Michael Eisner Quotes

Failure is good as long as it doesn't become a habit.

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

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.

Sometimes you have to be worn out and burnt out to become authentic and original.

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

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

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.

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

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

Over time, the product we produce has been consistently successful here in America and around the world. Apparently, we are doing something right.

You can't succeed unless you've got failure, especially creatively.

Doing stuff that I don't have to talk about because I'm not in a public company is fantastic.

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

Management is not a science, it is an art.

A company that pays attention to the family unit is a successful company. We don't isolate the family. We don't make rides that say, 'Hey mom, dad, you go sit on the bench.'

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

Succeeding is not really a life experience that does that much good. Failing is a much more sobering and enlightening experience.

To punish failure is yet another way to encourage mediocrity.

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

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.

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.

There's no good idea that can't be improved on.

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

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.

Recovering from failure is often easier than building from success.

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.

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

If you're soft and fuzzy, like our little characters, you become the skinny kid on the beach, and people in this business don't mind kicking sand in your face.

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

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.

Years later, I found myself running
a network television division and then a
movie studio and now an entire entertainment
company. But, much of the success I've achieved
can be traced to the direct and metaphorical
lessons I learned in building those campfires.
I can hardly think of an aspect of my life
that wasn't positively affected by my camping
experience.

Nobody has a bigger cult than Warren Buffett.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Diversity is a great force towards creativity.

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.

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.

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.

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.