The Ride of a Lifetime
Robert Iger spent forty-five years working his way from a weatherman job at a small ABC affiliate to the chief executive office at the Walt Disney Company. His memoir uses that arc to lay out a working theory of leadership built from real decisions rather than slogans. He walks through the negotiations behind the Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox deals, the launch of Disney+, and the relationships with Steve Jobs, Ike Perlmutter, and George Lucas that made each acquisition possible. The book is structured around a short list of leadership principles, including optimism, courage, decisiveness, and fairness, that Iger returns to as he tells each story. It became one of the most read business memoirs of its decade.
What you might want to know about The Ride of a Lifetime
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Disney CEO Robert Iger looks back on his career, from ABC sports trainee to the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Fox.
Chesky tweeted that Iger's book is one of the most useful CEO memoirs he had read and pointed friends and founders to it as a practical guide to leadership at scale.
Both. Iger uses the Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Fox stories as case studies for a short set of leadership principles he returns to throughout the memoir.
The Ride of a Lifetime was written by Robert Iger, published in 2019 by Random House.
The Ride of a Lifetime is 272 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Ride of a Lifetime takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
The Ride of a Lifetime is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.