Lobbing Bob bombs.
Photo: Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images
This town (Orlando) ain’t big enough for the both of them (Bob and Bob). Less than a month since the publication of ousted Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s memoir, Behind the Castle Walls: My Thirty Years at the Happiest Place on Earth, the ouster-er himself, Bob Iger, has announced a book of his own: One Last Time: Managing Crisis and Building Resilience at Disney. In case you’re getting your Bobs in a knot, Iger was CEO from 2005 to 2020 and Chapek took over until 2022, at which time the board insisted that Iger be brought back to reassume the title of HBIC (Head Bob in Charge).
“This is a comeback story,” Iger said in a statement. “It’s about what Disney needed to find its way back to its core values and what that journey taught me about leading in a time of unprecedented challenge and change.” As Penguin Random House put it in the book’s press release, Iger “returned to a company facing not just disruption, but a constant drumbeat of all-consuming crises — a permanent crisis that required Iger to learn new lessons about leadership and resilience.” In other words, Iger is saying that Chapek left the place a mess.
It is hard not to read this announcement like the Disney C-suite version of competing diss tracks. In Chapek’s book, he wrote that Iger left Disney in 2020 because he didn’t want to deal with COVID and continued to meddle throughout Chapek’s brief tenure. Like Mulan defending her family’s honor or Simba returning to Pride Rock to govern, Iger had no choice but to bob and weave in response with a Bob-on-Bob Burn Book of his own. One Last Time, which Penguin insists is “never boring,” will be out on March 2, 2027, and will be written with the aid of Dan Schwerin, the guy who helped Hillary Clinton write What Happened? Current CEO Josh D’Amaro should thank his lucky stars he doesn’t have a dog Bob in this fight.
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