirement packages pushed on executives, and a grinding effort to right-size the streaming business. Now he has stepped aside again, this time leaving a longer letter and a more detailed checklist for the board.
Whether the checklist is enough depends on whether D'Amaro can execute in an environment where Disney faces pressure on every front. The company has been betting heavily on direct-to-consumer streaming, including a push toward free ad-supported channels, while simultaneously raising Disney+ and Hulu prices past $21 a month for ad-free plans. Balancing those two strategies will test exactly the kind of crisis-management stamina Iger described.
Iger's six-page letter is a nice gesture. But Disney's shareholders might reasonably ask why the lessons it contains, be careful with your power, know your weaknesses, don't rush the process, were not self-evident before the company burned through a CEO, a boardroom crisis, and a two-year do-over to arrive at them.
Good succession planning should not require a sequel.