Designer Times by Bob Gurr
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LaughingPlace reader Nico Smedley asks about:
....The behind the scenes interactions between yourself, Walt, and other staff in WED/WDI or throughout the upper echelons of the company's administration in the "good ole' days." In other words, to borrow your phrase, what exactly was it like interacting with Walt when he became "tickled pink" with your hard work? How did others around the office see him? How was the atmosphere at the Disney company in the past as compared to nowadays from what you know?
62. Walt Disney Company - Then and Now
What was Walt like....what was working at Disney
like....what do you think of the Company today? Disney fans consistently ask
these same questions of all the early employees still around after fifty years.
Well, times change, tools change, but most folks are who they are at their time
in the saddle.
To get a grasp on the fifty year Disney difference, take a look at the business
tools. We had the telephone, pencil and paper, the IBM Seletric Typewriter, some
folks even had a Dictaphone. That was the gizmo that an executive could talk
into thru a speaking tube and it would turn out a mechanical drum recording. A
typist could then replay this thing and put words on paper with the typewriter.
Why, you could actually make maybe five carbon copies at the same time. Make a
mistake and you'd need Whiteout. Some fancy typewriters even had a backspace
erasing feature.
The telephone was real simple....put your finger in a rotary dial and spin the
wheel to talk to anyone in the company. The phone company had live lady
operators who could poke and push wires into big fancy switchboards and connect
you with anyone in the US, even overseas thru underwater cables. You didn't have
to enter all those numbers like today, the ladies would do it all for you. If
you were lucky to have a secretary, you never dialed....you'd just say "get me
so and so".
If you didn't have a secretary and couldn't type....real easy, just write by
hand, one copy, no keyboard needed. When you needed lots of copies of things, go
get the Mimeograph Machine, a messy monster that left blue dye all over your
hands when you screwed up.
Running a business was so simple. You had time to perform actual work since you
were not busy typing memos, reports, and such. You were not in the publishing
business using Xerox and page collators. Email never got in the way of reading
the vast amount of inbox copies of all the great communications from hundreds of
co-workers. No, you did REAL WORK. Thank God, we built Disneyland before Mr.
Xerox invented his publishing empire.
Why WRITE stuff when you DO stuff.
Today, most large companies have the latest in business tools; Xerox - collators
- computers - laptops - Blackberries - PDA's - pagers - cell phones - Email -
internet - video/phone conferencing - software applications for thousands of
tasks - Fedex - satellite feeds - iPods to stick in your ear so you can whistle
while you work - PowerPoint instead of a pointer stick for your presentations.
Presentations? Good gosh, Walt just came around to your room every few days to
see what you were doing. What a concept....one on one with the guy who is
leading the band! Walt had it right. Go personally check on everyone to make
sure we were all on the same track. Guess what? He'd see new ideas along the way
and could instantly improve the path everyone was taking.
The projects would not need coordinators or project managers. Everyone did the
coordinator stuff as a matter of course while doing the work. Today if a
coordinator came around to gather info, you'd have to stop your work just to
explain details to some new soul who had little knowledge of what the work
entailed. Managing the work can stop the work! Why have long meetings followed
by reams of reports circulated to other folks. Look at all the modern business
tools we have today. When we were building Disneyland, none of them had been
invented yet, so they could not interfere with our WORK!
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