Dreams Make a Difference – Part 10

I started out this series by saying that Walt Disney is one of my heroes. This is not to say that Walt was perfect, or even consistently admirable. There are plentiful rumors and tales of Walt’s anti-semitism, despotic management style, mercurial temperament or politically insensitive transgressions. The Disney Studio was far from the happiest place on earth. Disney animators unionized after promises of profit sharing on the hugely profitable Snow White vaporized and Walt subsequently scooped up all the credit for the amazing artistic and technical achievement of the studio team. Even longtime friend Ub Iwerks had a trial separation from Walt for 4 years after being constantly shoved out of the spotlight (although he subsequently returned and spent most of his remaining career with Disney). Yes, Walt had a monumental ego. Yes, he was a glory-hound. And yes, he could be a tyrant to work for.

But that’s not how we remember Walt.

We remember his as a visionary, an artistic pioneer, a maker of magic and possibly the most powerful entertainment icon of the 20th Century. His presence was so powerful that the company foundered for years after his death, trying to guide themselves with the management mantra: What Would Walt Do?

You see, the way we remember things is substantially different that the way things actually are. The same is true for people. Eulogies never inventory the deceased’s many faults (because we all have many faults). They memorialize their strengths, their gifts and their accomplishments.

Leveling and Sharpening

In order to jam things into our long term memory, we take facts and distill them into an idealized version of reality. It’s called “Leveling” and “Sharpening”. We “level” out the mediocre, the mundane and details we just don’t agree with, basically eliminating them as unnecessary “noise” from our memory. Then, we “sharpen” the extraordinary, whether it be extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad. Finally, we pick one or the other. We tend not store diametrically opposed opinions of things or people. It creates too much cognitive conflict. We either like things (or people) or dislike them. If we like them, we filter out the negatives and build up the positives. If we dislike them, we do the reverse.

It’s this human tendency that I talked about before in Daniel Kahnemann’s exploration of remembered happiness vs experiential happiness. We level and flatten our lives as well, forever storing an idealized (or demonized) version of what actually happened.

So, for me, although I’m aware of Walt’s faults, that’s not really part of my “image” of the man. I focus on his accomplishments and many gifts. And as I inventory them, I am comfortable in calling him one of my heroes. Walt’s achievements were, by any measure, extraordinary. Perhaps they would be beyond the reach of someone less driven, less egotistical or less tyrannical. Perhaps, perhaps not. But that’s not really for me to judge. What is important to me is that Walt achieved them.

And there is my final lesson from Disney. It’s the extraordinary that will be remembered. It’s when we reach beyond our limits that we determine what we’ll be remembered for. The mundane details of our lives will get lost in the retelling, along with our mistakes and faults, if we strive to achieve something remarkable.

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Dreams Make a Difference – Part 1

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 2

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 3

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 4

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 5

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 6

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 7

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 8

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 9

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 9

Perhaps one of the greatest rewards for any company is when they can unleash the power of their customer’s imaginations. Our imagination is a supremely powerful human gift. Imagination drives everything that is wonderful about human culture. Every achievement we’ve made, every piece of art ever created, every book written, all comes from the same wellspring – our imagination. We are never more completely, uniquely, wonderfully human than when we are imagining.

When we imagine, we create an inner reality that lives apart from the world around us. It is a world of our making, envisioned in our minds eye. But we can also use our imaginations to share the vision of another, drawing it into our inner world and ensure that it resonates with our own beliefs and views. This sharing of a vision was the special gift that Disney shared with us. From the imaginations of the Walt Disney company came spectacular visions and make believe worlds, and the door was always open to welcome us inside. Like the sidewalk chalk drawings of Mary Poppin’s Bert, these were richly imagined worlds that we could share in. We could fly and stay young forever. We could find our Prince (or Princess) and live happily ever after. We could each have our own Fairy Godmother. If we were in a darker mood, we could experience the terror of a Night on Bald Mountain, or of being transformed into a donkey on Pleasure Island.

Disney never underestimated the power of imagination. It was a corporation fuelled by imagination. But even with all the imagination that could be found within Disney, it would have all been meaningless if we did not have the imagination to share in their vision. Works of imagination are like seeds..they need to land in fertile ground to germinate and bloom. Someone without imagination can find no magic in a Beethoven symphony, a tale by Dickens or a Disney movie.

