Was this Walts secret to success?

[manning]

What did Walt have to say about the people who loved his work?

http://disney.go.com/inside/issues/stories/v050405.html

 

[disneyworldgirl]

Nice article, manning. I think Walt's respect for the audience and park guests was definitely the key. While he knew that money was necessary in order to accomplish his goals, he wasn't obsessed with the "bottom line" the way the current Disney execs seem to be. He cared more about creativity, innovation, and imagination than he did money; and IMHO, it showed in everything he did.

 

[manning]

I've seen companies get run into the ground for the sake of the bottom line. They get carried away and end up trimming the muscle along with the fat.

You have to have balance and I think Walt (with the help of Roy Sr) was able to strike a balance.

Walt was not a director nor an officer of the company. He wanted to work in the pits with the boys. He left the other stuff to brother Roy.

 

[Peter Pirate]

'scuse me there manning but ole Walt was seldom 'one of the boys'. He was tyranical and a know it all. Thankfully he was right more often than he was wrong, leaving us a brilliant legacy. But it seems totally remis to blindly accept that Walt valued creativity over money, it just isn't that simple. He seldom skimped on costs, which I believe is often misconstrued this way but he was not beyond the quick money fixes of dubious quality...The same types of things Eisner gets ridiculed for. Almost everyone respected Walt for his genius, but even his longest associations like Ub (whom Walt eventually 'chased' away) and Roy, his own brother (who went months at a time without speaking to Walt) felt constant tension from his 'my way or the highway' attitide. He wasn't, based on my reading, a really nice guy.

Also, to dwgirl, don't mistake those things that Walt did with what Eisner or Iger can do. Disney (the Company) was a totally different entity in a different place and time...Eisner wielded the same power as Walt (perhaps) but instead of breaking creative grounds over and over we got quantity (Parks, attractions and entertainment) for the masses...Not a bad thing, even if it wasn't what Walt would have done.

 

[disneyworldgirl]

Also, to dwgirl, don't mistake those things that Walt did with what Eisner or Iger can do. Disney (the Company) was a totally different entity in a different place and time...Eisner wielded the same power as Walt (perhaps) but instead of breaking creative grounds over and over we got quantity (Parks, attractions and entertainment) for the masses...Not a bad thing, even if it wasn't what Walt would have done.

Don't mean to start a debate on the matter, but I have to disagree with you on this last part. Quantity over quality is a very bad thing, especially when you're talking about an entertainment company. I know from firsthand experience how quickly a business can deteriorate due to the "quantity over quality" management style. I (as well as many others that I know, including my DB) have worked for several companies that went under because of it. They lost sight of what made their companies successful, therefore alienating their main customer base. And while I sincerely doubt that Disney is in any danger of going under, the fact that there was a 45% no-confidence vote for Eisner by the stockholders speaks volumes.

There are alot of people out there (and on the DISboards) who are very unhappy with the direction that the Disney Co. has taken recently. Walt may not have been a saint, and I'm sure he had his share of personal demons; but together, he and Roy managed to build an entertainment giant that's loved by people all over the world. They didn't do it by empasizing quantity over quality, and I think this is something that needs to addressed by Disney.

 

[Peter Pirate]

Under Walt we'd probably have had DL and (a DL clone) MK (built to finance his EPCOT - Not the Epcot we all know and love). No Studios, no Epcot, no AK (although since he loved animals Walt may have given us an animal based park eventually) no water parks, certainly no DTD's. No DL Paris, No DL Tokyo, no great resorts...This would have been ok with you? Walt got bored easy and was no longer interested in animation OR theme parks...Tell me how his 'indifference' could possibly have been good for us in the long run? Oh sure he may have 'revolutionized' something else, but most likely (had he lived) he would have become a city planner like the world has never seen. His achievement (the real EPCOT) would have been great for society but was certainly NOT going to be an entertainment venture.

I agree that quantity over quality isn't the best road to success...Or is it? Home Depot, Wal-Mart, franchised everything...My point was this is todays world (even though I don't like it) AND Eisner did do some good. The expansion of WDW alone was a great thing in my view, although to be sure, none of it would have been possible without the dreamer himself at the outset.

