Success Quote by Michael Eisner

Eisner’s line lands like a veteran executive’s warning disguised as a toast. On its face, it’s a compliment to the mythical “great partner,” but the real move is expectation management: assume incentives will diverge, assume people will keep score, and treat genuine selflessness as an outlier so rare it becomes a once-in-a-career story you dine out on.

The subtext is transactional realism. In corporate life, “partner” sounds egalitarian, almost friendly; Eisner punctures that romance. He’s pointing at the quiet ways power actually operates in business relationships: credit allocation, risk shielding, information control, the subtle habit of optimizing for personal upside while speaking the language of shared mission. By framing selflessness as “luck,” he removes it from the realm of moral exhortation and places it in the category of scarce resources. You can’t build a strategy around it. You can only recognize it when it appears.

Context matters because Eisner isn’t theorizing from a seminar room; he ran Disney through eras where partnership meant fragile alliances with creatives, boards, and distribution gatekeepers. In that world, selflessness isn’t just kindness, it’s a competitive advantage that’s hard to price: the person who will take a hit now to protect the relationship later, who won’t weaponize leverage when the deal turns.

The intent, then, is both pragmatic and faintly elegiac. He’s telling ambitious people to be grateful if they ever find trust that doesn’t come with hidden invoices - and to structure everything else as if they won’t.