Page 229 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

210 The Disney Way

The message for management, then, is to look at your business in a
holistic manner the way Disney looks at its show. Carefully examine all the
details that affect the way your product or service is provided to customers.
In other words, go the extra mile, or as the folks at Disney might say, “Bump
the lamp.”
This cryptic phrase originated when the movie Roger Rabbit was being
made, and it relates to a scene in which someone bumps into a lamp, causing
the shadow it casts to wobble. Initially, there were no shadows in the scene,
which the animators immediately spotted as being unrealistic, so they went
back and did the hundreds of drawings needed to bring perfection to these
few seconds of the film.
“Bump the lamp” has become shorthand at Disney for doing things the
right way, down to the tiniest detail. The Walt Disney Company has raised the
bar of performance—to “bump the lamp,” despite their well-publicized man-
agement blunders of the past decade. In the next chapter, we explain how CEO
Bob Iger is re-creating the “magic” throughout The Walt Disney Company.

Questions to Ask

■ Do your cross-functional teams map all the critical details of processes
in order to determine which steps can be safely eliminated?
■ Do your employees and teams make quality and time measurements
of their critical processes?
■ Do your employees routinely ask, “How can we do this better?”
■ Do you include meticulous attention to detail as part of your organi-
zation’s values?
■ Do you reward people in your organization for detecting inconsistencies
or defects in the products you produce?

Actions to Take

■ Appoint a “details squad” to get fanatical about the details that make
a difference to your customers.
■ Continuously evaluate the effectiveness of your processes.
■ Make attention to detail a part of organizational values.
■ Evaluate how “little things” can make a difference in the way you
serve customers or turn out products.
■ Don’t assume you can wow a customer with the big picture at the
expense of details.