Page 131 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

112 The Disney Way

the operation. When The Cheesecake Factory was about to land its first
national bakery account with Darden Restaurants, Darden made some criti-
cal observations of Evelyn’s kitchen operations.
“Darden looked at our company as an entrepreneurial, West Coast com-
pany that had true quality with their cakes,” says Max Byfuglin, president of
The Cheesecake Factory Bakery, Inc. Evelyn was proud of cracking the eggs, but
the first time Darden came to visit us in 1986, they said, “You can’t do that.”
Evelyn was also proud of the butcher tables in the bakery and they said, “You
can’t use those.” After that visit, I got a three-page letter saying that they’d love
to do business with us, but first, here’s a list of the things we would need to do.
We were just building a new bakery down the street, so I was able to incorpo-
rate their suggestions in the areas of quality and safety. That was the beginning
of becoming a national company on the bakery side. Darden has been a great
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partner for us.” As The Cheesecake Factory discovered, a great partnership can
dramatically increase both your reputation and your profitability.

Restructuring Your Business through Partnering

Business alliances, as we said, are formed for any number of reasons. There
is partnering between customer and supplier and between managers and
coworkers. There is also partnering between manufacturing and service
companies; between business, community, and educational institutions;
and between government and industry. In our consulting business, we have
encouraged a multitude of organizations to consider restructuring their busi-
nesses through partnerships. By this we mean a coming together of suppliers,
manufacturers, and service providers to support and strengthen one another’s
positions. We envision quality performance through teamwork. Small
companies can join forces to take on the giants of their industries; big com-
panies can form alliances with smaller companies that are less restricted by
bureaucracy. These joint ventures or strategic alliances champion the sharing
of knowledge, markets, and profits. The Commonwealth Alliance Program
(CAP) reports that businesses now attribute approximately 25 percent of all
revenue to strategic alliances, estimated at $40 trillion.

Certification versus Partnerships

According to old economy rules, customer and supplier partnerships were
defined by a process of vendor certification. The process required the vendor
to adopt a new culture that entailed meeting a wide range of quality and