Disney’s Worst Board Member

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 13, 9:30AM EST

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Mark G. Parker, who was just named board chair at Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS | DIS Price Prediction), is Disney’s worst board member. A director since 2016, he has witnessed the downfall of Disney while doing nothing to halt it. Parker is currently executive board chair of Nike and should know more about governance than almost anyone in America. (See how Disney was involved in one of the biggest scandals of 2022.)
[in-text-ad]
Parker has sat through most of Disney’s largest problems. The list is long. He was part of the board when it promoted failed CEO Bob Chapek. Parker was on the board when Bob Iger extended his retirement several times without a strong successor. He was on the board when Disney overpaid for Fox in March 2019. Disney paid $71.3 billion for Fox, and Disney’s long-term debt sits at $48 billion.
[nativounit]
Parker voted for the most important poor decision of the past several years: to bring back Iger, who had been the architect of so many Disney problems. Parker and the board made the decision almost overnight when it could have taken longer to consider and talk to other candidates. Chapek’s tenure may have been troubled, but nothing about his performance required emergency measures. Parker recently had approved a deal to extend Chapek’s contract for three years, from July 2022 to July 2025.
[wallst_email_signup]
Parker did not mention these missteps when Iger returned to the company. He and the balance of the board did not tell shareholders that they had given Iger a specific mandate beyond fixing the company. They had not put together a specific program to find Iger’s eventual replacement.
[recirclink id=1192443]
Parker is like so many big company board members. They go along to get along. Almost none take CEOs to task but rather let them make decisions that are not in the best interests of the company.

Where was Parker when Disney’s shares started to slide in November 2021? Apparently nowhere useful to common shareholders.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.