Last year, James Gorman told the In Good Company podcast that now that he had stepped down as CEO of Morgan Stanley, he wanted a board role that was more than an easy paycheck. “I want something that is complicated. I like solving problems,” he said.
Gorman got his wish. In February, he joined the board of Walt Disney Co., which on Monday announced he will take over as chairman early next year. In the job, Gorman will be tasked with solving the company’s most intractable and highly scrutinized problem: who will replace longtime CEO Bob Iger.
The selection of Gorman shows just how seriously Disney has come to take its thorny succession issue. Rather than pick someone with deep media experience, it went with a former bank boss, who sees himself as something of a CEO whisperer and recently executed his own successful CEO handoff at Morgan Stanley.
This was the right move for Disney — especially considering its own succession process doesn’t seem to be going particularly well. Disney coupled the Gorman news with the revelation that it won’t announce its pick for CEO until early 2026. As Matthew Belloni explains in Puck, the delay suggests that either the internal candidates aren’t ready for the job yet or never will be, meaning Disney may need to look outside the company for its next CEO.
Disney has a long and troubled history in the succession department. During Iger’s first 15-year run as CEO, the board extended his contract so many times that it became an inside joke at the company. “I was going to say, ‘This time I mean it,’ but I’ve said that before,” Iger quipped in 2019, when he told investors he planned to leave in two years.
When Iger did finally step down, he replaced himself with Bob Chapek, an uninspired choice not helped by Iger’s constant undermining and meddling. Chapek lasted only two years in the job before the board ousted him after a series of missteps, and Iger got a hero’s welcome when he boomeranged back to the CEO role in 2022.
Having joined the board only earlier this year, Gorman isn’t tainted by this messy history. He also sidesteps the criticisms faced by several of the company’s directors that they are in Iger’s pocket. CNBC has detailed how, by 2019, Iger had personally chosen every director and was close with a number of them, including Nike Executive Chairman Mark Parker and General Motors CEO Mary Barra.
Gorman is replacing Parker, who is reportedly stepping down to focus on Nike’s own succession drama. Parker and Gorman both hold the title of executive chairman at their respective companies, but Gorman will have cut ties with the bank by the time he takes on his new role at Disney in January. Unlike Parker, he’ll be able to give the handoff his full attention, which a problem of this magnitude demands.
At Morgan Stanley, Gorman oversaw a delicate CEO handoff to Ted Pick, in which the other two other internal candidates got passed over but stayed on at the bank. That’s a rarity in these kind of succession horse races, which the company pulled off by paying all three executives a $20 million bonus to signal their importance to the firm. Implementing this kind of thinking will be important for Disney if it wants to keep all of its internal candidates once the process is over. It’s a move that would help establish some level of stability during the transition and maintain critical institutional knowledge of the company’s complex portfolio, which ranges from cruises and theme parks to streaming services and sports.
Key to making a handoff work this time around will be whether Iger can actually cede control and not try to direct his successor from the wings. Gorman seems to have figured out how to do this, in part by taking on the challenge at Disney. This might be where Gorman’s influence will be most important: advising Iger on how to move on once he finally steps down as CEO — hopefully this time for good.
