"Work in Progress," Michael Eisner Memoir, with Tony Schwartz, To Be Released by Random House; In Stores Sept. 24

Business Wire, Sept 24, 1998

BURBANK, Calif.--(ENTERTAINMENT WIRE)--Sept. 24, 1998--"Work in Progress," the long-anticipated memoir of Michael Eisner, CEO of The Walt Disney Co., goes behind the scenes to describe how one of the country's most creative executives uses a combination of fact and intuition to arrive at the decisions that enabled Disney to achieve one of the most remarkable financial turnarounds in the history of American business, growing from a company with profits of $100 million in 1984 to nearly $2 billion in 1997.

In the book, published by Random House, which will reach stores Sept. 24, Eisner offers rare insights into his highly acclaimed management style and recounts his triumphs and failures since taking over Disney in late 1984.

Eisner provides a candid account of his continuing career as Disney's chairman and CEO and describes in detail the thinking and negotiations that led to Disney's acquisition of Cap Cities/ABC, catapulting the company into its current position of leadership in worldwide entertainment.

He also details the early difficulties at the Euro Disney theme park near Paris; the failed attempt to build a historical theme park in Virginia; the tragic death of his Disney partner and confidant, Frank Wells; his own emergency quadruple heart bypass surgery; the high-level management changes that followed; and the emergence of a new generation of young leaders at Disney.

"My job involves juggling multiple roles and finding common ground between conflicting impulses," he writes. "I serve not just as a chief executive officer, overseeing a team that is far more creative than I will ever be. I'm a cheerleader but also an editor; an advocate for change but also a fierce protector of our brand."

The book traces Eisner's life and career from his comfortable New York boyhood to Denison University in Ohio, then to NBC television, where he worked briefly as a clerk. Later, at CBS, he was involved in the Saturday-morning line-up of children's shows. In 1966, he moved to ABC and worked his way up to responsibility for daytime programming, including soap operas, game shows, afternoon specials for older children and Saturday-morning children's programming. Later, he became responsible for prime-time programming and helped to develop shows such as "Happy Days," "Barney Miller," "Laverne and Shirley" and "Welcome Back, Kotter."

At ABC he forged a business relationship with Barry Diller, who in 1974 became chairman of Paramount Pictures Corp. Two years later Diller hired the 34-year-old Eisner as the studio's president. "I often functioned as the enthusiast and Barry as the skeptic," he explains. "If I tended to fall in love with projects, he looked instinctively for where they were likely to go wrong. As he once put it, 'I will focus on all the negatives, but with the comfort that Michael is pushing to go forward.'"

During his time at Paramount, Eisner oversaw a string of hit movies that included "Ordinary People," "Saturday Night Fever," "Terms of Endearment" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Among his TV successes were "Cheers" and "Taxi."

In 1984 at Disney, Eisner became CEO of a corporation in great difficulty. He immediately set out to reinvigorate its production of live-action and animated films and enlarge its theme parks. By 1998 Disney had expanded into broadcast and cable television and radio, entered book and magazine publishing, become the owner of major league baseball and hockey teams, built an international network of retail stores, initiated an online computer services business and launched a cruise line.

Following the success of the stage version of "Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King" has become one of the most successful and critically acclaimed hits on Broadway. Disney's commitment to refurbish the New Amsterdam theater on 42nd Street is widely given credit for sparking the renaissance of New York City's Times Square.

Despite the difficulties of opening and operating Euro Disney, including high-stakes negotiations to restructure its debt, Eisner never lost faith in the project. He outlines the early difficulties: design, budget and construction problems, a deep European recession the year the park opened, such cultural miscues as serving the wrong kinds of breakfasts and not selling liquor.

Even the name itself was a problem.

"As Americans, we had believed that the word 'Euro' in front of Disney was glamorous and exciting," he writes. "For Europeans, it turned out to be a term they associated with business, currency and commerce." The park, now on its way to financial health, has been renamed Disneyland Paris.

Of Disney's failed attempt to build an American history theme park in Virginia, Eisner writes, "A good idea never dies, and I have no intention of giving up on a historical park permanently." Noting that there was no other project during his first decade at Disney about which he felt more passionately, Eisner admits to having underestimated some key issues:

"First, we failed to recognize how deeply people felt about maintaining their communities just as they are. This was especially true of the land to the west of us where our neighbors included some of the most powerful families in America. The other issue that blind-sided us was the Civil War battlefield in the town of Manassas, approximately five miles from our site. Our opponents ultimately were successful in conveying the impression that our site literally sat on a battlefield rather than five miles from one."