The Honest Picture: Jim Fielding on Disney Store, Fox, and what really happens inside big companies

How do you keep a global organization aligned when the numbers say everything’s fine but the reality on the ground says otherwise?

Jim Fielding — former President of Disney Stores Worldwide, CEO of Claire’s, and President of Consumer Products & Innovation at 20th Century Fox — walks through what actually keeps big organizations honest about what’s happening.

Jim took over Disney Store during the 2008 financial crisis and reinvented its global footprint across Europe, North America and Japan. He went on to serve as CEO of Claire’s — a $1.5B specialty retailer across 3,500+ stores in 44 countries. Then Global Head of Consumer Products at DreamWorks Animation. Then President of Consumer Products & Innovation at 20th Century Fox, where he hired a five-SVP leadership team before he’d even started. Today he’s Founder of the League of Radical Kindness, Executive Coach at The ExCo Group, and author of All Pride, No Ego.

In this conversation, Jim walks through the airplane-hangar prototype behind the Disney Store turnaround, the “glocal” model that let stores feel local while sharing most of their catalog, the two sentences that kill innovation inside any company, and the diagnosis he gives every founder who tells him “my team can’t execute” — a diagnosis most CEOs don’t want to hear.

In this episode

• Taking over Disney Store in 2008
• Coordination through travel, listening, and physical presence
• The airplane hangar prototype and 350 tours
• “Glocal” — 70–75% global, 20–25% local
• Test-and-scale: Japan plush → global bestseller
• Building Fox Consumer Products with 5 SVPs
• “All Pride, No Ego” — controlling ego, not erasing it
• The best leaders aren’t the smartest people in the room
• Truth tellers, vulnerability, and the open-door discipline
• The two phrases that kill learning
• Diagnosis for the founder whose team “can’t execute”
• Closing advice: phone a friend

Links

Jim on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jimfielding

All Pride, No Ego: the book on Amazon

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