Page 43 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

24 The Disney Way

Canada, and the United States. Under the old way of doing business, leaders
from the six areas involved would have gotten together to devise a plan, then
taken pieces of that plan back to their respective countries and started work-
ing separately.
This time, though, things were to be different. Instead of following
marching orders issued from the top, an empowered team was charged with
examining the options and coming up with an agenda. Team leader Jerry
McColgin wasted no time in setting the tone for how he wanted his group
to tackle the work ahead. His first order of business was to insist on a new
layout for the team’s office space at its Indiana facility. Out went the walls,
the cubicles, the compartmentalized look to create a space that resembled an
old-fashioned newsroom: open, convivial, and barrier-free.
The project officially got underway with a five-day Dream Retreat for 40
people from all over the world. There, in the dead of an Indiana winter, the
Global No-Frost team assembled its collective talent.
The retreat began with people talking about their personal dreams and their
sense of the team’s mission. The individual interests of each sector were weighed
against the overall goals of the company as the team strove to achieve a realistic
balance for the project. As the five days unfolded, however, something exciting
and gratifying began to happen: the barriers between the various functional
areas started to crumble. Technicians accepted responsibility for engineering
tasks; engineers listened attentively to marketing concerns; marketers assumed
the critical business role of evaluating suppliers. Even the usually standoffish
finance people willingly jumped into the trenches with purchasing and market-
ing folks. The flow of ideas became a flood. By the end of the retreat, everyone
was working together for the common good of the team.
The Dream Retreat was an essential first step on a project that ended up
surpassing everyone’s initial expectations. Never before had new Whirlpool
products arrived on the market so quickly. That’s because the Global No-Frost
team met every deadline and achieved every goal. When, in the middle of the
project, team members found that they needed to lower costs further than
originally planned in order to increase competitive position, they rallied to
the cause and did it without cutting quality. And here’s the icing on the cake:
the entire project came in under budget. It’s not unusual for our clients to
credit a Dream Retreat for keeping costs in check.
As Brian Hartke, manager of project engineering at the Bristol-Myers
Squibb Company’s Mead Johnson Nutritional division, aptly points out: “If
you change something in the planning stage, it costs you a dollar. If you change