James Gorman is set to conclude his 18-year run at Morgan Stanley at the end of December, which has included finding his own successor at the bank. But he’s already getting serious about his next challenge: finding Bob Iger’s successor at Disney.
Gorman, who joined Disney’s board earlier this year and serves as succession planning committee chair, will take over as board chairman on Jan. 2, succeeding former Nike CEO Mark Parker. He has set “early 2026” as the timeframe for when the highly anticipated Iger successor will be named, which he says allows “ample time for a successful transition” before the Disney CEO’s contract expires at the end of 2026.
While the early 2026 timeframe doesn’t give Wall Street or Hollywood much clarity, analysts and corporate governance experts expressed confidence that Disney’s succession decisions are in strong hands based on Gorman’s track record with his own transition and his ability to bring independence and objectivity to the search process.
“His relationship with Disney and membership on the board is relatively very new, which could lead to less preconceived ideas or favorites,” Morningstar analyst Matthew Dolgin told TheWrap.
Gorman’s appointment was key to helping Disney defeat Nelson Peltz in its proxy fight earlier this year and quelling concerns about succession.
“He certainly has supported Iger’s position and suggested he would act independently and I think people believed him and that’s why ultimately they supported Disney’s slate,” Charles Elson, founding director of University of Delaware’s Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance, told TheWrap.
Iger, Gorman and the rest of the board are facing heightened pressure to make the right decision after the disastrous and short-lived tenure of Bob Chapek. They will have to find a chief executive that is not only prepared to uphold Disney’s reputation of creative excellence, but equipped to navigate the real-time evolution of new technologies picking up steam in Hollywood, in particular generative AI.
“Disney is in a challenging situation and having a leader that certainly understands entertainment and all the different businesses of Disney is important,” CFRA Research director Ken Leon told TheWrap. “Gorman may also look for someone that can also see things clear at 100,000 feet. You need someone who can be strategic and look at the overall enterprise.”
While Gorman’s will ultimately have to weigh Iger’s own input as one of many factors, the two-time Disney leader will likely have less of an influence on the process than in the past.
“It will not be a shut door to Bob Iger from the board, but it will be on a need- to-know basis,” Leon said. “This committee will be thoughtful and will look inside and outside the company for someone that can take Disney into the future.”
Who is James Gorman?
Born in Australia in 1958 as one of 10 children, Gorman began his career as an attorney in Melbourne. He rose to be a senior partner at consultancy Mckinsey & Co. before serving in various executive positions at Merrill Lynch.
He served as CEO of Morgan Stanley from 2010 to 2023 and chairman from 2012 to 2023. He’s been credited with growing the bank’s wealth management business and market share and helping it navigate the 2008 financial crisis.
Gorman also serves as a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, is chair of Columbia Business School’s Board of Overseers, and is a member of the Financial Services Forum, Business Council and the Business Roundtable. He also previously served as a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
“I like solving problems. I’m not interested in joining boards so I can attend board meetings and get paid for it,” he said during a 2023 interview on the “In Good Company” podcast. “It’s not about status or finance. It’s more about ‘give me a problem in a different industry I can work on.’”
Last October, Gorman played a key role at Morgan Stanley in identifying his successor after evaluating three candidates, who all ended up staying on at the bank after the decision.
“Each of them were great in running their own businesses,” Gorman said during the podcast. “But the job of a CEO is not how good are you running a business, it’s how good are you dealing with what a CEO has to deal with. You deal with governments, you deal with regulators, you deal with media, you deal with investors. You are the face of the company. Your personal judgment really matters.”
Gorman started working on identifying his own successor in 2010, during his first board meeting. He gave the board a short list of people he thought could succeed him, which was updated five years later to account for candidates that had retired. The actual evaluation process began in 2020. The board finally decided on Ted Pick.
“We tested them and we gave Ted and one of the others strategy to run,” Gorman said. “We gave Ted all of Global Technology to run. We took them to forums and situations and put them on TV and showed them what the job of a CEO is really like and saw how they move towards the flame. Some people retreat from the flame or the fight and some people move towards it.”
After deciding on Pick, Gorman recommended the board award all three CEO candidates $20 million to “show they were a team at the top of the company.”
Finding Iger’s successor
Under Gorman’s leadership thus far, the Disney succession planning committee has met six times in 2024 as it evaluates candidates both inside and outside the entertainment giant. As TheWrap reported last week, the four internal names under consideration are Disney Entertainment co-chairs Dana Walden and Alan Bergman, ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro and Parks & Experiences chief Josh D’Amaro.
Stefano Bonini, an associate business professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, believes it’s unlikely that an outsider would be handed the CEO job, given the intricacies and complexities of Disney’s business.
“It would be extremely hard to pull off the changes and the management of the complex problems that they have,” Bonini told TheWrap. “It’s a really balanced type of skill set, but I think that the most important one is knowledge of the company at this point.”
Disney’s next CEO will need to be able to balance business and creative acumen with navigating the political and regulatory landscape — a skill set that’s difficult to find in a single person, said Needham analyst Laura Martin. She was puzzled by the early 2026 timeframe, arguing that a decision needs to be made sooner rather than later.
“The timeline of this board is completely out of step with the rapid technological changes impacting the media business,” she told TheWrap. “You should get a new CEO now, when generative AI is only 12 months old, not 18 months from now.”
Though some remain skeptical that Iger, 73, won’t extend his contract beyond 2026, Bonini believes such a move is unlikely, emphasizing the need for “fresh blood.” He added that the mentoring process will be “very tricky” to navigate.
“Nobody knows what is going to happen in the next five to 10 years, but having someone who outlines at least a plan is much better than not having clear guidance,” Bonini said. “What you don’t want to project is the image of a company that has a CEO who is simply an extension of the past CEO.”
Gorman’s advice for CEOs
Gorman is no stranger to helping other CEOs, noting during the podcast interview that he always calls CEOs within a month or two of getting their job as a way of introducing himself and to offer advice.
“Most CEOs are insecure overachievers and they don’t want to admit to the fact that maybe they’re not as smart as people think they’re going to be or maybe they don’t know everything that people think they should know. So they feel compelled to be constantly wise from day one,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. There’s a lot you don’t know.”
His advice for CEOs is to have a clear and consistent vision for success.
“You can’t have strategic paths without knowing what the end state is you’re trying to achieve,” he said. “Sometimes you’re opportunistic. Do you buy this company or sell this division? Sometimes you’re driven by [whether] the markets are cooperative or they’re not cooperative. Sometimes you’re driven by the talent you have around you. So there are many different pathways, but the heart of establishing a strategy is understanding what it is you’re trying to arrive at.”
Gorman added that you have to be comfortable owning decisions and dealing with the consequences.
“You have to accept that if you’re going to make a lot of decisions, you’ll get some wrong. So I embrace failure. I say, ‘Well, of course, we got those wrong. We had to get something wrong. We’ve done 100 things’,” he said. “It’s part of moving a complicated organization forward.”
