Former Disney CEO Bob Iger on What He Valued in a Successor After Chapek Ouster: Can They Deal With a ‘Real Crisis’ in ‘Reasonable and Sane and Steady,’ ‘Mature Way’

By Jennifer Maas

Jennifer Maas

TV Business Writer

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It’s no secret that former Disney CEO Bob Iger didn’t end up loving his first choice successor, Bob Chapek, following Chapek’s very public firing and Iger’s rehiring. But now that Iger has left the top post for good and handed over the reins to former parks head Josh D’Amaro, he’s got some specifics notes on exactly what made one a better fit for the job than the other.

“We had a process back in 2019 and ’20 when we chose my successor. Looking back, perhaps it wasn’t as thorough as we thought, in part because we thought we knew the person extremely well,” Iger tells Nitin Nohria, former dean of Harvard Business School, in an interview published by the Harvard Business Review Thursday. “He’d worked for the company for a very long time and for me directly. And we knew his strengths and we knew some of his weaknesses as well.”

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