Hello, dear readers!

Bob Iger spent two decades and roughly $90 billion turning Disney into the most valuable storytelling machine in history. He also turned himself into something more dangerous: a single point of failure. As he lines up his final exit, his third, Hollywood keeps asking whether his successor can fill his shoes. That’s the wrong question. Below, I dig into the one we should be asking instead.

I also look at why so many smart, capable people are hopeless at the one skill that quietly decides everything else: choosing what to work on. It isn’t laziness or bad tools. We’re simply wired to finish things, even the wrong ones.

Plus: OpenAI turns its security models loose on the world’s codebases, Google keeps bleeding talent, China inches up the AI rankings, and the “zombie unicorn” stalks Silicon Valley. And finally, a big thank you to all who sent me heartfelt notes on the 100th issue. Your feedback and encouragement is what keeps this labor of love moving forward!

Let’s get going.

Industry Highlights: Disney’s Indispensable-Man Problem

Walk through Disneyland with Bob Iger and the problem comes into focus. Fans run up every few yards for selfies. One tells him to run for president. Another mistakes him for his successor, Josh D’Amaro, and Iger laughs: “They think I am Josh! He is going to love that.”

Charming moment. It’s also the whole issue in miniature. When a company spends twenty years letting one man become its face, its conscience, and its brand, what happens the day he finally walks out?

As D’Amaro told the Financial Times this month, “To a great extent, Bob was Disney.” That’s meant as a compliment. Read it again as a risk disclosure.

The $90 Billion Architect

Give Iger his due, because the record is staggering. Since 2005, he has spent roughly $90 billion pulling Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and most of 21st Century Fox into Disney’s stable, plus close to $100 billion more on the parks. Revenues tripled. The share price rose fivefold by 2020, easily beating the S&P 500.

He picked three priorities in his first weeks: quality content, technology, and theme parks, then spent twenty years ticking them off with a discipline most executives never manage. (Hold onto those three; they return in the next section.) The deals ran as much on charm as on strategy: he won over Steve Jobs, George Lucas, Ike Perlmutter, and Rupert Murdoch one handshake at a time. As Steven Spielberg put it, no one in the business has ever had such back-to-back-to-back success. Which is exactly what makes him so hard to replace.

The Long Goodbye

Here’s the part the highlight reel skips. This is Iger’s second time stepping down, and the first was a disaster. In 2020, he handed the title to Bob Chapek but kept the executive chairman role, creative oversight, and, tellingly, the office with the private shower.

The setup was unstable from day one, and Covid made it worse. Inside of “10 months and three weeks,” as Iger pointedly puts it, the two Bobs were barely speaking. Chapek was fired in a 2022 boardroom coup. Iger came back, reversed nearly everything, and launched a $6 billion cost-cutting plan that wiped out 7,000 jobs.

Sit with what that tells you. The most accomplished media executive of his generation tried to engineer his own succession, and the company nearly came apart. The failure wasn’t Chapek’s alone — it was structural. You cannot cleanly remove the person an entire organization has been built to orbit. When the leader is the brand, the handoff isn’t a transition. It’s a transplant, and the body keeps rejecting the new organ.

The Concentration Trap

The brand isn’t the only thing dangerously concentrated. Theme parks now throw off roughly 60% of Disney’s profits, up from a time when studios, TV, and parks each chipped in about a third. Iger signed off on D’Amaro’s $60 billion parks investment in 2023, and they’re once again money machines. But a company leaning that hard on one division, however lucrative, has a thin margin for error.

The studio tells the same story. Disney topped the 2025 global rankings with a $6.58 billion box office, yet that sits below pre-Covid levels, and this year’s slate is almost all sequels: Toy Story 5, Avengers: Doomsday, The Devil Wears Prada 2. Streaming finally turns a profit, but its margins are nowhere near Netflix’s.

Activist investor Nelson Peltz spent 2023 and 2024 pushing for exactly this: fatter streaming margins and a hard look at the conglomerate sprawl. Iger beat back the proxy fight and kept ESPN and the news networks, arguing they’re worth more inside the company than out. He may well be right. But “trust me, it’s worth more together” is precisely the judgment that walks out the door with the man who made it.

