Difficulty
Part of the issue I think some people are missing is the scope of the Walt Disney company.
Currently the CEO of the Walt Disney Company is in charge of:
- Six large theme parks
- A cruise ship line with it's own islands and ports
- A travel company
- Four streaming services
- A music label (or two?)
- Multiple movie studios, along with theatrical and home movie distribution networks
- Multiple cable and broadcast television networks
- Multiple advertising, merchandising and licensing departments
Along with a slew of miscellaneous properties - movie theaters, brick-and-mortar and on-line stores, book publishing, magazines...
How, exactly, do you manage something like this? What qualifications do you need as a CEO to run a company like this? The answer, in my opinion, is that it is unmanageable. It's far, *far* too large.
The single best example I can come up with is the god-awful video advertisement they did for the Star Wars hotel. Disney is the single largest media company in the world, and the advertisement for their ultra-premium hotel property looked like it was produced for community access cable TV. The one thing that Disney, as a whole, should be able to do competently is put together an advertisement. The fact that, apparently, the theme park division can't make a call to corporate and get help putting together a really nice video for their premiere hotel shows that something is broken in the Disney management structure.
The entire company needs a reorganization. Chapek was not the person to do it. I don't think Iger is the person to do it, either.