

The Disney Recipe (2013) - wglb
https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-makes-a-good-corporate-st

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philwelch
You know how good tech companies feel like they're run by engineers and not
MBA's? You get the strong sense from these charts that Disney was run by
artists and not MBA's. Any other company at the time wouldn't stand for the
frivolity of doodling cartoon characters on this kind of document, and even
today it would come across as forced, but it comes across as genuine here.
It's even lettered like a cartoon. Companies always feel more "real" when the
people running them can also do the actual work. Could you imagine Bob Iger or
Michael Eisner doodling a cartoon like this to explain their business
strategies?

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notahacker
MBAs are pretty big fans of _paying someone else_ to make their internal
presentations look shiny...

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EvanL
here is bigger version:
[https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2013/05/disn...](https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2013/05/disney-2.jpeg)

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vlunkr
Thanks for that. I don't know why they would post that unreadable version in
the arcticle

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jsprogrammer
AFAICT, small, unreadable pictures is SOP for most blogs.

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trequartista
It's amazing how Disney hasn't deviated from this strategy and vision even
today. If anything, the acquisitions of Marvel and Lucas Films reinforce this
strategy.

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taylorwc
The interesting departure from this strategy, though still related, is their
interest in ESPN. I read (looking for the source, will add when I can recall
it) that ESPN accounts for nearly 25% of Disney's overall earnings.

Edit: finally found the source! [https://500ish.com/the-9-bullet-points-of-
doom-for-espn-a692...](https://500ish.com/the-9-bullet-points-of-doom-for-
espn-a692d0f48182)

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cousin_it
So the main idea is to cross-promote the same IP (e.g. Mickey Mouse) in many
different media (films, TV, music, comics, books, merchandise, Disneyland).
Kinda like superhero media today.

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zecho
Superhero media today, owned by Disney.

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cousin_it
Good catch :-) Time Warner too, though.

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mergy
Not such a fan of this chart. Their org chart though was really great. I
really appreciated the different take on org charts that show purpose and
include the clients/customers as creatively and genuinely as they did.

[http://mergy.org/2015/07/disney-org-chart/](http://mergy.org/2015/07/disney-
org-chart/)

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bedhead
Interesting. Not sure how I feel about a children's media company (or any
company for that matter) that has "Morgue" as a division within the management
group.

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medmunds
I'd guess that's "morgue" meaning historical archive, not dead body storage.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgue#Alternate_meanings](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgue#Alternate_meanings)

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LiweiZ
I found a comment in the hbr's link([https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-makes-a-
good-corporate-st](https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-makes-a-good-corporate-st)):
by Faisal Khan 18 days ago

Though I have great respect for Todd but this piece do no justice with Walt
Disney's strategic process and what's the message in the drawing for today's
planners. The Disney recipe is definitely missing from this article and
shouldn't be tagged as that at all :).

Can anyone elaborate this?

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ykl
Every time I see this chart, I like to post this quote from Walt Disney:

"We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies"

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wglb
This is drawn from [https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-makes-a-good-corporate-
st](https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-makes-a-good-corporate-st) which discusses it
in a bit more detail.

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dang
Yes. We changed the url to that from
[http://flowingdata.com/2015/07/14/disney-business-
strategy-c...](http://flowingdata.com/2015/07/14/disney-business-strategy-
chart-1957/).

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AngeloAnolin
Seems to me they are structured in a holacracy[1] distribution.

[1] [http://www.holacracy.org/](http://www.holacracy.org/)

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ekianjo
Oh you mean like this way of working where you need to pay to discover what it
is actually about?

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Kluny
... what?

