In Walt’s way
Disney has been in the news recently – there is the tie-up with India’s Yashraj Films and there is a new biography about the man out in the market.
I haven’t read the biography yet but having closely followed the lifescape of the Disney organisation, I am amazed by the ability of Walt Disney to attract, inspire and retain some of the best talent in his industry.
His inspirational skills are legendary. It is said that towards the latter part of his life, when Walt Disney’s skills as an artist were failing, he took to playing out his characters. According to Walt Disney: The Biography by Neal Gabler (reviewed here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n11/grei01_.html), Disney performed the entire SnowWhite and Seven Dwarfs story for his animators. It was a three hour performance and the book says, one animator claimed, “that one performance lasted us three years.”
Such was the power of his passion that not only did he inspire his team to perform beyond their abilities but did so without really sharing the limelight with anyone else. And given that Disney was always hiring people who were more talented than he was, it is amazing how he managed to retain people at all. I think that the Disney success story shows us that talent attracts talent. Also talent is motivated to perform when it sees that there are others who are capable of taking up a similar challenge.
In the case of Walt Disney, he spared himself no effort at raising the bar on the performances he put up or, on expanding the scope of his organisation. He was a standard setter. He moved from making cartoon characters to animation films to setting up amusement parks while raising the standards on delivery with each new deliverable.
The process of managing talent is a fascinating one and the Disney story points to some of the key principles involved. It shows us that we need to:
§ Drop all reservations of hiring people more talented than we are
§ Inspire, inspire and inspire
§ Lead through personal example
§ Raise the bar
Do you have any more to add? Please write in to us and let’s hope we can get a good chat going at our blog…
D5 Creation
Very interesting. Certain parts of the article like hiring more talented people and raising the bar reminds of Bill Gates. To me, in talent management, the focus should be more on the person. Henri Ford said once “I hire a man, not his history”.