Politics at Walt Disney

Under CEO Michael Eisner, Disney had acquired a tall bureaucratic structure and centralized decision-making structure. This had led to lowered performance. Eisner also had a bad relationship with Steve Jobs, who was the CEO and major owner of Pixar. As a result, Jobs threatened to find a new distributor for Pixar's movies when its contract with Disney expired in 2007. In 2006, Disney's board decided to act. Eisner was encouraged to become chair of Disney and to allow his handpicked successor, Bob Iger, to assume control of the company as its CEO.

Iger dismantled Disney's central strategic planning office, which was composed of several levels of top managers who were responsible for sifting through all the new ideas and innovations sent up by Disney's different business divisions. The result of cutting out these unnecessary layers in Disney's hierarchy has been that more new ideas are generated by its different business units and the level of innovation has increased. Disney's performance has improved steadily under Iger.

1. What are the various sources of conflict and politics that have plagued Walt Disney in the past?

2. Discuss how Iger used different conflict resolution and political strategies to solve these conflicts to make better use of the company's resources.