Many of my clients are women of color. I’m lucky that they trust me to help elevate their voices and get them the attention they deserve. I do currently have one white guy as a client, and he’s a joy to work with, too. I don’t discriminate! But there’s a trend I have noticed over the years. We white guys are a lot more confident when it comes to taking credit for our work.
Why does that matter? Because in America, getting attention is how you get promoted. People with power need to notice your impact and talk about it amongst each other. Those people tend to read the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. They tend to look like I do.
Yes, efforts are under way to disrupt these dynamics and widen the talent pipeline. They’re important and I support them. But the truth is, if you’re working towards any cause, it’s less important what exactly you’re doing. It’s more important that you understand your impact and know how to take credit for it. I always say that if you don’t do that, you’re selling your cause short. You need to be more confident in your impact and be more comfortable advocating for yourself. Otherwise, it will be more challenging to raise money and you’ll fail.
I’ve recently finished reading The Ride of a Lifetime, Bob Iger’s account of his ’05-’20 tenure as CEO at Disney. It’s clear from the book that he worked hard and became an astute navigator of internal politics. He also credits his 4 a.m. workouts and “reflection time” as part of that, which I don’t altogether buy. Who can get up at 4 a.m. to “reflect”!? His family life gets scant mention, and one senses he didn’t have to do much childcare. Then I Googled Mr. Iger, and found a self-evaluation he’d written in 2019. It was part of a presentation to the board to lobby for his $47.5 million pay package at the time.
Reading Mr. Iger’s self-evaluation, I was struck by the need for more of my clients to do something similarly glowing. More of us would benefit from a mirror on the wall that reflected us back to ourselves in the same light. If you’re listing your major achievements today, how do they stack up? Where are you selling yourself short? And ask yourself: What if I thought about myself as Bob Iger did, in his 2019 self-evaluation, when he was asking his board for fifty million bucks?
The interesting thing about the evaluation is that it doesn’t lie. It just goes all-out on the positives. It talks about launching Disney Plus. It highlights the rise in share price of the company as a result, from $116 to $148. It mentions the $50 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox. It says the company’s studio generated more than $10 billion in box office. It includes this line: “Avengers: Endgame was the biggest film in history.”
None of those are self-effacing statements. Mr. Iger knew that it was time to take credit for his company’s impressive achievements and get paid. He was the one to drive the Marvel acquisition. He was the one to buy Pixar and set the company’s animation operation back on the path to success. In 2019, the company reported net income from continuing operations of $10.4 billion. It came from gross revenue of $69.6 billion, up 17 percent from the previous year. To my mind, improving net income by 17 percent is remarkable. If I paid myself the same percentage of net to gross income as Mr. Iger got, I’d earn a salary of two hundred dollars a year. If anything, I’m arguing for him to earn more money. Not less.
Now, though, Disney’s stock is down to $102. The board fired Mr. Iger’s handpicked successor and he’s back in charge. He’s said a few things in public since then that seem to blame the ‘interim’ CEO for the stock’s tumble. But he’s hardly gone out there and said, “you know what, guys? I picked a dud. And I’ve pretty much run out of good ideas.”
He’s not one for knocking himself, in other words. Still, if you’d invested money in Disney 20 years ago, it’d be worth about the same as the rest of the stock market is, today. In other words, you could have stuck your money in an index fund and got the same results. Meanwhile a dollar invested in Nvidia the year Donald Trump got elected would be worth $125 today. So, one wonders why Mr. Iger is credited with incredible leadership insight. In many ways he was a competent man in the right place at the right time.
Self-promote like a white guy. That should be the title of my upcoming book.
