The DealBook Summit, hosted by The New York Times last week, featured some of the world's most influential business and political leaders. Their perspectives, although directed toward a general audience, offered glimpses into the minds of regulators and executives alike.
For CFOs, these insights provide guidance on how other leaders are addressing challenges their teams are facing.
Bob Iger, CEO of media and entertainment conglomerate Disney
Iger talked about Disney’s succession challenges, which led to him coming back from retirement. While doing his best to keep the details quiet of who may be next in line for his role, Iger did touch on reflecting on his succession process, adding that this time around, the process will be much more "robust."
"I'm not the only one who may consider the [Bob Chapek] hire a mistake; the board obviously had its issues with Bob. But, I've tried hard to conduct my own post-mortem, so as a company, we don't do it again, and we've discovered certain things we perhaps could've done better.”
“It's interesting, just like the vice president [Kamala Harris] was saying, there's not a job that really trains you for this job, and in many respects, that's the same with Disney too. It's a large, very complex company that is in the public eye all the time. There's interest in just about every sector of society, and it takes a certain type to not only compartmentalize when it comes to managing issues and problems; it takes a certain constitution, a tremendous amount of energy, and a tremendous amount of patience.”
Jensen Huang, CEO of the world’s largest smart-chip manufacturer, Nvidia
Huang highlighted the lessons learned from OpenAI’s executive debacle. As many companies push to make their own chips, Huang's three-decade-old company is expected to face challenges in the future. When asked about OpenAI’s situation, Huang provided insight on balancing building the business and the environment simultaneously.
“It brings to mind the importance of corporate governance. Nvidia is here thirty years after our founding; we’ve gone through a lot of adversity. If we hadn’t set up our company properly, who knows what it would’ve done. I think when you’re architecting an industry, you want to apply some of that wisdom to architecting a company [too].”
Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission
Lina Khan, the youngest in the highly coveted position of FTC chair, discussed what a win means to her and her team. As mentioned by the host, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Khan has developed a sense of fear among business leaders who are looking to conduct large mergers under her watch.
“We have a big job and limited resources. So, we have to figure out [how we] have the greatest impact on what we identify as some of the biggest problems. So, we are very focused on things like healthcare, food, and agriculture; [and] we’ve spent a lot of time talking to market participants, businesses big and small, to understand where their choke points are and what we can be doing.”
“The other big thing for us is to have an impact; we’re focused not just on bringing individual lawsuits but issuing rules. These are market-wide rules like non-competes, junk fees; I think the big picture for us is that the country knows that the FTC is in their corner, fighting for them against illegal business practices.”
Khan also added this when asked about how much of her business is about deterrence:
“As a law enforcer with limited resources, you want to promote deterrence. There are a few components of that. One is you need to be clear about the rules. Brightline rules that are making clear what is permitted and [what's not], so that’s why we at the FTC actually prefer those types of per se prohibitions rather than complex regulations that oftentimes favor incumbents over small businesses and startups.”
Jay Monahan, Commissioner of the PGA TOUR
Monahan spoke about his company’s merger with LIV golf, which received a tremendous amount of legal and public scrutiny, and had a serious impact on Monahan personally. Shortly after the deal was announced, Monahan took a leave of absence for mental health reasons. He spoke about how someone in his position was able to drive support to allow him to step away and get healthy.
“Listening to so many other people talk about their anxiety [and] depression, talking about the steps they took to get themselves right, that they’re [also] a work in progress, there are so many brave people that I’ve watched. To me, I recognized, I saw it as a strength that I was going to come back stronger. It was very clear that this was something I needed to do, and at that point in time, and it’s my nature, I wanted to make certain I was all in on this.”
“I [needed] to go and spend the time to learn about the mind, and learn how the mind works, and why my mind was the way it was. I had to get to a place where I learned the fundamentals on how to deal with it.”
David Zaslav, CEO of media and entertainment conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery
Zaslav talked about how to pay off his company’s massive debt pile, he had to step in and make important decisions like extensive layoffs and axing of projects, including the move not to release Batgirl.
“This is an incredibly exciting job, and there are a lot of great days. There are a lot of tough days [too]. I remember our first big layoff. It was brutal. But, Warner Bros. and Time Warner and even Discovery, these are companies that had never really been restructured for the future.”
“And so, we decided that we have to have courage; we have to figure out how to restructure these businesses for the future, and part of that was [saying] let’s take a hard look at Warner Bros and not just me, as a leadership team [and our subsidiaries] ‘What content is going to help us win?’ And we held on to all the content that we thought would be helpful to us. For the content that wasn’t, we made a strategic decision on, and it was difficult and painful, but I think it was the right decision for the company.”