A Ride of a Lifetime Reads Like Walking Along Squeaky Clean Main Street in Disney Land
A Ride of a Lifetime is Bob Iger’s autobiography as a CEO of Walt Disney corporation. It hits the expected high notes of his career: a career that took him from ABC television to Disney, and during which he oversaw the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox. As a business book, it obligatorily spells out Bob Iger’s ten leadership principles. Although they were a bit generic: be optimistic, strive for excellence, focus, have high integrity, etc.
One of the surprises reading the book was his close relationship with Steve Jobs, after the acquisition of Pixar.
ChatGPT summarizes the book as
“Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company” is a memoir by Bob Iger, the former CEO of Walt Disney. In the book, Iger reflects on his journey leading one of the world’s largest media and entertainment companies. He shares stories of challenges and successes, detailing key decisions and their consequences, including the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox. He also covers his philosophy on leadership, innovation, and corporate culture, offering insights into the strategies that helped him steer Disney through rapid technological changes in the media industry. The book is both a personal account of Iger’s tenure and a broader exploration of the challenges facing businesses in the 21st century.
The book, released in 2019, comes across as a prelude to a potential presidential run. That run may never come now that Bob came out of retirement and returned to Disney at the age of 71, replacing his successor Bob Chapek. The book reads like walking along squeaky clean main street in Disneyland: an optimistic story with little controversy or true conflict. There were a few tough times nevertheless, such as the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando or the death of a toddler at DisneyWorld. Of course, as an autobiography, you can expect some of the unflattering parts will be left out. Especially, if, while writing it, you may be contemplating a run for the US presidency.
I wish there was a bit background about what didn’t go so well in his career. ChatGPT reminds me of several controversies he faced during his tenure as CEO of Walt Disney, that didn’t come up in the book: executive pay, ESPN layoffs, political donations, treatment of James Gunn (the fired director of the Guardians of the Galaxy). I am not necessarily looking for a backstory on every controversie. I was looking for his experiences as a leader or executive when things were more messy, periods of uncertainty or when he doubted himself.
Bob does explain how he approaches every challenge as a problem or puzzle to solve. Yet, his puzzle solving comes across as a perfect trajectory: and then I did this, and, while I didn’t think it would not necessarily work, it did. Sprinkle some Disney Magic and voila.
Regardless, I loved reading the book. His writing and verbal communication style in interviews is simple, precise, and clear. I like his style. It is also a style befitting a statesman and US president.
February 5, 2023
A Wet January Meant a Slow Start to the Training
January started slowly with only a few rides, while dodging the rain drops. Overall, I worked out for almost 14 hours, completed 28 workouts of all sorts, completed 5 rides (125 miles), and broke 71 personal records. I am getting stronger.
The team is also nicely coming together. I read that almost 40 of the South Bay Blaze will participate this year in the ride to Los Angeles. 
Not only do we ride together, there was a great team showing at the South Bay happy hour and the NorCal AIDS/Lifecycle Expo in San Francisco. The Expo was a great place for newbies to learn about the ride and to get some free gear, donated by Pedal It Forward. I got a lot of great training jerseys and cold weather gear.
The team bicycle clinic was amazing with a lot of tips, tricks, and gear to fix and maintain the bike. I got most of the missing gear since from Amazon. I also learned how to deal with tubeless tires.
Also the fundraising is making good progress. I raised a tad over $3000, well on my way to the $3500 to push my ticket to Los Angeles. Thank you to all my sponsors; your money is going to a great cause.
February 3, 2023
ALC2023
Don’t Mess With the Garvey Sisters
Although Apple TV+ has a more limited offering than other streaming services, the quality appears to be consistently high.
In the midst of the pandemic, it was Ted Lasso who made us smile and made us believe. The show put Apple TV+ on the map. The Morning Show was a strong second course. We became regulars with For All Mankind, Physical, Acapulco, and Surface. Most recently, we were awaiting the release of new weekly episodes of Slow Horses, the dark English spy series.
Yet, no show has elicited more reaction in our household as Bad Sisters. A recreation of the Flemish TV show, Clan, the show is about the Garvey sisters’ attempt to help their sister in her marriage to John Paul. We all felt a deep and growing hatred towards John Paul and wanted him to die, soon.
It is now common to hear my daughter shout out ”You mad bitch! or ”Hug me, you cow”. Yet, we are forbidden by my wife to call her ”Mammy”. Apparently, a second season of the Garvey sisters is on the way.
January 14, 2023
Bob Iger Should Give John Stewart a Conkrite Audience and a Will McAvoy Mission.
I’ve been a fan of Bob Iger and admire his communication style. The Eisner era was full of troubled waters. When Bob Iger took the rudder, he steadied the pirate ship.
Now that he is back at Disney, after a short Chapek hiatus, it is now also clear he is not going to run for president of the United States. Many have suggested he would have been a great candidate. Instead, he is going to sunset at the happiest place on earth, (in a parallel universe from the Desantis’ Florida.)