The Real Threat Isn’t Succession

And here’s the uncomfortable backdrop. Netflix and YouTube now dominate how people watch. Paramount is reshaping Hollywood’s power base with megadeals. AI is raising questions about how content gets made that, in Iger’s words, “few in the town have the answers for.” He’s sanguine, betting the artist will always have it over the algorithm. Maybe. But he won’t be in the building to test it.

The Bottom Line

The lesson of Iger’s long goodbye isn’t really about charisma or deal-making, impressive as both were. It’s a governance lesson hiding inside a Hollywood story. Disney’s IP is a real moat. Its dependence on one irreplaceable executive is a structural flaw, and the two are not the same thing.

D’Amaro’s job isn’t to be the next Bob Iger. It’s to make sure Disney never needs one again. Pull that off, and the most valuable thing Iger leaves behind won’t be Marvel or Star Wars. It’ll be his own redundancy.

The Future of Work: Too Many People Are Shockingly Bad at Prioritizing

Notice what Iger and D’Amaro have in common. Iger ran Disney on three priorities for twenty years. D’Amaro’s first memo to staff laid out exactly three, two of them lifted straight from Iger’s 2005 playbook. That’s no accident. Choosing a few things and ruthlessly ignoring the rest is the rarest executive skill there is, and almost nobody has it.

Work, as a recent Bartleby column in The Economist puts it, is really a string of decisions about what to prioritize: how to allocate capital, which bets to back, which numbers actually matter. And the evidence says we’re terrible at it. Not for lack of frameworks, but because of how we’re built.

Take an experiment by Timothy Ballard at the University of Queensland. Participants chased two competing goals for cash. Even when finishing one paid the same as finishing both, and chasing both made it likelier they’d get neither, they tried to do everything anyway. We’re so hooked on completing things that we can’t make ourselves quit. Being the 400th person to review a document adds nothing, but at least you have an achievement to your name.

Organizations are no better. Many pile up so many priorities they hit what the column calls the “peanut-butter problem”: attention spread so thin that nothing gets enough. When Niels Christiansen took over as Lego’s CEO, he found the company tracking “100 key enterprise risks.” His response: “How can you look after 100 different risks without being risk-averse on everything you do?”

The frameworks aren’t the issue. The Eisenhower matrix sorts tasks by urgency and importance. Product teams use RICE and MoSCoW. Google’s 70:20:10 rule splits resources across the core business, adjacent bets, and the genuinely new.

Picking a framework is the easy part. Two harder disciplines decide whether any of it works. The first is communication. In a 2017 study, MIT’s Donald Sull asked senior executives at 124 companies to name their firm’s strategic priorities. In the typical company, only about half the leadership team agreed. Half. If your own executives can’t name the same top three, your frontline has no chance, and I’ve sat in enough leadership offsites to tell you that gap is the norm, not the exception.

The second discipline, which almost everyone skips, is stopping. To prioritize a new thing, you have to deprioritize an old one. In The Octopus Organization, Amazon’s Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner argue for hard rules to cancel work: predetermined “go/kill” points and “kill criteria” that trip an automatic stop. The language is a little martial, but the instinct is right.

So here’s the usable version for anyone running a team. Prioritization isn’t a list. It’s three verbs: choosing, communicating, and stopping. Most managers do the first, fumble the second, and never attempt the third. Want to know if your priorities are real? Don’t look at what you started this quarter. Look at what you killed.

AI Insights

• OpenAI / Daybreak: OpenAI’s new defensive stack GPT-5.5-Cyber (85.6% on CyberGym, up from 81.8%), a patch-drafting Codex plugin, and an open-source “Patch the Planet” effort with Trail of Bits aims to move security teams from endless findings to actual fixes, backed by pacts with eight countries and the EU. It’s the most useful framing of enterprise AI I’ve seen all year; patching at machine speed may quietly become table stakes.

• Google’s brain drain: Within days of each other, Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI and AlphaFold Nobel laureate John Jumper left for Anthropic, triggering Alphabet’s worst single-day slide in over a year. Google can buy compute and ship models; the dozen-odd researchers everyone is trying to poach are the input it can’t.

• China’s quiet climb: Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2 now trails only Anthropic’s Fable 5 on front-end coding benchmarks, and founder Tang Jie expects parity before year-end, well ahead of Elon Musk’s Q1 2027 guess. The story isn’t the ranking; it’s that the gap is now measured in months, not years.