As for not wanting to debate, that is what we generally do around here and I certainly take no offense in disagreement (as long as it's done nicely ).

As to the no confidence vote...That was two meetings agao. The last meetings' vote gave Eisner an overwhelming vote of confidence as you recall.

 

[disneyworldgirl]

First, I don't know exactly what Walt would have done in WDW. I'm sure there are alot of things that would have been different, but we'll never know what or how much. As for Eisner's "redemption" in the eyes of the shareholders, I believe that it was based on the fact that he had decided to step down and the Board promised a "thorough" search for his replacement.

And don't even get me started on Walmart...

That having been said, there's no way in this world or any other that you're going to convince me that the corporate mentality presently permeating the Disney Co. is a good way to go. And I doubt that I'll be able to convince you that it's wrong for the company. So let's just leave it at that.

 

[Peter Pirate]

No, no no...You've got me wrong. I personally don't think it's the right way to go. I abhor corporate america in general and WDW is falling right into the 'pop culture' trap.

I'm only saying that Eisner, did in fact, do some things that IMO were of great positive import to Disney and for vacationing families.

To be sure, I'd love for quality the guest experience to be the hallmark of the Company again...I just don't see that it can or will happen in the culture WE have created...Therefore I choose to look at things from as poitive an angle as possible and hope for the best...Otherwise I just don't see the point.

 

[manning]

'scuse me there manning but ole Walt was seldom 'one of the boys'.

Scuse me Pete, I didn't say he was one of the boys, I just said he liked to work in the pits with the boys.

There may not have been any love lost on him, but there was respect for him. Unlike Eisner he would get out of their way and let them work.

Here are a couple of interesting audio interviews with the author, James B. Stewart, of Disney War. They took place in Feb. Just click audio when you go to the sights.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4503311

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4508119

 

[crusader]

It amazes me how often the harshest critics of Disney keep plugging a book which in and of itself, epitomizes the corporate culture of our society by disgracefully ripping off the consumer. Now why, would anybody here allow themselves to be charged for information they've already repeatedly obtained for free in the public domain?

Sorry manning, I really do appreciate hearing what you have to offer, but it becomes increasingly difficult (particularly right now), when you appear to be inadvertantly supporting the fleecing of the Disneyite in this manner.

 

[Peter Pirate]

Good clarification manning, thanks...I thought you were painting Walt with the ole 'he was a genius therefore he must have been a great guy' brush that so often gets put forth. My mistake.

It's true that he did let his craftsmen do their work...But only in the respect that they were seeing his vision his way. This was a dictatorship, make no mistake.

As to the Disney War material. it offers very intereting insight but is still just another source carrying no more validity than other books that have been written. So often books that have painted Walt in the negative are dismissd as assasination pieces and to the converse the books praising Walt were dismissed as puff pieces - clearly the truth lies in the middle.

 

[DisneyKidds]

No Studios, no Epcot, no AK (although since he loved animals Walt may have given us an animal based park eventually) no water parks, certainly no DTD's. No DL Paris, No DL Tokyo, no great resorts...This would have been ok with you? Walt got bored easy and was no longer interested in animation OR theme parks...Tell me how his 'indifference' could possibly have been good for us in the long run?

Hey, Pete....how ya been? This comment struck me as very 'black or white' in nature and the WWWHD exercises usually don't get us far, but I had to comment nonetheless.

I agree that Walt himself likely would not have personally done any of the things you reference. Walt had moved on and would have pursued other interests. However, that wouldn't have meant that the DL and the Florida Project would have stagnated.....withered on the vine. Surely Walt would have put someone else in charge of the parks and resorts, and as much as Eisner may have had a hand in some good things for Disney, it didn't take a genius to make the decision to expand the resort in Florida and take Disney's reach beyond California and Florida. Would we have had the exact same parks and resorts as we do today? Perhaps not, but surely there would be something more than even what was on the Master Plan. Businesses take on a life of their own and they will grow, and Walt wouldn't have prevented that..........Now it's the manner in which they grow that is crucial.