The Disney conglomerate includes ABC and ABC news. So, if Bob Iger isn’t running for president, he does still have an opportunity to make a big impact on the US democracy by fixing news.
To do so, he will need to be a bit more daring than World News with David Muir. Those shows appear heavily sanitized, and then run one more time through a bleach bath for good measure. The news needs to be a bit more hard hitting and critical.
And I know just the person who Bob should be hiring - assuming he is willing to rock the boat a bit, and not be as concerned about the squeaky clean Disney image. John Stewart.
This video might as well been a job interview. It is part of a bigger Apple TV+ segment on The News is broken. John Stewart clearly has evolved from the Comedy Central jokester to a hard hitting journalist.
Let’s give John Stewart a bigger forum, a Conkrite audience, and a Will McAvoy mission.
Make no mistake. This will not be a profitable endeavor. Yet, with a few good truly altruistic donors, it will be a dent in democracy mission. It will have a bigger impact on the US and the world than any presidential run.
January 8, 2023
Essay
The Age of the Essay is one of my favorite reads recently, even though it was written almost ten years ago. It describes what an essay should all be about.
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called “essais.” He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out. Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.
Growing up we rarely had to write an essay. Our writing assignments were more infrequent than the writings my kids had to produce throughout high school and university. I can’t even recall the papers I had to write in university, beyond my thesis on the design and implementation of an ISDN Power Fail Unit for a Private Automatic Branch Exchange (PABX), to be used in emergency situations. Writing essays and papers is something quite popular in the US educational system and I applaud it.
I’ve been spending a lot more time writing in recent years in a professional setting. I am not in marketing, publishing, nor do I make a living writing. I use it to better my thinking and to be more a succinct and clear communicator. I ask questions and try to answer them.
The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn’t do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea. The river’s algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can’t have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course. This doesn’t always work. Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall. Then I do the same thing the river does: backtrack. At one point in this essay I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of ideas. I had to go back seven paragraphs and start over in another direction. Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought– but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts. It would be exhausting to read. You need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator inking over a pencil drawing. But don’t change so much that you lose the spontaneity of the original.
Asking questions and meandering through potential answer appears natural to me. However, my struggle with my writing has been capturing a surprising ending, or at least a surprise of some magnitude.
Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
David Sedaris does this brilliantly. What starts as an ordinary page out of his journals, blossoms into an amazing, surprising, shocking or sometimes embarrassing ending.
The pressure of discovering something new, being contrarian, describing a funny insight, or just ending with a surprise, can be paralyzing. Not every river leads to the discovery of a hidden city, and just boringly flow into the ocean. The challenge is to keep being on the lookout what happens on the banks of the river or under water. I’ll keep essayer.
January 7, 2023
Podcast Spring Cleaning
A quiet time on the beach, over the holidays, allowed me to clean up my podcast list. Some downloaded episodes had been collecting digital dust for over a year.
Here’s the list of the podcasts I am listening to - mostly while doing chores or training on my bicycle. Ideally a podcast is 30-40 minutes long. The Huberman Lab podcast needs its own podcast Huberman Lab Summarized. With episodes of over 3 hours, they are really lectures more than a podcast.
Business and Tech Industry
- Founders
- Securities
- My First Million (my favorite podcast)
- Pivot
- Work Life
- The Indicator
- MIK+One
Health
- Maintenance Phase
- Huberman Lab
Sports
- De Tribune (VRT Max) (in Dutch)
Culture
- This American Life
- The Problem with Jon Stewart
News
Comedy
- Wait wait don’t tell me
- Netflix is a daily joke
Exploring
I haven’t made up my mind about a few recently discovered podcasts:
- Invest like the best
- Slow Burn
- What you will learn
- Where it happens
- Zoe Science and Nutrition
- Life Made Simple
Need
I am looking for some more sub-30 minutes comedy podcasts. I am also in need of way to easily save podcast time stamps. “Hey Siri, note this podcast time stamp”.
January 1, 2023
Prediction
Mathieu van der Poel is not having his best last 12 months. Sure, there were a few big wins: Dwars door Vlaanderen, a stage win in the Giro d’Italia, the Grand Prix de Wallonie and of course the epic sprint battle to win De Ronde van Vlaanderen. Clearly not a pannekoek.
Yet, the Tour de France was not a success. He crashed severely in the Olympic Game mountain bike race. He sabotaged himself at the World Championship in Australia. And he has been falling short during the cyclocross season to beat Wout van Aert.
Wout van Aert however has been riding another banner year: Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, E3 Saxo Bank Classic, Paris-Nice stage win, Criterium du Dauphine wins, an amazing Tour de France for himself (stage wins and the green jersey) and for the team (yellow jersey). Great cyclocross wins against Mathieu van der Poel and Tom Pidcock.