The Supply Aside

📕 Read - The Let Them Theory

This whole issue is about the cost of trying to control everything: Iger orbiting Disney, managers who can't stop, leaders who won't delegate. Mel Robbins wrote the pop-psychology version, and it's sold by the millions. The pitch fits on a Post-it. When people judge you, leave you out, or do things you'd never do, let them, and put your energy back on yourself. The idea is old, since the Stoics were teaching it two thousand years ago, but Robbins makes it stick, with the same warm, no-nonsense delivery that turned her podcast into a global sensation. Read it for the one discipline this issue keeps circling: most of what drains a leader is effort spent on what they were never going to move.

What Else I’m Reading

• The rise of the “zombie unicorn” (The Economist): A new creature stalks Silicon Valley, the once-billion-dollar startup that’s now a husk of itself. By May 2026, 332 of the 1,900 unicorns in Stanford researcher Ilya Strebulaev’s database had raised money at or below their peak. Cameo, worth $1 billion in 2021, is estimated at $82 million today. Pitchbook expects net cuts of up to $1 trillion as these firms reprice, sell, or fold.

• Work from home refuses to die (The Wall Street Journal): Despite a relentless drumbeat of return-to-office mandates from Home Depot, Microsoft, and JPMorgan, the data has barely budged. An average of 26% of paid full days were worked from home in May, down a hair from 27% two years ago and well above the 7% in 2019. Stanford’s Nick Bloom flags the tell: firms with younger CEOs allow far more remote work. As the old guard retires, expect more flexibility, not less.

• How bosses psych themselves up (Bloomberg Businessweek): Thirteen executives on winning the room before the big moment. F1 Academy’s Susie Wolff reframes the jitters: “Butterflies in your stomach can actually become a superpower.” But restaurateur Malcolm Wood’s line is the one I keep chewing on: “Adrenaline is what you reach for when you haven’t done the work; preparation is what lets you stay quiet when it counts.”

📺 Watch - World War II with Tom Hanks

Eighty years on, the Second World War remains the most defining conflict in human history, and this landmark series reexamines it through the lens a new century. Twenty hours across twenty episodes, narrated and produced by Hanks with the National WWII Museum, it runs from the rise of fascism to the fall of Berlin, with new episodes Mondays at 8/7c. Given Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, Hanks is about as credible a guide as the genre has

👂 Listen - Acquired: Disney, Plus

The perfect companion to this issue’s streaming thread. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal dissect Iger’s defining bet: walking away from billions in Netflix and pay-TV licensing cash to build a direct line to the customer through Disney+. It’s the clearest account of why Disney swallowed years of thin streaming margins on purpose, and why that wager still hangs over the company D’Amaro inherits.

🧠 Think: Philosophy's Revenge

For years, philosophy was the punchline. The degree ambitious parents dreaded, and employers politely ignored. Everyone wanted computer science instead. Then AI showed up.

Suddenly, philosophy graduates are being hired by companies like Anthropic to teach AI how to reason, weigh tradeoffs, and wrestle with questions that don't have clean answers. Turns out machines are very good at producing answers. They're far less capable of deciding which questions matter most.

That's the real shift. For decades, we rewarded people for accumulating knowledge. AI is rapidly commoditizing that advantage. The scarce skill is judgment. Context. First principles thinking.

In other words, knowing how to think instead of simply knowing what to think. Knowledge is becoming abundant, but judgment remains scarce.

Charts of the Week

The Supply Times Analytics: Observe the widening chasm between public frustration and economic anxiety. When state-level underperformance eclipses price-hike worries by such a staggering margin, the boardroom response is predictable: a strategic retreat into defensive asset preservation.

The Supply Times Analytics: Observe the widening chasm between public frustration and economic anxiety. When state-level underperformance eclipses price-hike worries by such a staggering margin, the boardroom response is predictable: a strategic retreat into defensive asset preservation.

The Supply Times Analytics: The massive US healthcare spending gap ($14,885 per capita) underscores why employee health optimization is the next necessary frontier for enterprise procurement and cost control.

Quote of the Week

Tweet of the Week

The Final Chuckle

Thanks so much for reading. I’d love to know what you think about this issue and how I can make it more useful to you. If you have suggestions or topics you want to see me address, email me at [email protected]!