Disney has been a brand in decline, to say the least. Bob Iger, it can be argued had a great tenure at Disney early on but then his ego, his hubris, and his surrendering to woke nonsense has run the company onto the rocks.
It’s taking on water and, like the dog in the burning room, keeps saying “This is fine.”
But is a Disney shake up coming?
According to CNBC, Disney will name Bob Iger’s replacement in 2026. In January, former Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman will replace Mark Parker, former Nike executive chairman in January.
Nike of course has been run into the ground through cost cutting and woke nonsense as well.
It seems though these board members and chairmen are simply playing musical chairs.
Disney has tapped James Gorman to replace Mark Parker as the company’s next chairman, effective in January, as the media giant lays the groundwork to name a successor for CEO Bob Iger in early 2026, the company said Monday.
Gorman joined Disney’s board less than a year ago and was named the head of the succession planning committee in August. He will continue to lead that committee after he takes over as board chairman from Nike Executive Chairman Parker.
So it appears this has been the play since last August if we are talking about succession planning. So what does the future hold?
Disney had initially targeted 2025 to announce a successor, as CNBC reported last year. Pushing the date back to early 2026 will give the board more time to conduct due diligence on both internal and external candidates, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private.
Gorman has experience with succession planning: He oversaw the orderly transfer of power at Morgan Stanley, with Ted Pick succeeding him as CEO there at the start of this year.
Succession hasn’t been smooth at Disney. The board fired Iger’s handpicked successor, Bob Chapek, in November 2022 after a turbulent tenure that lasted less than three years. Iger returned to the CEO job, and now, Disney shareholders are eager to see a succession plan stick.
So we’ll see! One of the issues I’ve seen across all companies, and I think Disney in particular, isn’t just the proliferation of “woke” but also of the mercenary executive.
These “leaders” aren’t Elon Musk or Steve Jobs who, for all their faults, have a passion for making a product.
These executives are part of the dull witted managerial class whose sole purpose is profitability.
They will not make better shoes, they will send the manufacturing of said shoes to China to make inferior products with slave labor. But look at our stock price!
Nike has just provided us with another case study. Because the product life cycle in fashion is much faster than it is in airplanes, it took only years, instead of generations, to cripple a great company. When John Donahoe became the CEO of Nike in 2020, he was the company’s second-ever outsider CEO. Donahoe had been the CEO of eBay and Bain but – critically – he had no history in shoes, or sporting goods, or even in fashion.
This article goes into more details of how out of touch the CEO was with their core products, not even knowing what their branding actually was.
He slashes sales teams and R&D, shifts sales from retailers to their own stores and boosted numbers in the very short term to the detriment of long term viability.
He laid off hundreds of marketers who had an intimate knowledge of Nike’s customers, intending to replace them with data driven insights. Product creation shifted from sports to demographics (instead of a department focused on creating products for basketball, it would have one creating products for men, like Zara, Gap, H&M, or any other generic fashion brand.)
This is the product of a smooth brained dullard who managed to parlay what little talent he had at crunching numbers to destroy a company.
The article also outlines the failure of Hertz Rent-A-Car who, with woke at their side (like a religion), turned Hertz into an EV rental company with perfectly predictable results to us regular people not on the woke mindvirus and have to live actual consequence driven lives.
At the center of the Hertz debacle was its poorly thought-out commitment to electric vehicles. With Scherr at the helm, Hertz acquired 60,000 EVs, with a goal of putting over 300,000 into service.
A CEO who understood his product and his customers would have understood what a calamitous mistake Hertz was making. Mr. Scherr, however, was not such a CEO. Customers didn’t want to rent the EVs, counter agents struggled to lease them, and make-ready crews struggled to keep them charged and road-ready.
Anyone think this cabal of midwits will finally put Disney on the right path? Do you see anyone among them a visionary like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, or old Uncle Walt himself?
Of course not.
These are risk-adverse, cost conscious, worshippers of the political cult. To be fair, they’d worship whatever cult that might be if Blackrock told them to. They have no real beliefs or philosophies of their own.
We’re being run by a bunch of Patrick Batemans.