Wout has been growing steadily over the past years, whereas Mathieu has stagnated. So what’s been going on?
My theory is that is boils down to the team. Wout has been surrounded by a great Jumbo-Visma team with a scientific sport approach and where the team prevails over the individual.
On the other hand, Alpecin-Fenix team from MvdP, has been fighting above its weight class for several years. They are a small wonder of a team. Yet, they can not compete with the likes of Ineos or Jumbo in budget and staff. Combine that with the fact that Mathieu is their primadonna star, who can dictate his individual desires over the team goals.
Mathieu needs a change, a reset.
The news that Jumbo supermarkets are not doing so well in Belgium may just bring that.
It is not a secret that Jumbo-Visma wants to build the best team with Dutch riders, just like Rabobank many years ago. They already invested in a younger generation to train the next Dutch Tour winner. With Dylan Van Baarle, Jumbo added a big Classic rider to their ranks this year. Van Baarle came in second in De Ronde this year and won Paris-Roubaix.
My prediction is that Mathieu will join Jumbo-Visma in the coming 1-2 years, and that Wout van Aert will jump to Quickstep. Jumbo wants that all Dutch team. Patrick Lefevre needs the Classics wins in spring.
December 30, 2022
It has been two weeks since my last doomscrolling session. I am on a Twitter detox.
Twitter Detox by Dall-E
Daily I would spend on aggregate one hour scrolling through my Twitter feed, being amazed, laughing, and getting annoyed. And yet, I believed I was learning, staying up to date with the tech world, and gathering “information”. After all, the folks I followed were journalists, tech leaders, thought leaders, contrarians, and a few jokesters.
I would also share my brilliant thoughts and insights. I was engaged with the public town square.
The fun ended when my Twitter feed became mostly about Twitter and Elon Musk. The outfall from Elonjet and the hypocrisy from first amendment absolutist Musk was the proverbial drop. I am not quitting Twitter. I still hold hope. I am taking a break. I deleted the application from my iPad and my iPhone.
As with many detox sessions, the immediate results feel amazing. I recuperated some time to read a book or do something productive. Every once in a while you need to leave the town square and go on vacation.
Luckily, I could end with a high note:
December 30, 2022
Thank You!
What started as a desire to ride my bicycle with others has evolved into something much bigger. Last year, I joined the South Bay Blaze on rides in the Los Gatos and Woodside mountains. The South Bay Blaze is a bicycling group designed to provide strength and support to all those training for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s AIDS/LifeCycle ride: 545 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles in support of services and people with HIV and AIDS.
I rode many times across Mount Eden, Kennedy Road, and to the top of Alpine. Oh, did I suffer! I stopped for water at Robert’s market a plenty and know every bump of Foothill Express Way. We went all the way South to Morgan Hill and to the top of Alum Rock park. Jamie led us on so many nice roads.
But June 2022 was already booked for me with a trip to Belgium. I missed out on an epic 2022 AIDS LifeCycle ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
As if I needed more inspiration, the ALC 2022 SBB video pushed me over the top. I committed for the ALC ride in 2023!
I joined the SBB Hot Summer Street training rides and continued on the 30-milers in the fall. I am ready for the spring training rides. I will be ready to ride all of the Lake Tahoe perimeter, our final ride before heading to the main course.
With the help of many donors, I am also already well on my way to “punch my ticket” to LA. Fundraising is new to me. So thank you, thank you, thank you! I have a small bit to go. So if you want to contribute to a great cause, check out https://giving.aidslifecycle.org/participant/JanVanBruaene.
I am finishing 2022 with over 1600 miles in the saddle and over 54,000 ft in elevation gain. Let’s toast to many more miles in 2023!
December 29, 2022
ALC2023
Literary Fiction Has All Kinds of Benefits in the Workplace
One of my favorite interview questions is to talk about a recent book you have read. When hiring, I am looking for a curious mind and someone who is always learning.
The answers often surprise me. I often hope to hear something in the realm of management, business, or technology.
After listening to a recent episode of the Securities podcast, I am expanding beyond the obvious fields.
In the podcast, New York City professor Anne-Lisa Cohen, talks about the benefits from reading literary fiction. Non fiction is all about acquisition of knowledge. It is formulaic and often follows simple structure. Literary fiction on the other hand forces us to follow a more complex narrative. It makes us take the perspective of others, sometimes less favorable actors. Those two elements, being more open minded and lowering the need for simplicity, make us better decision makers.
Professor Cohen also mentions about the exposure to literature on the need to closure. People who have a high need for closure, want to make a decision quickly, based upon a few data points. On the others hand, a low need for closure is related to contemplating alternate viewpoints and sifting through information. Literary fiction leads to lower need for closure.
So Kafka, both Apache and Franz, are great answers to the question about a recent book you’ve read.
December 19, 2022