23rd Annual Business Leadership Celebration Keynote (2014)

The University of Washington Foster School of Business welcomed Robert A. Iger, chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, as the keynote speaker during the 23rd annual Business Leadership Celebration.

In his keynote conversation, Iger shared his essential traits of a great leader: curious, optimistic, focused, fair, thoughtful, decisive, risk-taking, courageous, innovative, and a perfectionist to boot.
In Q&A with ABC News correspondent Cecilia Vega, Iger embarked on an entertaining meander of topics, ranging from his humble start at ABC four decades ago (when his myopic first boss declared him “not promotable”) to the great leaders who influenced him (including Roone Arledge, Tom Murphy, Michael Eisner and Steve Jobs). He recalled the risk he took to bring “Twin Peaks” to the small screen and the even larger risk that Walt Disney took to bring “Snow White” to the big screen. He noted successful Disney acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm (for a total price tag of more than $15 billion), and shared a laugh at his folly in greenlighting “Cop Rock,” a short-lived TV police musical in the early ’90s. And he celebrated the Disney’s historically successful first animated feature directed by a woman—Jennifer Lee’s “Frozen”—and historic construction of the company’s largest castle ever for Disneyland Shanghai.