Page 188 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

Chapter 9

Make Your

Elephant Fly—Plan

The way to get started is to quit talking and get started.
Walt Disney

ision without a means of execution is like a plane without wings
or Dumbo without his ears—it just won’t fly. No matter how
Vdeep a company’s resources are, progress of company projects
greatly depends on the strength of execution, and proper execution requires
thorough and detailed planning, a reality that Walt Disney understood
completely.
No wand-waving or intonations of “abracadabra” preceded the building
of Disney’s Magic Kingdom. The cartoons, movies, theme parks, and all
the rest of the delights that took shape in Walt’s prolific imagination came
into being through a precise process of planning that he employed from the
very beginning of his career. Making a movie is a costly undertaking, but
because animation is especially expensive and labor-intensive, Disney had
to plan carefully to control costs and successfully execute his ideas. Out of
necessity was born a nine-step process that takes a “blue sky” idea and turns
it into reality.
Dumbo, the perennial animated favorite about the flying baby elephant,
was itself a product of this rigorous Disney regimen. By putting process in cre-
ativity—in this case, using a straightforward script and story and resisting the
temptation to experiment with expensive new technologies—Disney and his
animators produced Dumbo in just one year. As one Disney executive has

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