GOOD GROOMING.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 04-OCT-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

In July, 1994, Michael Eisner, the C.E.O. of the Walt Disney Company, underwent emergency quadruple-bypass surgery. Just before taking him to the operating room, the doctors gave him a little time to talk to his wife and his sons. Among other things (including his wish to be buried aboveground), Eisner wanted to discuss who would succeed him as C.E.O. if something went wrong. The only candidates he could come up with were his friends Barry Diller and Michael Ovitz. There were no Disney executives on his list. No one at the company, he thought, was capable of taking his place.

This was, as Eisner later wrote in a memo, a "sad truth." He had been in charge of Disney for a decade, long enough, you'd think, for him to develop a crop of up-and-comers. Yet, by his own account, he had failed to do...

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