http://huffpost.com/us/entry/6520290
Disney CEO Readies Magic Carpet for Exit
You know them well. Perhaps too well.
The
Fab Five and their friends.
From Kermit the Frog to Buzz Lightyear. From Iron Man to Darth Vader.
Among the stable of American
cultural touchstones, they stand emblematic as a cross-generational binder of a people and a product. More a symbol of America in its minted-by-Wall-Street and cemented-on-Main-Street role as
a global ambassadorthan Lady Liberty herself, the Walt Disney Company has risen from a cartoon maker of its eponymous animator to a warehouse of media brands unrivaled in its sheer breadth.
And it is
that last part that might well be a big part of why
the 'remaking' of Disney under the direction of outgoing Chairman and CEO Robert A. "Bob" Iger may well signal the decline of the brand itself. Mickey Mouse is Disney. Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck are Disney. As are Pluto and Goofy. But, once we move beyond the endearingly drawn and meticulously marketed page jumpers sketched by Disney --
the man and not the brand -- and
his Nine Old Men, the marquee becomes harder to define as being Disney.
Such was the intent of Bob Iger when he succeeded Michael D. Eisner in his transition from one-time weatherman to programming executive and now chieftain of a media empire. A noted manager and delegator, two defining words not in sync with the traditional studio head, Iger went about
acquiring content creators as the steward of America's premier producer of content that defied the limits of age and transcended cultures.
With success unrivaled, it is hard to conceive how the man who delivered for Wall Street, for the financial community, could have
somehow diminished the brand or worse. Then again, it is often difficult to analyze the climb from the summit. Still, the fall is a given.
"It's in our best interest to put some of the old rules aside and create new ones and follow the consumer -- what the consumer wants and where the consumer wants to go," said
Mr. Iger back in 2005.
Disney, Walt Disney, understood the people and the product. He knew of the wants of the consumer, often before they themselves knew, and the needs of the machine of manufacture. He also instilled a sense of significance at his company of the work being done and for the workers, or cast members in Disney jargon, doing it.
As Mr. Eisner said to the
Harvard Business Review in February of 2000:
[A] few years ago, I was walking around Walt Disney World, midnight, by myself. I got to a pavilion that was being renovated. I figured I would climb over the barricade and see what was going on. I started walking around, and pretty fast a junior security officer came toward me with a flashlight. I introduced myself. Luckily he had heard of me. So, we got talking, and he knew where all the plans were. He wasn't involved in the construction at all, but he knew all about it. He was interested. He cared. He went through every page of the plans with me. He knew everything, and he really was passionate and intelligent about the project. It was obvious to me that this guy was special.
Now, while it can rightfully be said that times change, the life cycle of a brand is dictated by its ability to deliver the product welcomed by a wanting marketplace. When that product drifts into territory foreign to the consumer, the once reliable revenue streams created by these individual consumers will follow.
To date, the Walt Disney Company has
largely drawn from the remainder. A sizable crowd, no doubt. But, there is a difference between the toe-dipper and the marathoner. For years, for generations, Disney has been the ultimate beneficiary of the latter. Successively, without pause, families turned to Disney for their prepackaged entertainment of all sorts.
And as
Ron Suskind -- whose son Owen is autistic -- documented in his book
Life, Animated about piercing the autism spectrum through the dialogue and songs of Disney's animated movies, so strong is the bond between the product and the people that Disney's content has
even been adapted for therapy.
Whether speaking of an outing to the multiplex to catch the latest from its feature animation division, raiding the store aisles of its consumer products division's offerings or making that pilgrimage to Walt Disney World or Disneyland, the Walt Disney Company
has delivered without fail.
In the cyber world, Disney has built a fountainhead of near-endless adulation that runs perilously close to cult status. While in the world outside of its electronic confines, families have even migrated from points afar to build "the Disney Driven life" centered at or adjacent to Disney's parks and resorts.
But, perhaps as the bellwether of the new century and new economy, even among these most loyal and forgiving of fans of all that represents the iconic Disney brand a splintering of sorts has challenged whether Disney is deserving of such praise and devotion.
Drawn from a report co-authored by this contributor:
Starting in the mid-1990s,
superfanAl Lutz became a prominent voice on the Disney brand as the Burbank-based media behemoth increasingly relied on the cash heavy theme parks and resorts as a backstop for failures and deficiencies in other segments of the company. Using at first the
MousePlanet.com imprimatur and later that of
MiceChat.com, Lutz championed the vaunted Disney of Walt's day.Delivering management changes at the parks, specifically in Anaheim at the industry making Disneyland, Mr. Lutz became a well-known personality and pundit of the Disney product from the consumers' lens. With that, for the first time, Disney found itself being questioned not by Wall Street but by Main Street.
Not long after Mr. Lutz launched into the Disney-verse, Stephen Frearson, an import from the United Kingdom, premiered
wdwmagic.com -- a Walt Disney World centered site. And around both, communities grew and conversations were had. Still today, these conversations occur with regularity. Only, the dollars spent on Disney by these most devoted of fans have dwindled.
Visit any one of these sites today and you will likely find discussions ranging from the minutia of Disney's parks and resorts to the import facing the Walt Disney Company with no apparent successor in place for the Wall Street-maker and
Main Street-breaker Bob Iger. Who, somewhat ironically, was ushered into his role as CEO by Walt's nephew, the late
Roy E. Disney, after the twenty-one year tenure of Mr. Eisner.
Now, as the play is on for that post, Disney has few inside candidates for the role. Disney CFO Jay Rasulo, an often puckish glad-hander, and Parks & Resorts Chairman Tom Staggs, an oddly waifish man of anemic personality, are the only two names in the already full throttle effort to succeed Iger. In 2010, they
actually swapped jobs. Yet, with pause, many media types note that Disney experienced
the greatest period of growth in the company's history when it last went outside of the company to fill the top spot.
That was in 1984, when Sid Bass and Roy Disney brought Michael Eisner on board along with Frank Wells and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
In spite of his effortless transition from an entertainment executive into an 'Uncle Walt'-like figure and widely admired media head, Mr. Eisner was ultimately dismissed from a company he is both credited with having saved and criticized for having somehow diminished. And yet, it is Bob Iger who has almost certainly done the latter by approaching a creative powerhouse like a floor manager at a manufacturing camp on the outskirts of Shenzhen.
In his successor, it may now be time, for only the second time since its founding in 1923 as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, for the Walt Disney Company to close the door on rotating internal candidates into this role and bring back the perspective only an outsider can deliver.
As to the consumer, whose focus is not on slick and sappy marketing but the actual product delivered, Disney is not a jumble or inventory of creative content. It is not a Time Warner or a Comcast. Disney has the liability and the gift of being Disney.
Only these days, more of its most zealous followers are straying as they question whether Disney remains Disney. Whether the company that delivered
Steamboat Willie and
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has any connection -- any sense of heritage -- with a company spitting out popcorn and pop culture products under the shingles of Marvel Entertainment and Lucasfilm placed upon a castle built by a man named Walt Disney.
Or, for that matter, a studio stuck in a cycle of sequels named Pixar led by the equally entrenched John Lasseter and Ed Catmull.
"Sometimes
you just have to be there with your people. You have to be in the same room with them, look them in the eyes, hear their voices," said former Disney CEO Eisner.
As his successor Mr. Iger said at the
Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit held just last fall of the typical Disney consumer, "We have no idea who they are. We don't know what they are willing to spend, what they like and what they don't like."
Walt knew. Michael too.
Gary Snyder is a member of the Redstone family, whose company, National Amusements, owns Viacom and CBS, among other media assets. He is an advisor on Western media and culture to China.
