Michael Eisner Quotes

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.

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

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

We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.

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

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

To punish failure is yet another way to encourage mediocrity.

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

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.

Management is not a science, it is an art.

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

Recovering from failure is often easier than building from success.

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

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.

Diversity is a great force towards creativity.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The odds of being successful are the same for every group that is educated in America. It's just that the group that is not wealthy is 95 percent of the population. So if there are 100 successful people in a room, probably 95 out of 100 came from more modest means.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

If you're really good, you should express yourself...a lot.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Creativity can flourish within sensible financial limitations.

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.

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

Balanced emotions are crucial to intuitive decision making.

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.

Nobody has a bigger cult than Warren Buffett.