[byoung2]

I haven't read the new book yet, but I'd be interested in your take on Disney's trajectory over the last, say, 2 decades. It seems to have strayed pretty far from Walt's original vision, largely due to the actions of Bob Iger. He took what used to be a company that was fueled by creativity and turned it into a machine that strip mines IP and extracts value. Iger purchased IP (Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Fox) as a risk mitigation strategy since you get an established brand you can exploit on day 1. But in doing so he killed the soul of Disney, which was built on big creative bets (literally sell the car to make a movie, mortgage the house to build a park).

[eries]

I recently had the chance to meet Abigail Disney, who has been a very vocal critic of what's happened to her grandfather's ethos. It sounds quite sad.

[byoung2]

I recently left Disney after working there for almost 5 years. It's much worse on the inside than people realize. Very sad indeed.

[th0raway]

Disney has an especially difficult problem, as optimizing for revenue for an org might actually lower total revenue for the entire company. See how many movies do badly because people expect them to see them in D+ quickly. A company this complicated need a very special kind of leadership, along with creative teams that reliably deliver hits. Now the batting average is way worse than it needs to be, and a lot of the leadership is just uninterested on the bigger problems, and more focused on personal strip mining. How many RSUs you get becomes more important than making sure the stock ever goes up (and it's not going up)

[byoung2]

In some ways that “problem” is an escape hatch for Disney. Other studios have to write off huge losses for underperforming movies (and Disney definitely does this too). But even a flop can drive Disney+ subscriptions, park visits, merchandise purchases, hotel stays, cruise bookings, etc. Star Wars is an excellent example, even though many of the Disney era movies underperformed (it’s hard to say flop), Disney has made back more than the purchase price of Lucasfilm, the budgets of all movies and shows, and construction costs of 2 Galaxy’s Edge lands and turned a profit. They’re like Costco in that way where the food court doesn’t need to profit as long as they sell memberships.

[shimman]

From what I hear it seems like any other large labor hating corporation. Does Disney have a unique take on face stomping compared to Comcast or Walmart?

[joshuaS98]

@eries I have a question at the bottom for you

I happen to think a lot about this exact case. Walt Disney was an innovater who hated to repeat himself. He took enormous leaps of faith multiple times during his career in doing something completely new/different. Snow White: first full length feature film, Disneyland, and then EPCOT. He also hated making sequels on animated movies, he thought of it as a cash grab. That's why sequels like Bambi 2 and Cinderella 2 came decades after his death.

The reason I believe for all this is that founders like this are visionaries that are hard to corrupt. Walt had a strange relationship with money, he didn't long to have a lot of it, yet he knew he needed it to build his extraordinary projects. Ofcourse a founder with no care for money is a recipe for disaster, thus his brother Roy, an accountant often critizing Walt's ideas made the perfect match for the powerful duo that they were.

When Walt died, his vision died with him. The company slowly got handed over to other CEOs like Eisner and Iger. They just see the world very different, they just needed to secure the future of the company and make as much money as possible, sequels started to come out, park prices drastically went up while reinnovation stayed far behind.

We all know that the innovative soul of Disney died with him and that's very sad. But on the bright side, his story can still inspire others to make their magic.

My question to @eries; I studied business in the university of Rotterdam before coming a developer. Our bachelor was a 4 year course with your 'Lean startup method' at it's core. One thing that bothers me a lot in this day and age is the culture of reiterating and 'ship fast'. I look up a lot to Walt and his vision was quite the opposite. He built stuff and had a special eye for quality before releasing anything. He had the nerve to remove parts of a movie where artists had worked 8 months for the sake of the quality of a piece. I feel we live in an age with no sense for quality anymore. We just are to re-iterate as fast as possible and build shitty MVPs to see if there is demand. I get the idea, really.

But honestly, as an industry, at the same the bar for quality is extremely low. And it's in the entire industry from startups to SME to Enterprises. With AI, this trend only seems to become worse, we generate more, but not necessarily better. We are going to be in a time where signal to noise ratio will be incredibly low, and the demand for quality products is going to be up.

I hope it doesn't sound too bitter, but I just long for that old philosophy of quality first. Curious what you think about that!!