In this episode, we talk with Bob Weis, the former president of the legendary Imagineering division at Disney, and author of the new book Dream Chasing: My Four Decades of Success and Failure with Walt Disney Imagineering.
If you’ve been to a Disney theme park, resort, or cruise ship, you’ve experienced Weis’ work. His first job at Disney was selling popcorn, ice cream, and balloons in the Disneyland theme park, and by the time he left the company, he had helped open parks in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Orlando, and he also had a hand in rethinking the California Adventure theme park in Anaheim after it got off to a rough start.
His book covers all of that, and Weis will be sharing his perspective on creativity and innovation at our Impact 2024 conference in Boston next month.
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Here’s a snippet from this episode in which Weis talks about what happened when someone new took over as head of Disney’s theme park division.
Scott Kirsner: What’s your advice about handling [management transitions], and ensuring that you don’t run into that issue where the new [leader] comes in and says, “Let’s clear the boards. I want to kill all the old projects, and let’s start only new projects.”
Bob Weis: One of the things that Bob Chapek said to me when he came in was, “I’ve asked all the parks what the what the biggest problem in the park business is” — he was coming in as head of parks, not CEO [at that time.] He said, “Everybody tells me the biggest three problems in the park business are Imagineering, Imagineering, and Imagineering.” Now, imagine that’s your first day at work with your new boss.
There is a natural conflict between the creative people who are trying to think about the future and build things that are for the future, and the people who operate things every day.
Scott Kirsner: Well, what did he mean by that?
Bob Weis: He didn’t know, but he felt like it was time to, you know, do exactly what you said — go in and throw a grenade, start everything over.
There is a natural conflict between the creative people who are trying to think about the future and build things that are for the future, and the people who operate things every day. And in some ways, it’s like there are people who are really good — and I don’t mean this disrespectfully — at running trains on time, but they’re not necessarily the same people who design a new train. And so there’s a built-in conflict, always, where there’s a sense that Imagineering is doing something, [and] it’s too expensive, it’s too big, it’s too slow, it’s not going to work. And then all of a sudden, Tower of Terror opens, and it’s a game-changer on attendance. Or Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge. It can be a very frustrating process for people who are in the day-to-day operation of it, because they’re usually excited to see new things, but these things take two or three years or more. They take lots of money. They take lots of resources.
But anyway, I took on Bob’s challenge. I realized I probably had a few months to convince Bob that Imagineering was a fantastic organization, and so I showed him people, process, ideas — and we left him a believer. He was the one who turned on so many projects during that tenure that we had with him as head of parks. This is where the [Disney’s California Adventure] experience came in, because it had had such an appreciable change effect on the Anaheim Resort that Bob could see that capital investment in parks was the most valuable thing he could do in the business. And so he needed an Imagineering that was efficient, that was good, but at the same time could deliver around the world. With Bob, we queued up a lot of projects around the world, all of which got [put] on hold during Covid, but then slowly inked back. That was a huge growth spurt there, but it started with a very skeptical client, a very skeptical partner.
