When you work in a corporate structure for so long, you become trained to give legalistic, corporate responses, but I didn’t care about any of that in this moment.

Of great interest to me was the fact that almost every traditional media company, while trying to figure out its place in this changing world, was operating out of fear rather than courage, stubbornly trying to build a bulwark to protect old models that couldn’t possibly survive the sea change that was under way.

Peter saw no problem with a system in which he and the analysts who worked for him made so many of the company’s decisions. Meanwhile, businesses around us were adapting to a world that was changing at blinding speed. We needed to change, we needed to be more nimble, and we needed to do it soon.

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.

I uttered the same sentence to them that I had repeated multiple times during my negotiations with Steve and John and Ed: “It doesn’t make any sense for us to buy you for what you are and then turn you into something else.