Page 109 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

90 The Disney Way

Consider organizing teams around processes. If visitors were to have visited
EPCOT’s METLife exhibit several years ago, they would have come in contact
with many different departments: merchandising, food service, attractions,
maintenance, and horticulture. To the guest, the barriers to providing service
were invisible. But cast members recognized problems in delivering the great
service we have come to expect. For example, whose job was it to clean up the
Body Wars attraction if someone got sick? Was it maintenance or attractions?
So they decided to organize around the process. Everyone associated with the
attraction now is a member of one team. Their job is to make sure the guest
has a pleasant and memorable experience. The whole team is focused on the
guest experience and not on who is responsible for what.
Restructuring an organization’s operations around teams goes a long way
toward breaking down rigid managerial barriers. What results is a win-win
situation. Lower-level employees feel empowered when they are encouraged
to voice opinions and make suggestions in a group that includes a manager.
In turn, the organization derives the enormous benefit of being able to draw
from a valuable source of new ideas and knowledge. The hierarchy remains,
but the distance between managers and employees is diminished.
The Walt Disney Company well understands that worthwhile sugges-
tions can be lost because employees will hesitate to make them in a normal
hierarchical business atmosphere. That’s why the Gong Show exists. But in
addition to giving employees specific venues for making suggestions, top
Disney executives go out of their way to solicit advice from staff members,
those front-line people who hear guests’ comments and see their reactions.
In 1994, for example, Michael Eisner was walking through an EPCOT
computer technology exhibit called “Innoventions.” It was anything but
innovative. There was nothing particularly imaginative or inspiring about
the technology displays, and the CEO was not pleased with it. So he stopped
and asked some of the greeters at the exhibit if they had any ideas about how
to liven it up. Told that another cast member by the name of Mike Goames
talked a lot about what needed to be done to brighten up the place, the CEO
approached him to ask for some ideas. Impressed by what Goames had to
say, Eisner asked him to detail his suggestions in a memo. (Goames suggested
that the exhibit should look more like a technical trade fair, showcasing new
technologies and experimental things like wrist telephones.)
We recently told this story about Eisner and Goames at a public seminar
where two employees of the local Disney retail store were in attendance. After
the seminar, they approached us and one of them, the store manager, remarked,
“Michael Eisner has never been in our store. But if he ever does visit, I really