Michael Eisner
Strategic Concepts & Mechanics
Primary Evidence
"One day I ran into Michael Eisner on the set of one of our game show pilots. He headed up daytime at ABC. I asked him how he liked the show, and he noncommittally said, “Well, my wife liked it.” So I sent roses to Jane Eisner, with a card. Michael called me and said, “Do not agent my wife!” He was kind of angry about it—but that sort of stunt got my name out there, and Eisner and I soon became friends."
"Michael Eisner used to say, “micromanaging is underrated.” I agree with him—to a point. Sweating the details can show how much you care. “Great” is often a collection of very small things, after all. The downside of micromanagement is that it can be stultifying, and it can reinforce the feeling that you don’t trust the people who work for you."
"Barrier. The Barrier in Cornered Resource is unlike anything we have encountered before. You might wonder: “Why does Pixar retain the Brain Trust?” Any one of this group would be highly sought after by other animated film companies, and yet over this period, and no doubt into the future, they have stayed with Pixar. Even during the company’s rocky beginning, there was a loyalty that went beyond simple financial calculation. To illustrate: in 1988, long before Disney began its association with Pixar, Lasseter won an Academy Award for his Pixar short Tin Toy, prompting Disney CEO Michael Eisner and Disney Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg to try to recruit their former employee back into the Disney fold."
"Robert Evans was deep into his cocaine period, and you can see when you watch the movie today that every single person was glassy-eyed stoned. There’s so much false energy that you’d have thought we shot it at 33 ⅓ rpm and released it at 78 rpm. Jane and Michael Eisner and I were in Europe for a meeting with our international distribution company, and since the production was nearby in Malta, we thought we ought to go visit. They’d built an elaborate Popeye’s village there, and when we walked down into the harbor, it dawned on us that everyone in our made-up village—and I mean everyone!—was completely coked out. Keep in mind we were making *Popeye* in a coproduction deal with Disney—whose only concept of *coke* was the drink sold at Disneyland."
"We blew them out of the water with our much more adventurous and original cartoons, and the Disney Afternoon was soon toast. Then Disney, in malicious reaction, sued us in federal court for antitrust violations, saying we were an unfit broadcaster. They went for our very throat and tried to destroy us. It failed, but I didn’t speak to Michael Eisner for three years. So much for our own non-animated children’s games of friendly and brotherly competition."
"Soon after we turned down *Moment by Moment,* we thought we’d found the perfect film for Travolta: *American Gigolo.* John thought so, too, and agreed to star. But about a month before the cameras rolled, John went to Michael Eisner and told him he was grief-stricken over the death of his mother as well as Diana Hyland, his girlfriend, who had recently died of cancer at age forty-one."
"By the time I started, it was clear I wasn’t going to bring Michael Eisner with me, and because Disney was so alluring, Michael was able to get most of the Paramount executives over with him. I wasted weeks trying to convince them that Fox would be better for them, but by then Michael was able to show them that Disney had these extraordinary hidden assets that hadn’t been tapped since Walt Disney died."
"As part of his continuing education on the business, Larry Tisch traveled to Hollywood to meet the industry’s most successful enter' tainment executives—Michael Eisner of Walt Disney Co., Barry Diller, then CEO and chairman of Fox Inc., and Robert Daly, then chairman and chief executive of Warner Brothers Inc. These were the people who packaged and produced the programs that formed a network’s lifeblood. CBS, he recognized, needed the equivalent of a Grant Tinker and a Brandon Tartikoff. Tartikoff had developed the idea of “The Cosby Show,” which at that point was a major reason for NBC’s passing CBS in the ratings. Tisch wanted to know how they did it. He asked everyone who ought to know, unconcerned about the possibility of sounding ignorant."