Here’s an interesting conversation with Disney CEO Robert Iger on the a16z podcast:
Alan Horn was the kind of studio executive that knew how to manage creative talent, and not just talent but the talent that manages the creative talent. You figure out how to insert yourself into a process in a benign way where you’re looking over peoples shoulder but not making them feel paranoid. You’re giving them advice on what to consider but not ordering them to change things. You’re being patient. You’re also understanding the anxiety that they feel and you’re not trying to exacerbate it.
There was an interesting part where he said that executives can sometimes nit-pick things to show that they are experts, but that is the exact opposite of the feedback creatives need to succeed. Sound familiar?
This talk of creatives, by the way, increasingly applies to technology companies and yes, even governments. These jobs are performed by knowledge workers rather than interchangeable assembly line workers. They need to be treated differently. Too much of government bureaucracy was formulated in the industrial age.
Here’s an example of how that goes. Today, program managers are handed an effort designed by people somewhere in the bureaucracy. PMs are often expected to go execute the baseline plan rather than have an integral part in formulating the requirements, budget, and acquisition strategy to go get it done.
That is also how Disney treated directors, leading to relatively poor performance. Pixar was a new company with a completely different culture and set of technologies. It was bought by Disney, and rather than allow the mothership to absorb Pixar’s culture, Bob Iger made sure that Disney culture adopted Pixar’s:
We ended up adopting a lot of Pixar’s creative processes. I’ll give you just one example. At Pixar, basically every movie they made was driven from the idea of a director. The director pitches an idea. Pixar says we like your idea, and you go make the movie. There’s a passion that exists deep within that director that is evident in every single step of production. In Disney’s case, we assigned ideas to directors. A director would be brought in to direct a movie that was someone else’s idea. The connection didn’t exist — the passion didn’t exist. There are other little things, even logistically.
In Pixar, every movie got assigned a room. The movie lived in that room full time. The director put pictures all around the wall, did all meetings about the movie in this room. The movie started taking on a tangible quality of existing in a space, whereas in Disney we had one room that all the movies shared. That’s subtle, but a sense of place and home and collegial feeling.
In order to turn Disney and its other brands like ABC around, Bob Iger had to implement a controlled process of decentralization. Here’s how he thought about that:
I think sometimes decentralization is misinterpreted to mean anarchy. It can’t be that. Pushing down decision-making, empowerment, and a sense of ownership into organizations is important as long as it generally conforms to what leadership expects and there is a very careful balance. I felt at Disney, too many decisions were being made centrally and there wasn’t a sense of empowerment and ownership. Some people who knew more about their businesses than any central organization were being deprived of their ability to apply their knowledge. That needed to change. That said, I thought that managing the brand and its qualities had to be done centrally and consistently.
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