No. of Recommendations: 4
I agree with you. I thought ISS and Egan-Jones made some good points regarding board dynamic and the prior mess with succession planning. It is Iger's greatest failure.
However, I don't think that it logically follows that these two director candidates are appropriate to fix this problem.
I don't have a large Disney position, but I have one. My thesis for DIS is the long tail value of their content is enormous. They are able to produce ROI on content they produced almost century ago. It is a small position for me, however, because I view this ability as extremely fragile.
Steve Jobs was an interesting person. Great in some ways and flawed in other. In this case, what he said in
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-why-... applies:
It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.For personal reasons, I've personally followed the Boeing issues for some years now. It's another case where a product led company may end up destroyed by shortsighted people who don't really understand their business. Disney's secret sauce is consistently producing great product over decades and decades. They are like the Berkshire Hathaway of great content, and could be destroyed by bad management just as easily.
The idea that Disney could have Netflix-like margins is crazy talk. Netflix won't have Netflix-like margins for that much longer. They capitalized on an extremely favorable Starz deal for a long time, and succeeded in becoming a default monthly expense for a number of people. But their original content track record is awful outside of House of Cards, Stranger Things, Bojack, and a few others. Imagine what a Netflix version of Disney world would look like. Would parents pay hundreds of bucks for Neflix cruise? Netflix on ice? Netflix has been on the monthly expense chopping block in my house for a long time, it will be the first things to go if we need to cut expenses.
Sorry, I've gone on far too long. I think Disney has problems, but nothing that that schmuck Peltz and the other guy can fix. Peltz couldn't even handle Wendy's.
