One of the kick-off speakers at our Impact conference last October was Bob Weis, the former President of Walt Disney Imagineering and author of the new book Dream Chasing.
One of the things he talked about was the relationship between the creative and design teams at Imagineering, and the operators who run Disney’s theme parks, hotels, and cruise ships.
“There’s an operating group that operates the parks and runs a business, and then there’s the Imagineering group. And…there’s this point where there’s a turnover, where you actually hand the keys to the operator and it belongs to them. …There’s [times] where we’ve handed something over and the audience has gone really wild for it, and so suddenly there’s a three-hour queue line, and…they have to distribute the audience… And once a while, the operating team will say, ‘Well, we figured it was going to be good, but we didn’t figure it was going to be really good.'”
“And I so I developed the technical expression for that, which is, ‘We don’t do sh***-y.’ It was kind of a reminder to people that if you’re going to spend a billion dollars on something, and you’re going to have 720 people work on it for six or eight years, you’re probably not trying to make it bad. So we’re not like Pixar, in the sense that Pixar can just keep re-editing the movie forever until they like it. We actually are building things out of concrete, out of machinery, robotics, lighting, effects, all that stuff. …We have to build up our sense of confidence as it’s happening. But there isn’t a scenario…where you can get there and say, ‘Oh, too bad. I guess it didn’t work.'”
To watch highlights from the session, click “play” above. This conversation was recorded at Impact 2024 on October 24, 2024.
Weis was also a guest on our Innovation Answered podcast in October 2024.
