Disney’s New CEO and the Rise of “Experience Intelligence”

I have spent more than three decades studying leadership excellence—how people perform at their best, why some leaders consistently move others to action, and why others fail even while holding power.

About two years ago, I was doing some qualitative research at Disney, and I began hearing the same name repeatedly: Josh D’Amaro. He wasn’t a public figure, but he was someone people wanted to work for, follow, and build with. The “Josh effect” people called it.

When I hear of such real-world excellence, I do what I have always done as a researcher: I study.

I followed him on three separate occasions: a day in the life at one of the parks, interviews at his offices, and “ride-alongs” during his design sessions with Walt Disney Imagineering.

One day as I followed Josh around, he was approached at one of the employee entrances by a cook, who wrapped him in a hug. It wasn’t the careful greeting most employees would give a senior executive, but the relaxed familiarity of two friends greeting each other. While the distance in hierarchy was enormous, the distance in human ease was none.

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Another time when I was at the park, a security guard had noticed I was asking about Josh. He pulled me aside and told me about the last time Josh came through his gate. They’d ended up talking about parents and children and how you prepare kids for adult life. “He’s one of the good ones,” the guard said quietly.

Later, walking down Main Street, park visitors streamed toward Josh, asking for photos, thanking him. I’m not a cynical person, but I am skeptical—a slightly uptight British researcher. What I saw cut through any psychometric skepticism. I saw lots of love that day. The guests were so thrilled to see him, beaming, and laughing, and dashing back and forth to take pictures.

And the employees were beaming too. The word that came to mind is “proud.” They seemed proud to see him so beloved. Proud to be a part of that love. Proud that their leader was present and listening, a living breathing human, standing for everything the customers wanted the company to stand for.

Other words I scribbled down that day: “uplifting,” “connected,” “as one,” “coherent,” “everyone leaning in.” “He’s not a celebrity,” I wrote, “they love him because he’s what they imagine a leader of this company to be.”

“Experience Intelligence” as a Leadership Capability

What I was seeing in these moments was not personality or charisma.

Josh was practicing a specific leadership capability—one that most organizations do not yet have language for, one that I call experience intelligence, or the ability to read and shape the human experience.

Under his leadership, cast members did not respond because they were pressured. They responded because they felt seen, trusted, capable and proud of what they were a part of. Guests responded because they too felt seen and their love of Disney honored and reciprocated. The hours Josh spent deciding on the correct color and placement of Main Street trash cans. The creation of an Instagram account in which Josh answered any and all cast member questions, all of which he was happy to make visible to the guests. The hours dedicated to analyzing precisely how to make each ride not just fun, but beloved—these are all signs of his experience intelligence at work.

Experience intelligence requires leaders to recognize two key insights.

The first is that the tools they tend to use to change people’s behavior—goals, feedback, and praise for employees; pricing, rewards, and loyalty programs for customers—are directive and produce only short-term results. The experience intelligent leader recognizes that a person’s experiences create lasting feelings, these feelings drive behavior, and the behaviors drives outcomes. To net extreme positive outcomes, the leader must create extreme positive experiences.

The second is that the most powerful experiences are those which the person says they love—not “like,” not “respect,” not “learned a lot during,” not “really enjoyed.” While each of these are positive feelings, it turns out they do not predict what a person is going to do next. A wealth of psychometric data show only love is predictive.

Leaders with experience intelligence understand that love isn’t a coating of softness. Rather, it is an ingredient—a specific cluster of feelings which an experience either creates or fails to create.

In my research, which I share in my upcoming book Design Love In, I’ve followed a number of leaders, including Josh, who have high degrees of experience intelligence.

Tim Massa of Kroger has it. He changed his title from EVP of people to chief associate experience officer and led the grocery giant through a very challenging 18 months by taking both love and experience seriously. He sponsored a wide-scale store initiative called “From like to love” and recast all associates as “experience-makers.” These moves, in combination with pristine new in-store décor, have yielded dramatic increases in employee retention, ratings of in-store friendliness, and higher same store sales.

Susannah Frost, the president of Chick-fil-A has it, as does COO Cliff Robinson. Though they are distinct in their personal styles, they are both deeply curious about how to wrap the chicken sandwiches they sell in genuinely loving experiences for both team members and guests. Understanding that experience drives behavior, they encourage all franchise operators to “be the customer.” They demonstrate their experience intelligence in the amount of time they dedicate to educating operators on how to turn drive-through from a transaction into an experience; in their ongoing efforts to highlight and disseminate the best experience activations across all 3,000 restaurants; and even in their commitment to building hundreds of new playgrounds to give the families they serve a more loving experience at the restaurant.

Patti Poppe, the CEO of Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has it. You can see it in her unremitting belief that the secret to restoring trust in PG&E was to love the communities they serve. She launched a “leading with love” campaign, which included a series of town halls with local communities and towns; the redesign of service onboarding processes for both individuals and business; and the burying of more than 1,200 miles of power lines as a wildfire safety effort. In her 2026 annual customer letter, Poppe acknowledges that “people rolled their eyes” when she began talking about love, but she wrote: “Here’s the truth: Love works. It means putting your safety, your family’s well-being, and the affordability of your energy at the center of every decision we make.”

Experience intelligence differs sharply from much of what currently passes as leadership. Many leaders rely on blunt force, chest-thumping directives, transaction, and extraction. They treat human beings as variables to be controlled rather than sources of energy to be cultivated. Or they design for process, optimized for efficiency, speed, or cost.

The data on this is not ambiguous. Extractive pressure produces compliance in the short term and disengagement over time. Fear narrows thinking. Transactional leadership drains resilience. Love—defined precisely as a deep and unwavering commitment to another human’s flourishing—does the opposite. It accelerates learning, strengthens loyalty, improves recovery from stress, and drives advocacy.

So, Josh D’Amaro’s appointment as CEO of The Walt Disney Company suggests something larger than one individual’s rise. It signals a choice. The most intelligent organizations are selecting leaders who understand that experiences where people say, “Love that!” are by far the most powerful force in business. They are choosing leaders who know how to unleash this force.

Take one last example from my time at Disney. I was in a conference room with 30 Imagineers and operators discussing a redesign of the Millennium Falcon ride. The ride already had a two-hour wait, but the issue they were discussing wasn’t demand.

“Guests like it,” Josh said, “but they don’t love it.”

He offered a diagnosis: It was a three-person ride, but only one person—the pilot—truly controlled the adventure. The other two—the gunner and the engineer—were less active.

The redesign they planned in that room meant no one on the ride would merely be a passenger. It would give each person agency—the chance to influence the outcome, demonstrate skill, and feel part of the story. Instead of leaving saying, “I liked it,” riders could leave saying, “I loved it.” (When the ride opens in May, Josh will learn whether his diagnosis was on point!)

“Disney is a delicate brand,” he told me at the time. “Anything I can do to help more guests say they love Disney is a valuable use of my time.”

Copyright 2026 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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