Had Walt been around as a guiding influence, as indifferent as he may have been to the destination resorts, perhaps the inevitable growth would have kept more of the focus on the quality, rather than the quantity that is so prevalent today.

FWIW, I do like much of the growth that WDW has seen, but I would surely trade some of it for a more quality based approach overall, wouldn't you? If one less "value" resort meant that DinoRama was something more........if one less "moderate" resort and no "Fox Family" meant that Beastly Kingdom existed.............wouldn't that have been better?

All speculation I know, but sometimes that is all that our discussions leave us. I happen to agree that one must......

look at things from as poitive an angle as possible and hope for the best...

.......and WDW is a pretty incredible place as it stands today, but we all know that it (and the Walt Disney Company), just like Simba at his low point , is more than what is has become.................

 

[manning]

It amazes me how often the harshest critics of Disney keep plugging a book which in and of itself, epitomizes the corporate culture of our society by disgracefully ripping off the consumer. Now why, would anybody here allow themselves to be charged for information they've already repeatedly obtained for free in the public domain?

Sorry manning, I really do appreciate hearing what you have to offer, but it becomes increasingly difficult (particularly right now), when you appear to be inadvertantly supporting the fleecing of the Disneyite in this manner.

Please explain further.

 

[Peter Pirate]

HI Kidds, yeah I know it was pretty black and white, and that's usually what ticks people off about my posts because you all know that it isn't really what I meant (a bad quality I have).

I agree that Walt would have put someone else in charge of Parks and flicks, etc. and I do believe the quality of additions and releases would have been more carefully watched, I don't believe any major capital expenditures would have been diverted away from Walt's plan du jour...And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to imagine how complex, ongoing and totally time consuming and mind boggling the real E.P.C.O.T. would have been.

As for the misteps of the past few years, yes DinoRama, at the very least, should have been done much, much better but mistakes get made and I can get past this one since it has been followed up with M:S, MickPhil, Soarin' and the promise of E:E. Still new mistakes have been made, the Stitch update for example. But it just proves there will always be somethng to talk about, I guess. As long as the mistakes aren't the rule but rather the exception I'm basically OK with it.

 

[disneyworldgirl]

No, no no...You've got me wrong. I personally don't think it's the right way to go. I abhor corporate america in general and WDW is falling right into the 'pop culture' trap.

I'm only saying that Eisner, did in fact, do some things that IMO were of great positive import to Disney and for vacationing families.

To be sure, I'd love for quality the guest experience to be the hallmark of the Company again...I just don't see that it can or will happen in the culture WE have created...Therefore I choose to look at things from as poitive an angle as possible and hope for the best...Otherwise I just don't see the point.

Sorry if I misunderstood (that's easy to do sometimes when you read the boards, I guess). And I agree that times, and people in general, have changed. Like you, I'm hoping for the best. But, naive as it may be, I like to think that if enough Disney fans voice their concerns, things could change for the better at the Disney Co.

One of my pet peeves about the way Disney is doing things right now is that there are so many remakes and sequels floating around (and more to come). I cringe everytime I read/hear about another Disney classic being redone, or that they've come out with a "2" or a "1 1/2" or whatever. I guess I'm a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to the entertainment industry. I usually hate remakes (whether they be films, music, TV shows, or TV shows remade into films); my opinion is if they were done right the first time, they don't need to be redone. I could probably handle it in small doses, but it almost seems like they're on a mission to sequelize/remake every single Disney classic in existence. But, that's just me.

 

[DisFlan]

I haven't posted in Rumors before, but "What Walt Would Do Today" is something that has long caught my interest. Walt was savvy about what people wanted. Nice guy or not, he plugged into the post-war 1950's psyche in a monumental way. Lots of kids being born, new highways to travel on and rising disposable income were his tools.

