Overview
Scores of books have been published about business, but rarely has a CEO as prominent as Michael Eisner of The Walt Disney Company written so intimately about his life and work. In Work in Progress, Eisner describes the daily challenge of a rapidly changing marketplace, countless creative choices, painful setbacks, and dramatic triumphs. For more than 30 years, Michael Eisner has lived and worked at the center of American popular culture. At ABC, as a young executive, he helped bring to life shows such as Happy Days and the miniseries Roots. As president of Paramount Pictures, he was responsible for films ranging from Beverly Hills Cop and Raiders of the Lost Ark to Terms of Endearment and The Elephant Man. As chairman of The Walt Disney Company for the past 14 years, he has orchestrated the transformation of a beloved but struggling company into a multimedia giant in movies, television, radio, theme parks, theater, and even cyberspace.Having spent his life helping other people to tell stories, Eisner now tells his own -- with humor, insight, and unstinting honesty. He recounts such significant events as the extraordinary revival of Disney's animation business and the negotiations for one of the largest acquisitions in corporate history - Cap Cities/ABC - which began in an Idaho parking lot. He is just as forthcoming about the early struggles of Disneyland Paris and the fierce opposition that finally helped to derail Disney's America. Blending the personal and the professional, he tells the stories of the tragic death of his partner and closest confidant, Frank Wells; his own emergency quadruple bypass surgery; the high-level personnel changes that followed; and the emergence of a new generation of young leaders at Disney. Throughout Work in Progress, we watch Eisner grappling with the often paradoxical choices that he faces each day in managing a creative company. What is the proper balance between art and commerce, tradition and innovation, short-term profit and long-term growth, pragmatism and excellence -- the company's good and the greater good? Like no other business memoir, Work in Progress is a riveting tale of high-pressure life at the top--an ongoing drama about risking failure and surviving success.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewMichael Eisner's career has spanned 30 years of popular culture. So his autobiography, Work in Progress, serves as a window on the decision making behind many of this generation's popular television and motion picture creations. It also chronicles the spread of the Walt Disney Company from theme parks to retail stores to the Internet to Times Square.
Growing up on New York's Upper East Side, Eisner learned from his mother how to charm people into doing what he wanted and inherited from his father a trait for not cutting corners. A family man in Hollywood, he serves as both chief executive officer and chief creative officer of the company he's led since age 42. His hands-on style extends to active participation in the 'anything goes' brainstorming sessions known at Disney as 'Gong Shows.' He's not too proud to 'stoop for excellence,' Disney parlance for bending to pick up the trash from the ground at a theme park.
The executive's drive for creating things 'bigger, better, faster, and cheaper' is coupled with a childlike wonder at the company's output. Eisner expresses a soft spot, for instance, for the theatrical version of Beauty and the Beast and confesses to sneaking into the balcony for weekend matinees and 'sharing the enchantment' with the sea of children seeing it for the first time.
For me, there will always be something special and intensely personal about 'Beauty and the Beast'. In many ways, it represented a homecoming — the closing of the circle. I'd grown up with theater in New York. When I took my first job, I left theater behindandfollowed the audience to movies and television.
Interwoven throughout the book are Eisner's feelings about his brush with death during a 1994 emergency bypass operation, which occurred just months after the death of his close confidant and executive partner Frank Wells, who was killed in a helicopter crash.
Don't expect dish. Eisner covers the highly publicized executive fall-outs with Jeffrey Katzenberg and former Creative Artists Agency chairman Michael Ovitz. But the book ignores, for instance, any treatment of the astronomical severance package Ovitz collected just one year after being hired as president of Disney.
Eisner and his co-author, journalist Tony Schwartz, who also co-wrote Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal, devote a separate chapter to each of the developing Disney enterprises. The end result is an impressive body of work.
Although Disney and its recent acquisition, Capital Cities/ABC, have seen better times, the fact is that in 1984, the company's revenues were billion and $98 million in net income. In 1997, revenues reached $22 billion, and net earnings were nearly $2 billion. The company's market value jumped from $2 billion to $75 billion, and the stock price increased thirtyfold. That's not Mickey Mouse.— Laurie Petersen