Newly crowned Walt Disney Co. CEO Josh D’Amaro won over the board by demonstrating a combination of a keen strategic mind, ability to make decisions and “good personal values.”
“He checked a lot of boxes,” Disney Chairman James Gorman told TheWrap. He described D’Amaro as a “polymath in abilities.”
D’Amaro’s appointment capped off a multi-year search for Bob Iger’s successor, and Tuesday’s announcement marked a smooth transition process for Disney. In addition to D’Amaro taking the reins, Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden will assume a new role as president and chief creative officers. Both assume their new positions on March 18.
Gorman, who successfully led his own succession process after an 18-year run as Morgan Stanley’s CEO, broke down the process behind CEO search and why D’Amaro came out on top.
“What impressed us about Josh is he’d obviously had great experience running a huge part of the company. I would put that in the necessary but not sufficient bucket. Some people interpret that as, ‘all that matters is parks,’ but that’s ridiculous,” Gorman explained. “You want somebody who has run a related business to what you do. You’ve got to be fit for the kind of business that you’re running and he demonstrated that. But he also demonstrated an innate curiosity about all the changes taking place in gaming, in AI, in studio production, an ability to tell stories.”
He added that D’Amaro “really understands the importance of storytelling and IP,” touting the expansion of Disney’s theme parks across the globe, including its plans to open a new theme park in Abu Dhabi. “Now he’s got to learn how to be a CEO,” he said. “He’s a polymath in abilities would be the way I describe it and I think the board was super impressed by that.”
Read on for the rest of TheWrap’s conversation with Gorman below.
In conversations with Josh and Dana, what came up as the biggest priority and biggest challenge the new leadership team has to face?
The two immediate challenges we’ve had the last couple of years were one, get the company back, stable, fit for purpose, address the streaming lack of profitability issue, figure out how we’re going to respond, at least in initial days, to AI, and how that’s changing parts of the industry, etc. Bob Iger did that.
The second challenge was get the internal team ready for prime time and prepare them and give them best shot for these leadership roles, which he did, and we ended up going that direction after considering, by the way, a lot of different options, a lot of different people. As a committee, we went to the four corners of the Earth. By the way, the number of people who are to be considered is longer than the line of the tourist busses in New York City. Everybody thought they could be CEO of Disney. The problem is, you’ve actually got to be CEO of Disney when you’re appointed. These jobs aren’t so simple.
There were the challenges. The stock’s cheap, it’s trading 15 times earnings. This deal with OpenAI is very interesting. We’re obviously committing $60 billion of capital to parks and cruises. I’ll let Josh lay out his plans when he gets there, but there is unlimited opportunity of this company, we have unbelievably good buzz.
In addition to elevating Josh D’Amaro, you also promoted Dana Walden to president and chief creative officer. Can you talk about the decision to give her that title as opposed to making her a co-CEO?
Boards are generally not fans of co-CEOs. You want a decision maker. There’s stuff that happens and you need a clear decision maker. Somebody’s got to be accountable. Sometimes co-CEOs work, but very rarely. They’ve been used and they tend to get used when there’s also an executive chairman, but not always. I would say it’s an organizational structure that is more likely to be challenging in getting decisions made and compatibility of personalities. I’m not saying it can’t work, there’s cases where it’s worked, but in many cases it hasn’t.
Dana is a wonderful executive and obviously comes out of a key business, the TV business, the entertainment business. She also has great creative instincts. She’s a great decision maker. She’s very connected across the industry. Dana’s a power and I think she’ll be enormously helpful to Josh.
Every CEO needs a team that works well with them. When I was CEO [at Morgan Stanley], I had presidents to work with me and give me some leverage and help supplement some of the areas I knew less well and give time to grow into them. She’s going to be great. The essence of Disney is making magical experiences and we want to focus on that across the whole of the company, bringing the best of our creative talent to the whole company, so that’s why she was given that broader role.
Some people might take the decision to elevate Josh D’Amaro over Dana Walden as a sign that the growth in the company is on the parks and experience side while the content side has been experiencing so much difficulty figuring out the streaming business model, transitioning, competing with short form and YouTube. Is that the signal or is it more about the personal qualities of one candidate versus the other?
Just strategically, that’s very simplistic. The power of what Disney has with its seven studios, with ABC, what we have with ESPN, what we’ve done with [Disney+], with Hulu, and the relationship with Epic and the partnership with OpenAI — if somebody doesn’t think those things are important and a massive competitive advantage, they don’t understand the industry.
They’re different but related businesses, the intellectual content and storytelling flows between both. It’s not a factor of favoring one over the other whatsoever. We’re blessed to have, at scale, two huge businesses, in addition to the best sports franchise in the world, ESPN, and take advantage of both of them. The decision on this was not a judgment on strategy. The board has to make decisions on picking their leadership team and that’s what we did.