Was he thinking forty or fifty years out? Probably not. But he'd plug in just as effectively today. He'd see the post-9/11 need for quality escapism just as clearly as he saw it post-WWII. Would it be a DL or WDW? Maybe not - but it would be good. And he'd make a buck doing it.

As to what he'd do with today's corp., we'll never know. But I have a feeling he'd have already updated the whole corporation way beyond our expectations - or our imaginations. Compared to what Walt would have already done, the Disney corp. has only been dusting around the edges of yesterday's ideas to keep the thing generating money. We won't see another Walt, but we can certainly partake of what we have of him before the inevitable corporate and creative entropy sets in more than it already has. So go forth and enjoy - while we still have at least a piece of Walt's genius left.

DisFlan

 

[crusader]

Please explain further.

I really don't mean to stereotype here, but to put my point in perspective it's pretty basic. Many critics hold Disney to a zero tolerance standard of excellence. Short of this, nothing is acceptable and the corporate climate is typically to blame. Yet on the otherhand, they turnaround and plug a book lacking in quality and printed purely to gouge the consumer as a "must read".

You can't have it both ways.

Jim Hill says it well: http://www.jimhillmedia.com/mb/articles/showarticle.php?ID=1340

Mind you, I guess I could re-read James B. Stewart's "DisneyWar." But -- to be honest -- I didn't enjoy it all that much the first time I read it.

Why for? Because -- to put it bluntly -- it's kind of a mess. It's like Stewart couldn't decide which sort of book he really wanted to write (I.E. A first person volume that takes you behind-the-scenes at the Magic Kingdom, an omniscient boardroom expose and/or a blow-by-blow account of the "Save Disney" battle & the Mike Ovitz trial), so he wrote all three.

So what James ultimately ended up with was a book that lurches all over the place, that radically shifts in style and tone depending on which chapter you're reading. More importantly, because this story isn't over yet, "DisneyWar" doesn't really have an ending.

Don't get me wrong. There are some interesting tidbits scattered among its 572 pages. Like how Disney CEO Michael Eisner hoped to convince John Lasetter and the rest of the crew at Pixar to continue on with the Mouse by offering that studio its very own Disney princess movie to produce, "The Snow Queen." Or Johnny Depp's battles with Disney Studio execs about how Capt. Jack Sparrow should be portrayed in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie.

But -- beyond that -- "DisneyWar" 's pickings are pretty slim. Given all the hoopla surrounding the release of this Simon & Shuster volume (I.E. How the publishers pushed up the book's release date by three weeks) as well as the fact that Stewart won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the stock market back in 1988, I was honestly expecting a lot more here.

You wanna read a really good book about the inner workings of the Walt Disney Company? Then go pick up a copy of Edward Jay Epstein's "The Big Picture." This Random House release blows the lid off of the way the Mouse makes movies.

By that I mean: I don't know how Epstein ever got access to some of the numbers that he uses in this book. But -- for the first time ever (That I can recall, anyway) -- we actually get a real accounting of how the money flows in Hollywood. How much goes to the stars, how much is spent on publicity & marketing, how much the studios actually use overseas.

For Disney fans, what's particularly fascinating about "The Big Picture" is that -- as its main example of Tinseltown's skewed version of book-keeping -- it uses Touchstone Pictures' June 2000 release, "Gone in 60 Seconds." Which -- while this Nicholas Cage film was touted in that year's annual report as being a financial success -- the truth of the matter is that this movie (which grossed over $242 million worldwide) was on Disney's books as having actually lost over $160 million.

Epstein walks you through all of the numbers associated with the production of "Gone in 60 Seconds." Its $103.3 million negative cost (I.E. The money the Mouse actually spent to make this movie), the $13 million spent on duping prints of the picture, the $67.4 million that was blown on advertising the film ... Which finally gives one a real sense of what costs what out west.

For those of you who love well-researched Hollywood histories, books that actually deliver on what they promise ... Well, my advice is to skip "DisneyWar" (Or -- at the very least -- wait 'til the thing comes out in paperback) and pick up a copy of "The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood." Epstein's book will really open your eyes.

