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Comment by ancorevard | Hacker News Reader

Bob Iger has long voiced his desire to retire, it's been postponed several times. He wrote about it at length in his most recent book. Just pulled the trigger.

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Surely you can see why "I have decided to retire right now, effective immediately, today, not even finishing out the week, going home this afternoon and never comin' back see y'all on the golf course" is going to raise a few eyebrows. It's... not the way this sort of thing is usually handled.

Yes, that would raise eyebrows, except that's not the case here at all.

Those weren't his literal words, but I trust you get my point: in most cases, this sort of transition is handled with something like "Joe Foobar will step down as FoobarCo's CEO at the end of next month, transitioning to [insert obviously ceremonial position]." This is an immediate transition to a position which isn't obviously ceremonial at all.

I'm not suggesting anything tragic like a fatal illness, a #MeToo event, or a presidential run, but only suggesting that this is an unusually-handled event. Look at his predecessor Michael Eisner, who was forced to resign after losing a boardroom battle -- Iger was announced as the next CEO in March 2005, but Eisner didn't actually leave until the end of September 2005, over six months later.

It's hard to tell from outside of any place. I felt once that I was a victim of attempted "constructive discharge", but I was not (and never have been) immediately marched out after giving my two week notice. Conversely, I had a boss that I never heard anything bad about or a scandal, who was escorted out with his stuff mailed to him after like a decade of service. Nobody admitted to knowing why, except for the usual generic reasons for a layoff.

Er, he's staying on as executive chairman through 2021, so even though he's stepping down as CEO it's not anywhere close to “going home this afternoon and never comin' back see y'all on the golf course”.

Plus everyone is ignoring that he's not leaving the company for a while. If it was anything bad, like some people are wrongly suggesting, he wouldn't be switching roles.

He also states he will focus now as Disney Chairman more on the creative side "because that becomes our biggest priority in 2021".

Yeah, I dont get what the surprise is, anyone who follows Disney ought to have been aware that this was coming.

I've followed news related to the company pretty closely, and there were not any rumors, or even speculation, that Iger would step down from the CEO role before the end of his contract in December 2021--especially not over a year and a half early.

I also read his book that came out last fall, and he explicitly said that his retirement is on the horizon, implying he was expecting to be in the role for awhile.

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