Robert Iger’s Excelsior Moment: A Short Book Review

There are certain things that you can’t learn by simply reading about them – kindness, empathy, listening, trusting your gut, etc. And it is these very things that self-help books and autobiographies of business leaders espouse. People often pick up these books expecting ah-ha wisdom, but it boils down to completely banal and cliched life-lessons that we’re all aware of. These lessons are a rite of passage and can’t possibly be understood or acquired by reading about them. There’s also the fact that individual journeys are more about luck and circumstance than anything else, and thus, force-fitting a bunch of generic leadership traits into a story about a leader’s rise to the top is in no way representative of how most of these journeys progress.