Of course, you can package entertainment in easily digestible, bit sized pieces. And certainly Disney turned out their share of mindless entertainment. It took no prodigious intellectual effort to find the meaning in a Silly Symphony cartoon short, Herbie the Love Bug or The Shaggy D.A. But Disney also asked us to flex the muscles of our imagination with works like Fantasia, Mary Poppins or even Bambi. He believed animation could be high art and he didn’t offer mental short cuts as entry points.

The more important the work of art, the more the creator asks from the audience in terms of sheer imagining horsepower. Those that underestimate that power pander to the lowest common denominator. The easy path is to rely on our animal responses. But the path that challenges us as humans raises us to a different level. It requires us to appreciate with our minds. Imagination is one of those things that pay you back for the effort you put in. If you take the easy path, you’ll be rewarded with fleeting pleasure. But if you mine the depths of your imagination, you’ll discover entire new worlds as well as new ways of looking at the world around you. When Disney was at it’s best, it offered us rich imaginary offerings that resonated at a deep and fundamental level.

Lesson #9: If imagination is your stock and trade, don’t underestimate the imagination machinery of your audience. Push the limits and both you and they will be rewarded.

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Dreams Make a Difference – Part 1

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 2

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 3

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 4

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 5

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 6

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 7

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 8

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 8

In a previous post, I cataloged the many challenges of Walt Disney’s career. It seemed to everyone, including his brother Roy, that just when things were going smoothly, Walt would find a way to court disaster yet again. Adversity became a way of life for Disney studio’s. It they weren’t struggling, they (and I use the collective team advisedly – I actually mean Walt) weren’t happy.

This is not exclusive to the Disney organization. Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, used to say: “As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot”. Kroc also said, “If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business”. And as any good Darwinist would tell you, there’s nothing like environmental adversity to speed up the pace of evolution. Adversity brokers no maybes. Almost good enough isn’t nearly good enough to succeed when the chips are down. You either win or you lose. You either succeed or you fail. Judgment is swift and ruthlessly accurate.

What this means, in the hands of a nimble and bold leader, is an incredible opportunity to hone the edge of a successful company. Employees can rally against a common challenge, and the bigger the challenge, the faster and more effectively they’ll rally. Great accomplishments come in the face of great adversity.

I suspect Walt knew this at a fundamental level. This is probably why he assiduously avoided comfort and complacency, seeking instead to lead his company balanced on the ragged edge of disaster. He embraced challenge and courted adversity. He thrived on it.

So Lesson # 8 is this – Don’t be afraid of adversity. Find the opportunities that lie within. And, in the words of Rahm Emanuel, never let a serious crisis go to waste. Those that live their entire lives in their comfort zones live very small lives indeed. Those that flaunt boundaries and incite challenge live big and leave huge footprints.

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Dreams Make a Difference – Part 1

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 2

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 3

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 4

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 5

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 6

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 7

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 7

Walt Disney was not a particularly talented animator. In fact, if it weren’t for longtime Disney animator Ub Iwerks and many others that followed in his footsteps, the peak of Disney animation might have looked like this:

Rather than this:

It was Ub and many, many other animators that made Disney the animation powerhouse it became. Walt very quickly (and shrewdly) realized that to reach the success he envisioned, he had to step away from the sketch table and focus his talents in other areas.

Most accounts indicate that Walt was not a particularly gracious boss. He was a fanatic about detail, a relentless task master and routinely demanded the impossible. One of my favorite Disney tidbits (unfortunately, I couldn’t find a source for this online, so I’m going from memory) happened during the making of Bambi, a film many consider to be the best of the Disney classics, coming at the height of the studio’s power. Walt envisioned Bambi as a classic melding of animation art , a powerful soundtrack and a simple but heartfelt story. Fantasia, made two years earlier, attempted to take the first two elements to new heights, breaking new ground in animation art set to a classical soundtrack. Never satisfied for long, Walt wanted to raise the bar even higher with Bambi. The film’s production was stretched out from 1937 to 1942 so Disney could avoid using second-string animators, maintaining the film’s rich “painterly” texture.

Because of the long timeline, the production of Fantasia and Bambi overlapped. Disney composers Frank Churchill and Edward Plumb were working on the soundtrack that would go behind the climactic forest fire scene when Walt dropped in to check progress. Churchill and Plumb played the work in progress for Walt, who listened for awhile, then interrupted with, “No..that’s not it. It’s not powerful enough. This is apocalyptic. The music has to match. Wait..I’ll be right back.”

Walt disappeared for a few minutes, then returned with a reel from across the hall, where Fantasia was being scored.

