Name: The Ride of a Lifetime
ISBN: 9780593170984

The Ride of a Lifetime

Robert Iger shares the lessons he's learned while running Disney and leading its 200,000 employees, and he explores the principles that are necessary for true leadership. Iger became CEO of the Walt Disney Company in 2005, during a difficult time. His vision for the future came down to three ideas: Recommit to the concept that quality matters; Embrace technology instead of fighting it; and Think bigger-- think globally. Here he shares the lessons he's learned while running Disney, and explores the principles that are necessary for true leadership. -- adapted from jacket

What Hacker News says

lansteinMar 2023

Advice to Founders and CEOs

- Dear Founder (Maynard Webb) - The Hard Things About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) - Straight Talk for Startups (Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman) - The Founders’ Dilemmas (Noam Wasserman) - The Entrepreneur’s Daily Nietzsche (Brad Feld and Dave Jilk) - Build (Tony Fadell) - Zero to IPO (Frederic Kerrest) - The Great CEO Within (Matt Mochary)

Finance

- Wharton's Introduction to Financial Accounting course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting](https://w... - How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers (Mihir Desai) - Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers (Karen Berman and Joe Knight)

Open-Book Company (Employee Ownership, Financial Literacy, Goal-setting)

- The Great Game of Business (Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham)

Legal

- Acceleration (Ryan Roberts) - The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Law and Strategy (Constance Bagley and Craig Dauchy)

Company Strategy and Direction (post-product/market fit)

- Crossing the Chasm (Geoff Moore) - Zone to Win (Geoff Moore) - Only the Paranoid Survive (Andy Grove) - Blitzscaling (Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh) - The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen) - Good to Great (Jim Collins) - Playing to Win (A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin) - Tape Sucks (Frank Slootman) - Strategy vol. 1&2 (Harvard Business Review)

Pricing

- Monetizing Innovation (Georg Tacke and Madhavan Ramanujan) - Confessions of the Pricing Man (Hermann Simon)

Startup Phase

- The Lean Startup (Eric Ries) - The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank) - Zero to One (Peter Thiel)

Management/Leadership

- The Effective Executive (Peter Drucker) - Managing Humans (Michael Lopp) - The Art of Leadership (Michael Lopp) - High Output Management (Andy Grove) - Managing Oneself (Peter Drucker) - Essentials: Management (First Round Capital) - The Making of a Manager (Julie Zhuo) - The Powell Principles (Oren Harari) - Radical Candor (Kim Scott) - Leading Matters (John L. Hennessy) (fantastic book list in the coda) - Turn the Ship Around (L. David Marquet) (this is THE book on delegation) - Principles (Ray Dalio)

COO/Succession Planning

- Riding Shotgun (Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles)

People Performance/HR/Culture

- Powerful (Patty McCord) - No Rules Rules (Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer) - Netflix culture deck - The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni) - Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock) - It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (DHH and Jason Fried) - The Culture Map (Erin Meyer) - The Talent War (Mike Sarraille and George Randle) - Great People Decisions (Claudio Fernández-Aráoz) - The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring (Ozzie Osman) - Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)

Purpose, Passion, and Self

- Start with Why (Simon Sinek) - What You Do is Who You Are (Ben Horowitz) - Drive (Daniel Pink) - Mindset (Carol Dweck) - Grit (Angela Duckworth) - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson)

Fundraising/VC

- Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Scott Kupor) - Venture Deals (Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson) - Raising Venture Capital (Andy Sparks) - The Business of Venture Capital (Mahendra Ramsinghani) - Done Deals (Udayan Gupta) - The Power Law (Sebastian Mallaby) - VC (Tom Nicholas)

Board

- Boardroom Excellence (Paul Brountas) - Startups Boards (Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani)

M&A

- Winning (Jack Welch) - M&A chapter - Connecting the Dots (John Chambers) - M&A chapter

Marketing

- Data-Driven Marketing (Mark Jeffery) - Positioning (Al Ries and Jack Trout) - Scientific Advertising (Claude Hopkins) - Traction (Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares) - Behind the Cloud (Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler) - Ogilvy on Advertising (David Ogilvy) - Marketing High Technology (William Davidow)

Psychology

- Influence (Robert Cialdini)

Negotiation

First, read Influence (under Psychology), then, in order

- Thinking in Bets (Annie Duke) - Getting to Yes (Roger Fisher and William Ury) - Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss) - The Bald Truth (David Falk)

Self

- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey)

Design and UX

- Creative Confidence (Tom Kelley and David Kelley)

AI (Machine Learning, Deep Learning/Neural Networks)

- Andrew Ng's AI for Everyone course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/ai-for-everyone](https://www....

Growth (Data Science, etc.)

- Hacking Growth (Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown)

Graph Theory

Product

- Inspired (Marty Cagan) - Joel on Software (Joel Spolsky)

Customer Loyalty/Customer Success

- Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh) - Setting the Table (Danny Meyer)

Finding a Startup Job

- Entering StartupLand (Jeffrey Bussgang)

CIO as ICP

- The CIO Paradox (Martha Heller) - Be the Business (Martha Heller)

Stories

- Made in America (Sam Walton) - Shoe Dog (Phil Knight) - The Everything Store (Brad Stone) - Built from Scratch (Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank) - Hard Drive (James Wallace) - Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson) - Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance) - Creativity, Inc. (Ed Catmull) - The Ride of a Lifetime (Bob Iger) - Valley of Genius (Adam Fisher) - The Idea Factory (Jon Gertner) - Dealers of Lightning (Michael Hertzik) - Idea Man (Paul Allen) - Pour Your Heart Into It (Howard Schultz)

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thenerdheadMay 2022

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen

Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins

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pchandaOct 2021

Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger is another which was a bestseller and also one I found rather insightful.

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rdliSep 2021

Some more details are covered in Bob Iger’s book The Ride of a Lifetime. It’s obviously about burnishing his legacy but if you’re a fan of Disney or the challenges of being a CEO at scale, it’s pretty good.

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enanDec 2020

For me it was:

* Exhalation by Ted Chiang

* Ride of a lifetime by Bob Iger was a close second

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wmoserDec 2020

Since you called out working on a container ship, a lot of these have a nautical bent but that’s an area of my personal interest as well.

Looking for a ship, John McPhee, Book about a sailor looking for work and eventually catching a ship.

Born A Crime, Trevor Noah, not about another career but Apertheid South Africa, I enjoyed it and wished I would have read it before traveling through S.A. For work.

Don’t Tell mum I work on the rigs, she thinks I’m a piano player in a whorehouse, by Paul Carter, read this one awhile ago but it’s about an oil well driller. The industry has changed quite a bit since this book was written but I remember really enjoying it.

Salvage: a personal odyssey by Ian Tew. I enjoyed this book about a a salvage master out of Singapore

The ride of a lifetime by Robert Iger, book about Iger’s journey to being CEO of Walt Disney Company. A bit of insight to what the company executives are doing/ supposed to be doing?

Quench Your Own Thirst, Jim Koch, the founder of the Boston Beer company. He discusses some of the mistakes he made along the way too.

Good clean fun, Nick offerman

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