We Thought We Knew Him: What Disney’s CEO Succession Teaches About the Cost of Overconfidence

Originally published on LinkedIn on September 25, 2026.

Key takeaways

The idea in this issue: familiarity is not independence. Knowing a leader for years tells you how long you have watched them. It does not tell you whether your view is free of your own stake in the answer. Before treating a long relationship as evidence, look for sources that would confirm it from somewhere else.

Most boards treat deep familiarity with a CEO candidate as an advantage. Disney’s experience suggests it should be treated as a warning sign.

In a Harvard Business Review interview published in September 2026, former Disney CEO Bob Iger explained why the company’s 2020 CEO succession was not as thorough as it should have been. His reason: “we thought we knew the person extremely well.”

The successor had spent decades at Disney, much of that time reporting to Iger. Iger says some weaknesses were known but were given less weight than they deserved, partly because of the push to finish the succession so he could step back.

It is a rare, candid admission from one of the most respected CEOs of his generation. It is also a clear case study in how capable, well-intentioned people can make an expensive decision about a leader on evidence that feels strong and is not.

From late February 2020, when Bob Chapek took over, to his removal in November 2022, Disney shares fell about 19% while the S&P 500 rose about 34% (Yahoo Finance).

The pandemic matters here. Disney’s parks made it more exposed than the average S&P 500 company, so not all of that gap belongs to the succession decision.

What is harder to explain away is the sequence at the end. In June, the board renewed its confidence for three more years. Five months later, it reversed itself. Confidence that can swing that far in five months was probably not resting on independent evidence to begin with.

Years of working with someone feel like a large body of evidence. In practice, it is one view, from one person, formed from one vantage point.

That vantage point has limits. A leader who reports to you shows you one side of themselves. You see how they manage up, not always how they manage down, across or under pressure no one has seen before. The longer you have known them, the more confident you feel, but the view itself does not get wider.

The person with the closest view also tends to have the largest stake. In Disney’s case, Iger has said the push to finish the succession so he could move on was part of why known weaknesses were given too little weight (WDWNT). That is not a character flaw. It is a normal human incentive, and it is exactly why the person closest to a decision should not be its only source.

This is the pattern I look for first: closeness is often mistaken for independence. They are different things. Closeness tells you how well someone can see. Independence tells you whether what they see is shaped by what they want.

The usual fix is to ask more people. That helps less than it seems, because more voices do not always mean more sources.

A voice is who told you. A root is where their view came from. Consider who a board typically hears from about an internal CEO candidate:

On paper, that can look like ten or twelve confirmations. Trace each view back to where it came from, and many lead to the same place: the outgoing CEO’s framing, or the candidate’s own account of themselves. Ten voices can rest on one or two roots.

This matters because agreement feels like proof. When eleven people say the same thing, no one walks out of the room uncertain. But if those eleven views share a root, the board has not learned eleven things. It has learned one thing, eleven times, and it has become more confident without becoming better informed.

So the question to ask before any decision about a leader is not how many people vouch for someone. It is how many independent sources there really are.

The removal of a CEO is the moment everyone remembers. By then, most of the cost has usually been paid, quarter by quarter, at a confidence level no one tested.

At Disney, that cost showed up in more than two years of lagging the market, and in a contract extension granted five months before the board reversed course. It also showed up in the reset that followed. In February 2023, Iger announced a plan to cut 7,000 jobs, about 3% of a workforce of roughly 220,000, as part of $5.5 billion in cost savings (CNN). Not all of that traces to the 2020 decision, since the whole media industry was cutting at the time. But a reset of that size is part of what an unsettled leadership question costs.

The same pattern shows up in private deals and investments that rest on one person. The loss is rarely booked the day the leader leaves. It is taken earlier, in decisions made while everyone felt sure:

None of these show up as a loss on the day they happen. Each one is a price set by the buyer’s confidence in a person. When that confidence is too high, the buyer pays too much, protects too little, and learns the difference only after the leader is gone.

That is why the time to test confidence in a leader is before the deal is priced, the extension is signed or the protection is waived. After the firing, the only thing left to decide is who explains what went wrong.

The same week Iger’s interview ran, Chapek gave his first formal interview since leaving and released a memoir, Behind the Castle Walls. He describes being undermined by his predecessor, including through Iger’s continued involvement in creative decisions (GuruFocus).

So there are now two detailed accounts of what went wrong. Each comes from a person at the center of the story, and each has a clear stake in how it is remembered. Neither is an independent source.

That is not a criticism of either man. It is the same problem, one more time. Accounts written after the fact are still voices with roots. A board or investor trying to learn from this case should weigh them the way it would weigh any interested party: closely, and never alone.

Chapek took over weeks before the pandemic closed Disney’s parks, a situation no succession plan was built for. He has also described working under a predecessor who stayed involved in creative decisions. A CEO can struggle for reasons that have little to do with the original choice.

So the lesson is not that the board picked the wrong person. It may have, or it may not have. The lesson is that no one can say for sure, because the confidence behind the choice was never tested against independent evidence. That is the part a board can control.

These apply to a board choosing or renewing a CEO, and to an investor underwriting a founder or management team.

Disney had every advantage a board could want: a respected outgoing CEO, an internal candidate with decades at the company, and years to plan. It still made a decision it later reversed, because the confidence behind it was never tested against independent evidence.

Most boards and investors will never face a decision that public. But the pattern is the same at every size. Before you price a deal, sign an extension or waive a protection, ask one question: how many independent sources is our confidence really based on?

If you are weighing a CEO, a founder or a successor right now, the free Source Map at gannett.partners lets you run this check on your own evidence in about ten minutes. Enter who told you what, and see how many of your sources are really the same source. Nothing you enter leaves your browser. And if you’d like to talk a situation through, I’m glad to.

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Chris Gannett is the founder and CEO of Gannett.Partners, a nationally recognized, Dallas-based firm that provides independent diligence on the founders and CEOs a business depends on. Boards, investors, sponsors and family offices use that work to price and protect the value they're betting on.