The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Interpretation: We can say that at a certain point in his career
Michael Eisner succumbed to a form of delusion when it came to
power, his thinking so divorced from reality that he made business
decisions with disastrous consequences. Let us follow the progress of
this particular form of delusion as it emerged and took over his mind.
At the beginning of his career at ABC, young Eisner had a solid
grasp on reality. He was fiercely practical. He understood and
exploited to the maximum his strengths—his ambitious and
competitive nature, his intense work ethic, his keen sense for the
entertainment tastes of the average American. Eisner had a quick mind
and the ability to encourage others to think creatively. Leaning on
these strengths, he rose quickly up the ladder. He possessed a high
degree of confidence in his talents, and the series of promotions he

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received at ABC confirmed this self-opinion. He could afford to be a
little cocky, because he had learned a lot on the job and his skills as a
programmer had improved immensely. He was on a fast track toward
the top, which he reached at the age of thirty-four by being named
head of prime-time programming at ABC.
As a person of high ambition, he soon felt that the world of
television was somewhat constricting. There were limits to the kinds of
entertainment he could program. The film world offered something
looser, greater, and more glamorous. It was natural, then, for him to
accept the position at Paramount. But at Paramount something
occurred that began the subtle process of the unbalancing of his mind.
Because the stage was bigger and he was the head of the studio, he
began to receive attention from the media and the public. He was
featured on the cover of magazines as the hottest film executive in
Hollywood. This was qualitatively different from the attention and
satisfaction that had come from the promotions at ABC. Now he had
millions of people admiring him. How could their opinions be wrong?
To them he was a genius, a new kind of hero altering the landscape of
the studio system.
This was intoxicating. It inevitably elevated his estimation of his
skills. But it came with a great danger. The success that Eisner had had
at Paramount was not completely of his own doing. When he had
arrived at the studio, several films were already in preproduction,
including Saturday Night Fever, which would spark the turnaround.
Barry Diller was the perfect foil to Eisner. He would argue with him
endlessly about his ideas, forcing Eisner to sharpen them. But puffed
up by the attention he was receiving, Eisner had to imagine that he
deserved the accolades he received strictly for his own efforts, and so
naturally he subtracted from his success the elements of good timing
and the contributions of others. Now his mind was subtly divorcing
itself from reality. Instead of rigorously focusing on the audience and
how to entertain people, he started to increasingly focus on himself,
believing in the myth of his greatness as promulgated by others. He
imagined he had the golden touch.
At Disney the pattern repeated and grew more intense. He basked
in the glow of his amazing success there, quickly forgetting the
incredible good luck he had had in inheriting the Disney library at the
time of the explosion of home video and family entertainment. He
discounted the critical role that Wells had played in balancing him out.

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With his sense of grandeur growing, he faced a dilemma. He had
become addicted to the attention that came from creating a splash,
doing something big. He could not content himself with simple success
and rising profits. He had to add to the myth to keep it alive. Euro
Disney would be the answer. He would show the world he was not just
a corporate executive but rather a renaissance man.
In building the park, he refused to listen to experienced advisers
who recommended the Barcelona site and advocated a modest theme
park to keep the costs down. He did not pay attention to French
culture but directed everything from Burbank. He operated under the
belief that his skills as the head of a film studio could be transferred to
theme parks and architecture. He was certainly overestimating his
creative powers, and now his business decisions revealed a large
enough detachment from reality to qualify as delusional. Once this
mental imbalance takes hold, it can only get worse, because to come
back down to earth is to admit that one’s earlier high self-opinion was
wrong, and the human animal will almost never admit that. Instead,
the tendency is to blame others for every failure or setback.
In the grips now of his delusion, he made his most serious mistake
of all—the firing of Jeffrey Katzenberg. The Disney system depended
on a steady flow of new animated hits, which fed the stores and theme
parks with new characters, merchandise, rides, and avenues for
publicity. Katzenberg clearly had developed the knack for creating such
hits, exemplified by the unprecedented success of The Lion King.
Firing him put the entire assembly line at risk. Who would take over?
Certainly not Roy Disney or Eisner himself? Furthermore, he had to
know that Katzenberg would take his skills elsewhere, which he did
when he cofounded a new studio, DreamWorks. There he churned out
more animated hits. The new studio drove up the price for skilled
animators, vastly increasing the cost of producing an animated film
and threatening Disney’s entire profit system. But instead of a firm
grip on this reality, Eisner was more focused on the competition for
attention. Katzenberg’s rise threatened his elevated self-opinion, and
he had to sacrifice profit and practicality to soothe his ego.
The downward spiral had begun. The acquisition of ABC, under the
belief that bigger is better, revealed his growing detachment from
reality. Television was a dying business model in the age of new media.
It was not a realistic business decision but a play for publicity. He had
created an entertainment behemoth, a blob without any clear identity.

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The hiring and firing of Ovitz revealed an even greater level of
delusion. People had become mere instruments for Eisner to use. Ovitz
was considered the most feared and powerful man in Hollywood.
Perhaps Eisner was unconsciously driven by the desire to humiliate
Ovitz. If he had the power to make Ovitz beg for crumbs, he must be
the most powerful man in Hollywood.
Soon all of the problems that stemmed from his delusional thought
process began to cascade—the continually rising costs of Euro Disney,
the Katzenberg bonus, the lack of hits in both film divisions, the
continual drain on resources from ABC, the Ovitz severance package.
The board members could no longer ignore the falling stock price. The
firing of Katzenberg and Ovitz made Eisner the most hated man in
Hollywood, and as his fortunes fell, all of his enemies came out of the
woodwork to hasten his destruction. His fall from power was fast and
spectacular.