Business Book Summaries

Walt Disney built one of the most durable firms in American economic history. The firm is so ingrained in our culture that in 1993 Disney actually found buyers for one-hundred-year bonds, known as “Sleeping Beauties.”

It seems that Walt learned not only to look back nostalgically, but also to get half the world to look at this era wearing his rose-coloured glasses. It seems that Walt learned early on how to nurture creativity despite a hard-hearted environment. This was perfect training for Hollywood. Walt Disney was destined to invent Fantasyland.

Disney launched Laugh-O-Gram with two principles in mind: First, he did not want to be anybody’s employee. Second, Disney wanted to leapfrog current technology.

Half a century before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs tinkered in their garages, Walt Disney dragged a stopaction camera into his garage and started experimenting with more sophisticated drawings. The results were stunning. Because the figures looked like more than paper cut-outs, the characters could have some personality.

Walt Disney’s movies were stunning innovations. But Disney did not fool himself into thinking he was a creative genius like Shakespeare or Picasso. Since every major film could potentially bankrupt his studio, he knew that he also had to focus on making money – or else he would be tossed out of the turbulent industry.

Disney’s innovations did not stop at merchandising the characters on the screen. We must give him credit for teaching the business world the importance of speed too. While other companies might have produced toys based on popular characters, Disney pressed to get those toys and gadgets out sooner – before the characters burst onto the big screen.

Even where Disney had no commercial tie-in, firms often profited as “free riders.” Economists call a firm a free rider if it benefits from another firm’s activities but does not pay for their benefit. This can also be called a “positive externality.”

Walt’s ultimate success with Disneyland brings us to another lesson: The CEO should not be a snob (though Estee lauder had no trouble going after the pocketbooks of snobs). The revival of Disney studio business and the stunning launch of Disneyland in the 1950s were powered by television. If Walt had been snobbish about a new medium called television, Disneyland would not have been an international smash, and his films would have limped along underfinanced.

Television did not just make Disney. Disney made television.

Walt Disney died a very wealthy man, but he did not plunder from his shareholders along the way. Remember, his reigning symbols were a mouse and a duck, not a pig and a wolf.

Walt lived long enough to see Julie Andrews mesmerize audiences as Mary Poppins. It would be easy to wrap Walt Disney’s image up in the American flag and say he was an American saint who only brought joy to children. Was he Mother Teresa? Hell no! He did bring lots of joy to children, but creating joy in children often meant bringing some tears to his staff.

He worked hard and was quick to rip into the inferior work of another cartoonist. No doubt he was sometimes unfair and short-tempered. But he never cheated his chief clients – the children in the audience. Nor did he ever rip off his shareholders. No, he was not Mother Teresa or even Mary Poppins. But the refracted light of America’s great creative geniuses, Thomas Edison and Ben Franklin, certainly shone more than a few rays upon him.

Despite a hard and humbling youth and the harsh discipline of a father who could not keep a job, Walk Disney knew, like Edison and Franklin, that he was destined to become a symbol. During the 1920s, while struggling for an advertising agency, Disney was asked by Ubbe Iwwerks to join in a poker game. Walt declined. He said he was too busy toiling on some sketches? Walt was actually practicing his signature, that simple yet stylish script that instantly tells adults and children that creative fun waits just around the corner, just after the commercial break.

Would you like to read the full summary of Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office?  Please visit BusinessSummaries.com.