“Here..we need something like this.” Churchill and Plumb listened in disbelief.

“But that’s Beethoven!”

“Yes..so?”

“You want us to compose ‘something like Beethoven’”?

“Yes.”

In the end, Disney got what he wanted, a score that still stands as a classic. Churchill and Plumb received two Academy Award nominations for the score, but unfortunately, for Churchill, the recognition came after his tragic death.

One can debate Walt’s treatment of his employees (Iwerks left Disney for a 4 years span because of a falling out with Disney and a bitter strike after Bambi led to the end of Disney’s Golden Animation era) but you certainly can’t question his eye for talent. Again and again, Walt was able to accomplish the impossible because of the talent he was able to draw to him. The lesson learned here is not how to manage your employees (as much as I respect what Walt did, he was not a shining example of employee empowerment) but rather the importance of recognizing your own limits and assembling a team that can take you farther than you could ever go alone.

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Dreams Make a Difference – Part 1

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 2

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 3

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 4

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 5

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 6

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 6

In the Disney Theme Parks, two of Walt’s great loves are on open display. The first comes from Walt’s inherent gift for storytelling. Most Disney rides are more than just a jolt of adrenaline. The thrills are seamlessly integrated into a story. Whether it’s Pirates of the Caribbean, Splash Mountain, The Tower of Terror or Indiana Jones, there is a distinct storyline to each ride, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Walt was, at his core, a natural born story teller.

Walt’s other love was his fascination with technology. Walt believed that technology was the hope for a brighter future and he had a childlike fascination for it.

With Disneyland, and with the later Disney parks, Walt’s dream was to bring his two loves together. He wanted to create an environment where great stories could come to life, allowing us to immerse ourselves in them. And, with technology, he wanted to provide a showcase for it’s promise and potential. Technology played a vital role in bringing the Disney stories to life, through innovations like animatronics and sophisticated special effects. But it was Tomorrowland and, later, Epcot, that Walt envisioned as the true shrine to the wonders of technology. And in these two examples lies a cautionary tale for us to heed.

The Power of a Story

As I said in an earlier post, humans are wired to love stories. If you have to get details to stick, the best way is to put them into a story. The human brain seems to respond naturally to the structure of a story, perhaps because stories are time tested distillations of how we see the world and what we find interesting about it. Stories are possibly the most highly evolved of all human communication forms, next to  grunts of warning or delight. Stories have lifted us to new heights, with the power of narrative being a constant through all our art forms, across all cultures. There is no society or tribe on earth that does not tell stories. And if you look at Disney’s best loved rides, you’ll find the ones that stay truest to the ideal of telling a story are the ones that stand the test of time.

But technology has not fared as well in the Disney Parks. Of all the lands in Disneyland, Tomorrowland has been the one that has required the greatest number of overhauls. What was once wonderful quickly becomes woefully dated. The challenge with technology is that it never stands still. You have to constantly re-imagine the future, because we relentlessly chase it. If you take technology and showcase it, you also freeze it in time, which soon passes it by. Even Epcot (originally standing for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) hasn’t managed to stay ahead of today. It’s no longer a glimpse of the future, but rather a quaint testimonial to what the future might have been.

Technology Fades, but Stories Live On

So, in the world of Disney, the power of stories has stayed as fresh and powerful as the day they were first told. But the lure of technology has rapidly faded, necessitating constant overhauls and retrofits. The lesson I’ve learned from that? Technology in itself is not an end goal, but rather the means to an end. Technology for humans started when we first realized that materials from our environment could be re-purposed to give us an advantage. The stone axe, the spear or the bow and arrow had no inherent magic. Their value lay in the things they let us do. Technology in and of itself is a empty promise, it only takes on meaning when it allows us to do something we couldn’t do yesterday. And that’s why we drive technology forward, pushing our advantage through the tools we adopt. Technology is a factor in the equation of human productivity, but it’s the result of the equation that matters.

Stories, however, speak to the heart of the human condition. They resonate with a different part of our brain. Technology gives us tools. Stories give us our soul. In looking at which of Walt’s two great loves eventually emerged triumphant in the hearts and minds of guests, it’s clear that stories strike closer to home. And in that is a very timely lesson for us. We have become infatuated with technology, but we should remember that it’s how we apply that technology to do very human things that matters. And it’s those things that will eventually make their way into our stories.

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Dreams Make a Difference – Part 1

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 2

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 3

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 4

Dreams Make a Difference – Part 5