Page 288 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

The Magic Continues 269

were in Walt’s day. And the way the company sees it, living those beliefs still
means working hard to exceed a guest’s expectations and always delivering the
“good show.” What’s more, if customers are the reason for being, it naturally
follows that everyone—cast members, partners, suppliers, and so on—must be
united in their effort to reach the goal. This is the Believe principle in action.

Thriving on Challenge

One of the initial decisions that Michael Eisner and Frank Wells made in the
1980s involved approval of the script for the decidedly “un-Disneylike” Down
and Out in Beverly Hills, an R-rated film far removed from the studio’s typi-
cal family-oriented offerings. The studio had already begun to move gingerly
away from its traditional fare before Eisner and Wells arrived on the scene, but
with the exception of Splash, no movie produced by the previous manage-
ment had been a hit. The early successes of Down and Out in Beverly Hills,
Ruthless People, and a series of other film releases proved that like Walt, the
team of Eisner and Wells had uncanny instincts for what audiences wanted.
After Wells’s death on Easter Sunday 1994, one of Eisner’s most daring
moves, and one that left both critics and competitors sputtering, was the
1996 acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC for $18.9 billion. The marriage,
which cemented a relationship that began when ABC helped Walt Disney
open Disneyland in 1955, silenced critics who had questioned whether Eisner
had the nerve to make a really big acquisition.
In another gutsy move, Eisner chose to renovate a seedy theater in New
York’s bawdy Times Square area and to bring The Lion King to Broadway. At
the time the commitment was made, no one could say for sure that a neighbor-
hood known for its sex shops and drug trafficking could be successfully trans-
formed. The musical has been sold out since opening and long ago recouped
its estimated $20 to $25 million production cost.
Eisner made another bold departure from Disney tradition by sinking
$800 million into the construction of Disney’s Animal Kingdom at Walt
Disney World, which opened in April 1998. “It’s basically anti-Disney,” Joe
Rohde, creative executive with Walt Disney Imagineering and lead designer
of Disney’s Animal Kingdom in charge of the park, said in an I.D. magazine
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interview. Not only does the 540-acre park feature live animals instead of
the much more easily controlled animated ones, but it also strips away illu-
sion in a fashion totally uncharacteristic of Disney.