This is true not just of the Walt Disney Company but of any company or institution. Something will always come up. At its simplest, this book is about being guided by a set of principles that help nurture the good and manage the bad.

Over the course of the next month, Tom and Steve went over the possible financial structure in great detail and arrived at a price: $7.4 billion. (It was an all-stock deal—2.3 Disney shares for each Pixar share, and netted out to $6.4 billion because Pixar had $1 billion in cash.) Even if Steve stopped just short of being greedy, it was still a huge price, and it was going to be a tough sell to our board and to investors.

The Pixar acquisition served our urgent need to revitalize Disney Animation, but it was also the first step in our larger growth strategy: to increase the amount of high-quality branded content we created; to advance technologically, both in our ability to create more compelling products and to deliver those products to consumers; and to grow globally.

Now that John and Ed were in place, that problem was well on its way to being solved. Once Disney Animation was solid, I was open to other acquisitions, even if they weren’t obviously “Disney.” In fact, I was much more conscious of not wanting to play it safe.

The content was there, and the talent was there. (In fact, the Marvel Studios talent, led by Kevin Feige, described their long-term vision for what would become the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU. There was a lot of work ahead of them, but the plan Kevin laid out, including a plan for intertwining characters across multiple films well into the next decade, seemed brilliant to me.)