Whereas Stewart's book? I have to admit that I found my eyelids drooping while I read the first 150 pages or so of "DisneyWar." I mean, was it really necessary to recap how Walt & Roy founded the company and/or how Eisner came to power? Particularly when these very same subjects have already been so exhaustively covered in Bob Thomas' "Walt Disney: An American Original," John Taylor's "Storming the Magic Kingdom," Ron Grover's "The Disney Touch" and Kim Masters' "The Keys to the Kingdom."

Sorry if I'm coming across as kind of cranky here. But I really wanted "DisneyWar" to be a good read. And -- to be honest -- it just didn't deliver the goods. At least for me.

Now, if you're looking for something that really takes you behind-the-scenes at the Mouse House, a publication that tells you how that Disney magic is actually made ... Then I suggest that you pick up a copy of the March 2005 issue of "Genii: The Conjuror's Magazine." This month's issue of this snazzy publication has an article by Brian Sibley entitled "A Spoonful of Magic." Which details how Jim Steinmeyer came up with a number of the illusions featured in the stage version of "Mary Poppins."

 

[airlarry!]

You can't have it both ways.

Funny that the poster should put it this way.

I looked for a post that would show balance in Crusader's views about the Disney Company.

I found platitudes about the Disney company not being made up of creative spirit or ingenuity...but instead about the millions of people who patronize it.

I found arguments for why Ei$ner (and Mini-ME) represent everything Walt could not do if he were here.

I found arguments why Mr. Stewart's book was trash and a waste of consumer's time, without any direct reference to anything contained in the book.

With 500 posts, admittedly, it will take me a while to finish, but perhaps Crusader could help me.

Where exactly has that poster showed balance in his opinion of Ei$ner? Surely, in a thread called "Walt's secret to success," that poster could think of one thing to say positive about the man who built the Kingdom? Or one thing negative about the man who allowed corporate raiders to storm the Kingdom from the inside?

Nah. Even posting one thing on both sides does not make a poster unbiased. Better to file in the vault the constant harping against Uncle Walt and the posters around here who love the spirit of Disney but hate what The Walt Disney Company is becoming.

 

[crusader]

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Look again, you'll find plenty. You'll find a post regarding why I felt it was time for Eisner to retire, having had the privilege of personally speaking with the many great representatives at the 2004 shareholders meeting.

You'll find many a post where I've referred to the soon to be former CEO as a tyrant and Walt as a genius.

It never ceases to amaze me how necessary it is to certain posters such as yourself, my friend (whom I do have a very high regard for by the way), that we either constantly criticize every single component of Michael Eisner's tenure and personality or be labelled the other side.

I don't need you to affirm anything during the past 20 years. Why do you need me to disaffirm everything?

Re: Stewart's book - there's no smoking gun. Do you really need to reread that which you already know in such a poor quality literary fashion? Jim Hill is right about this. I've been waiting for just one person to state the truth about this book and so far nobody around here has the brass to do it.

 

[raidermatt]

Jim Hill is right about this. I've been waiting for just one person to state the truth about this book and so far nobody around here has the brass to do it.

Or perhaps he's wrong (with regard to his conclusions, an all too common occurence lately), and nobody around here agrees with you. Just an alternative to the "nobody has any stones" theory.

There's no zero tolerance standard of excellence for Disney around here, just a zero tolerance for Disney not striving for a standard of excellence. I would hope you would have been able to make that distinction by now, regardless of whether or not you agree with our criticisms.

It's true that he did let his craftsmen do their work...But only in the respect that they were seeing his vision his way. This was a dictatorship, make no mistake.

True, and that's not a problem, is it? He demanded a standard, and empowered his people to achieve it. The proof is in the way so many people excelled and wanted to work with/for him. Of course there are exceptions, but the key is those were exceptions, not the rule. Whether he was a "nice guy" is another matter.

When it comes to Eisner, the belief that he is not a nice guy is only relevant because of the impact it seems to have on the company's business relationships with creative talent. The issue is Eisner's shortcomings in "playing nice", not his shortcomings in "being nice".