Success Quote by Michael Eisner

There is a certain corporate swagger in borrowing baseball’s most pressurized moment and turning it into a personal brand. Michael Eisner’s line hinges on a deliberately narrow image: not “winning,” not “leadership,” but the instant when the game is almost over, the margin for error is gone, and the crowd is already rehearsing disappointment. “Two outs in the last of the ninth” is a crisis fetish, a way of saying his best work arrives when everyone else is tightening up.

The intent is less motivational poster than executive self-justification. Eisner isn’t praising preparation or process; he’s praising the adrenaline spike of near-failure. That’s a revealing subtext for a businessman whose career, especially at Disney, became synonymous with high-stakes bets, aggressive dealmaking, and a willingness to reengineer institutions around force of personality. The quote implicitly frames pressure as a proving ground and calm periods as wasted opportunities. It also flatters the speaker: if success comes only at the cliff’s edge, then any chaos around him starts to look like the necessary precondition of genius rather than a managerial cost.

Culturally, the metaphor works because American business loves the myth of the clutch performer: the lone figure who delivers when systems sputter. But baseball’s ninth inning isn’t romantic; it’s often the result of earlier mistakes. Eisner’s sentence carries that double edge. It’s a boast, and a tell: a leader who thrives in emergencies may also be someone who keeps the organization living in them.