Comment by byoung2
7 hours ago
I haven't read the new book yet, but I'd be interested in your take on Disney's trajectory over the last, say, 2 decades. It seems to have strayed pretty far from Walt's original vision, largely due to the actions of Bob Iger. He took what used to be a company that was fueled by creativity and turned it into a machine that strip mines IP and extracts value. Iger purchased IP (Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Fox) as a risk mitigation strategy since you get an established brand you can exploit on day 1. But in doing so he killed the soul of Disney, which was built on big creative bets (literally sell the car to make a movie, mortgage the house to build a park).
I recently had the chance to meet Abigail Disney, who has been a very vocal critic of what's happened to her grandfather's ethos. It sounds quite sad.
I recently left Disney after working there for almost 5 years. It's much worse on the inside than people realize. Very sad indeed.
Disney has an especially difficult problem, as optimizing for revenue for an org might actually lower total revenue for the entire company. See how many movies do badly because people expect them to see them in D+ quickly. A company this complicated need a very special kind of leadership, along with creative teams that reliably deliver hits. Now the batting average is way worse than it needs to be, and a lot of the leadership is just uninterested on the bigger problems, and more focused on personal strip mining. How many RSUs you get becomes more important than making sure the stock ever goes up (and it's not going up)
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From what I hear it seems like any other large labor hating corporation. Does Disney have a unique take on face stomping compared to Comcast or Walmart?