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I’m a big fan of Disney, obviously. And since he took over for Michael Eisner in 2005, I’ve been a big fan of Bob Iger. He’s patched together relations with Pixar, set a strategic friend in Steve Jobs and Apple, branded some great new products and positioned one of the world’s biggest studios as a company that’s ready to take a leadership position in defining how media content is consumed in an internet-focused world where people want to download and share content, not buy it in a store.

In my estimation, he’s done a great job of handling all of this. So when I saw an article about how he works, I eagerly perked up and listened (er, read, I guess). Of the 5 key components of his style, I learned that we share a lot of similarities. In order (of how he mentions it in the article):

1. Get up before dawn. – OK, so this is where we differ the most. I do the opposite: work later into the evening to close out the day doing everything you set to accomplish. Same concept, opposite end of the clock.
2. Be punctual. – Yes, yes, yes! I HATE showing up for a meeting and waiting for others to arrive. I would add to this that when the meeting is over, leave. My company’s default meeting duration is one hour. I’ve changed mine (in Lotus Notes) to be 30 minutes and I often find that if we’ve thought about the agenda ahead of time and been punctual we get done very quickly.
3. Loose your driver. – Having someone (other than my wife) drive me into the office isn’t really an option for me; so perhaps this isn’t a big problem. Still, the concept is solid. I try to leave some time throughout the day to clear my head and have some white space in my life. It helps you reflect, reduces stress and leads to more creativity.
4. Write notes. – People don’t get complimented for good work enough. We simply don’t take the time to tell people they did something really well. Just this week, I sent two quick emails to people outside my area to tell them that something they worked on was very well done. Iger is right … it seems to go a long way.
5. Put history to work. – A former manager of mine loved the phrase “let’s not re-invent the wheel.” I, being a techie kinda guy, hated that phrase because I wanted to believe that even the wheel could be improved upon. However, at the end of the day, both that manager and I can stand to learn a lot from looking back on history and learning from its success and failures. A bit of historical research before you start any project is almost always a good idea.

   Bonus points to Iger for integrating an iPod into the research example he gave.

I sat in a meeting this morning where someone observed that (on a Windows XP machine) I was “pretty quick at navigating around Windows Explorer, for a Mac user.” I had to admit that the Windows Explorer interface never really has bothered me and that it was easier to delete files than in the Mac.

Or so I thought.

Even though I’ve used a Mac as my main machine for a few years now, there are some “basics” I still find once in a while because I never take a moment to learn a new (read: faster) way. Today, I learned that instead of dragging a file to the trash, you can simply hit “Command” (apple) and “Delete” on your keyboard and the file will instantly be sent there.

And now that I’ve admitted that out loud (via this post) I really feel like I should have learned that sooner. Maybe it’ll help one of you so you don’t have to admit it on your blog.