Michael Eisner Quotes

I find that no matter how long a meeting goes on, the best ideas always come during the final five minutes, when people drop their guard and I ask them what they really think.

I gravitate toward the team thing. I'm not a golfer - I much prefer basketball.

Content has always driven the business. Now it's no longer the queen to a king of distribution; it is the king, king, king, because the consumer has complete choice.

21 years as CEO is a long time. I was and probably still am the longest serving CEO in America. Certainly I am in the media industry, bar none.

Privacy laws are our biggest impediment to us obtaining our objectives.

Fear of failure is a far worse condition than failure itself, because it kills off possibilities.

Well, when you're trying to create things that are new, you have to be prepared to be on the edge of risk.

It is rare to find a business partner who is selfless. If you are lucky it happens once in a lifetime.

I don't think individual achievement in business is the most meaningful way for it to operate.

You just have to make sure the model you're working on does not undersell your product.

I always went into an area that was in last place, with a philosophy, 'You can't fall off the floor.' And I was lucky, was at the right time and the right place, with the right ideas, and each one of these areas became number one.

To this day, I fondly recall the challenges of building a fire, pitching a tent, climbing a New England mountain, canoeing on a lake. Camp songs still resonate inside me. Competition exists at Keewaydin, of course, but nobody fails summer camp, a nice respite from winters of fortune and misfortune at school.

There's a fine line between what would characterize you as a troglodyte and what would characterize you as a brilliant, avant-garde, forward-thinking genius. There's some middle ground.

The company should be run from a creative point of view rather than a financial point of view.

I find that, once you get into a position where you can afford a pair of shoes and a decent level of living, success in itself is empty.

A decision will be made before it's too late or soon thereafter.

You either play by the rules, change the rules, or get out, altogether.

Eventually the consumer will come to appreciate the editorial point of view of every different brand. User-generated content without editorial oversight will simply be background noise.

Creativity can flourish within sensible financial limitations.

If it's not growing, it's going to die.

We all know that the Disney brand is our most valuable asset. It is the sum total of our seventy-five years in business, of our reputation, of everything that we stand for.

To punish failure is yet another way to encourage mediocrity.

I'm not sure I was a typical head of a company. Most people that run big companies come out of sales and they come out of marketing and they're quite serious and they have MBA's from very good schools and things like that. I'm an accidental CEO, thank the Disney Company.

Management is not a science, it is an art.

Recovering from failure is often easier than building from success.

Nobody has a bigger cult than Warren Buffett.

Many people you think are individual achievers in fact have either a strong spousal partner over many years or a business partner who's either in the background, not given enough publicity or less egocentric.

Television is very much like the motion picture; you need high-end product that will first go on broadcast or cable and eventually on the Internet, and then the lifespan of this content being distributed worldwide.

The movie business has always been like the wild-catting oil business. Everyone wants a gusher.

If you make something good, eventually the audience will be there, eventually there will be something on the Internet that is a cultural phenomenon that's not available anywhere else, that's not available on television broadcasts, that's not on cable, it's only on some Web site. And the world will find it. And when that happens, it will be what the 'kiss' was to the theatrical movie business, 5,000 years ago or whenever it was.

The whole business starts with ideas, and we're convinced that ideas come out of an environment of supportive conflict, which is synonymous with appropriate friction.

Graduate school is a place to hide for a couple of years.

It doesn't matter whether it comes in by cable, telephone lines, computor, or satellite. Everyone's going to have to deal with Disney.

There's no good idea that cannot be improved on.

I remember the first time we stood in this spot. We were on the deck of a boat in the middle of what was then Penny's Bay, envisioning what could be, what would be, what will be. Six years later, through our dream partnership with Hong Kong government, the creative dream is now a reality. Hong Kong Disneyland stands before us as a living symbol of the creativity and imagination that are the heart and soul of Disney.

In every business, in every industry, management does matter.

My best idea was to not accept my wife's negative reaction when I asked her to marry me.

User-generated content is not done by professionals. The best user-generated content eventually becomes those people gravitated in the professional world.

The only thing that gives [new technology] purpose is the kind of creative content we all produce.

Balanced emotions are crucial to intuitive decision making.

I think when you get inured with the past, you get committed to the past, you stop growing.

My strength is coming up with two outs in the last of the ninth.

We cannot escape that Hollywood is in the middle of a wave of technological change. The current angst over all the implications of new entertainment technology is nothing new.

Failure is good as long as it does not become a habit.

Diversity is a great force towards creativity.

When I read biographies, I'm only interested in the first few chapters. I'm not interested in when people become successful. I'm interested in what made them successful.

A brand is a living entity-and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.

I grew up Jewish. I am Jewish. I went to an Episcopal high school. I went to a Baptist college. I've taken every comparative-religion course that was available. God? I have no idea.