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The Tradition

HR King
Apr 23, 2002
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CNN

Reporters often joke that journalists are going to the “dark side” when they go into PR. After reading about Geoff Morrell, a hero I didn’t know I needed, I understand the temptation.

Here’s the deal: A regulatory filing from Disney last week, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, has put a spotlight on Morrell’s incredibly brief but wildly lucrative tenure at the company.

As the head of Disney’s head of PR for just three months, from January to April of last year, Morrell made about $150,000 a day, my colleague Chris Isidore reports.

That sum included salary, bonuses and $537,438 for relocating his family from London to Los Angeles, as well as an additional $500,000 to “account for his unique circumstances” of having relocating the family again upon his departure.

On top of that, Disney is buying out the rest of Morrell’s contract. He’ll receive an additional $4 million in the current fiscal year that ends October 1 to pay out the rest of his contract, along with the target bonus he would have received for 2022.

So, in total, adjusting for an unvested performance bonus and payments yet to come, Morrell is walking away with $10.3 million for exactly one-quarter of a year’s work. And he’s already landed himself another gig as president of the global strategy and communications unit of Teneo, a CEO advisory firm.

Morrell did not respond to a request for comment on his Disney pay package, and Disney declined to comment beyond the details in the filing.

Why the brief tenure?

Morrell got handed a pretty raw deal soon after he started, when Disney’s then-CEO Bob Chapek waded clumsily into the debate around Florida’s legislation that prohibits teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation through the third grade — commonly known as “Don’t Say Gay.”

Long story short, Disney, the state’s largest private employer, tried to stay silent on the bill. Employees were furious. So Chapek spoke out against it. Then Republican leaders were furious.

The company announced Morrell’s departure within days of that PR nightmare.

(To be fair, I don’t think having Olivia Pope on the payroll would have gotten Disney out of that scandal unscathed. But also…someone had to take the fall. Ultimately, Chapek also got the boot, cushioned by a $20 million severance that just barely takes the sting off the embarrassment of being replaced by his own predecessor, Bob Iger.)

Bottom line: The story of Geoff Morrell confirms my suspicion that executive titles are meaningless and Corporate America is all just a big game that you can learn to play medium-well to medium-bad and still make out like a bandit.

 
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On a much, MUCH smaller scale, I worked with a guy who was hired as a tech writer and it took the company ~6 months to learn he wasn't a tech writer.
 
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