There is a quote from Steve Jobs near the end of the Biography that talks about the downfall of previous greats. It seems to ring very true for TWDC as well.
The opening echos Walt's as it relates to money too.. we start off
Steve Jobs said:
My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation.
Walt was concerned with money - because he knew it was what empowered him to carry out his visions.. but it wasn't the prime motivation. The delivery of his concept was the primary.
He continues..
Steve Jobs said:
Scully flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.
Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
This is another important aspect (tho Jobs at times took it a bit too far..) - that you must be AHEAD of the customers if you are to deliver that knock out product - that disruptor. That's what Walt did with his theme park - not build a 'better', 'refined' amusement park - he changed the game and understood what guests would like and want, before they even knew it themselves.
The next element is what I think rings the most true for TWDC of the 90s on. I can echo Job's beliefs in this section because I've seen it in my own companies as well.. and what the difference is between passionate companies looking to succeed - and companies and people just looking to continue...
Steve Jobs said:
It's easy to thorw stones at Microsoft. They've clearly fallen from their dominance. They've become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he's really not. He's a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it's never been my goal, and I wonder, in the end, if it was his goal. I admire him for the company he built -- it's impressive -- and I enjoyed working with him. He's bright and actually has a good sense of humor. But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn't copy it well. They totally didn't get it.
I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they're the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. John Akers at IBM was a smart, eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he didn't know anything about the product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guy run the company, the product guys don't matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Scully came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don't think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it.
I have seen this myself in technology companies - and it paralells what has happened at TWDC as well IMO as the company entered the mid eighties and had something to 'prove' and into the 90s as the expectations of public companies has changed with the bredth and access to the markets. @
WDW1974 has eluded to this in other posts about what companies focus on and it's my belief the changes in the stock market from computerized trading, to day trading, to the 24/7 news channels have all contributed to make the companies slaves to the quarterly estimates and deliverables. That pressure on the top, in turn is reflected internally - and top down, the company has been focused on sales and not about building the best products. As Jobs said in the quote, it's a subtle difference, but anyone in business who has been in the world of creating products probably can reflect on that and see past coworkers as one or the other.
Jobs and Walt both believed in building the right product - and the rest would take care of itself. The 'sales first' or in TWDC today, the 'business first', mentality will steer clear of risk and focus on optimization, revenue streams, and ways of eeking a few more drops of blood from the stone.. rather than believe in the product first.
The parallels in this conversation from Jobs echo about Gates and Iger too.
I don't idolize Jobs in any way possible, but some of his attitudes and thoughts about what you set out a company to do.. and be.. reenforce what I've seen myself in the difference between great companies and just companies that manage to book a lot of revenue.
