75% of the original Disney+ executive team is no longer at Disney
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Senior leadership at enterprises, in my experience, does very little collaboration. The CEO or the board make a choice to install a senior candidate in some senior position. That senior person drags behind them a retinue of trusted aides and associates, whom they busily install everywhere their reach allows. Most of their activity from that point on is trying to demonstrate that their team is the best, shitting on the remnants of whatever came before them, and forging non-aggression pacts with other people of their rank within the enterprise.
We often saw rolling waves of departures after a senior reshuffle, as departing senior execs took "their people" with them. Why stay if the next boss will consider your existence a threat to their ability to cultivate prominence and influence?
From a business stand point - it makes sense.
You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder. They're loyal, brilliant and quick. Startups that we celebrate on this forum exude this from all their pores.
When you start from scratch it's "easy" to create such an environment. You don't have random people going off and doing random things. Everyone is pointed, focused and hungry to get to the same goal.
If you don't, you run the risk of becoming lazy or hamstrung by politics and red-tape of people who want their rubber stamp to "show something for it". That's Intel vs ARM at the moment.
It's a fine balance. Obviously you don't want "yes men" but you want people who are willing to move as a unit.
I also agree it's terrible. Whole units are ousted because there's a new guy on top. People that gave sometimes decades to the company.
All I'm trying to say is - it's not so clear cut.
> You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder. They're loyal, brilliant and quick. Startups that we celebrate on this forum exude this from all their pores.
You go on vacation and temporarily hand off your support responsibilities to your counterpart on another team. When you return, you find that your counterpart has jammed a half-finished feature into your code, making it unrecognizable.
Your skip lead leaves for another company. Within weeks, half of your division leaves to follow him. Your support burden triples and no one is left to tell you how undocumented legacy functionality was supposed to work.
If startups worked like corporate executives, there would never be a successful one. The entire MO of the executive class is zero attention span, zero focus, and zero memory.
Corp execs should run like startups. Trusting, fast moving units effective in its execution towards a common goal.
When a corp exec replaces a whole layer or unit with their own guys it's because they need to move like a startup does.
Or it could just be cronyism - that's always possible too, but I think we're trying to find a positive/useful reason in this thread.
It's this. In my experience (line manager), when a new C-level is hired, within two years, they've usually replaced 50% of the VP/directors that sit below them in the org. That's far too much churn for it to be because those particular VP/directors are brilliant - by extension, that would mean the outgoing VP/directors were not - except many of them went to work for the recently departed C-level! They can't all be brilliant and they can't all be useless, so we're largely left with cronyism.
And you're right, you lose _lots_ of brilliant talent when the helm changes hands.
I think what's helpful is to imagine you are that exec going in to a new position of a large org, 26,000 people, say Chief Marketing Officer. A few know you, but there are a lot of new faces who now have to call you boss and answer to your directions whether they agree or not. You now have to convince each major head that what you're doing is the right thing. How long does it take to build that level of trust? Typically years and a few large projects won. Some of those heads have been around for a long time and don't like the way you do things.
If you want to be effective, you don't have much time to figure out who is toxic, who is simply lazy, who resists your leadership. Some resist openly, but most behind closed doors by dragging things, sowing discord. etc etc. You clearly can't keep everyone - it doesn't do any good.
At a certain level trust and speed make up for brilliance. Just like hard work/grit can close a gap of genius.
Again, I agree with you - lots of good guys are lost. So many times at the detriment of the company, but that means the outgoing leader picked the wrong successor.
Separately I enjoy this topic. Its our human condition laid bare.
> Bill hired him
So, who's Bob's direct manager? Usually it's the one who hired and can fire the person.
The person with the title of "Bob's manager", the person that hired him, the person that can fire him, and the person he will take orders from may be up to 4 different people.
You also need a team that actually knows the business.
Business is the business all businesses are in, and if you manage one business you can manage all businesses... So say the MBA
Business is about making money. Building products is only useful insofar as it enables selling products, which is one way to make money (possibly one of the hardest).
So the question becomes, "how do you position an organization to make money?" - and that has a bunch of different answers depending on many factors. Some of these answers are generic cross-sectors and some are not, and recognising the difference is where the much-maligned MBA types can fall short.
I wish that mattered, but I'm not sure it does. Many (more than half?) of all US business are either in non-competitive fields or have semi-locked in customer bases. These companies are effectively money-trees, they could do almost anything and never actually lose enough money to need to fix themselves.
Imagine AT&T gets a bad CEO. Or Comcast. Or Ford. Or GE. Or WalMart. Or CVS. Or UnitedHealth. Or ExxonMobile. These companies basically can't get into major trouble, no matter how many bad calls they make in the next 5 years.
If you are starting something new from scratch, then you have to worry about product (a new company, or a major new product in a new market, etc). But unless your doing that, your leadership-types often never have to learn anything about the business itself. They can pretend every business is just an identical spreadsheet of numbers, and even if they're wildly wrong, they'll almost never get punished for it (internally, or even by the market at large).
This is probably where MBA types get that impression from in the first place.
> Successful business leadership needs to make the right strategic decisions and that is not a trivial problem.
I wish this was true. But my experience has been that this is not nearly true enough. Terrible leadership can hang on for decades and never really get in any meaningful trouble for it.
Or in one case I saw they were the friends and relatives of the new CEO.
My naive view being beyond a certain size it's always broken. Just too many cooks in the kitchen.
If I'm going to be the CEO and you (as a board member) are going to expect me to meet these goals over the next few quarters, I need to be able to hire the people I know can do it. It's not in your, my, or the company's interests to give someone already working there enough slack to fail before replacing them and threatening my ability to meet these milestones.
This quasi-feudalism is a nash equilibrium common to most large organizations, from business to politics to NGOs. Its simply a decently effective way to act that will result in stability in power
A better solution, for the company, would be trusting the existing team.
Being able to engender trust and showing leadership seems like what an executive should be paid for.
The benefit for the exec is that installing their own team gives them a lot more leverage without needing those skills above - since it can be understood that a quickly-installed team will be quickly-uninstalled if you stop getting paid, leaving the company with a void.
This is very high risk for the company and seems to me like it only comes about through poor management and nepotism.
But if they are just turf building or resume-padding, then it is essentially exploitative behavior and hurts the company. It’s extremely difficult to tell the difference at first, just based on staff moves.
BTW this is true of startups too. They fail all the time even if the founders act like strong startup leaders in superficial ways. Theranos is probably the biggest example recently.
IIRC we're on our fifth or sixth vice president in the 15 years I've been there and the tiers immediately below that have turned over similarly with people promoting in and out from other opcos, or even from competing companies.
It has never made sense to me. One would think you'd want consistency for long-term plans, only replacing someone if they retire/are horribly ineffective.
And each one comes up with a revolutionary plan that has to be completed in that period and you end up with 6 layers of half finished 3 year plans. Each half finished plan makes the next plan harder to accomplish.
Occasionally the plans are even good, just not achievable in the time frame required.
The second guy came in, worked to understand the problems, made a considered plan, sold it to the team, and gradually started rolling it out. And he was totally defeated by red tape, bureaucracy and process.
The first guy who'd come in and broken everything in one fell swoop had to convince his bosses that radical change was necessary just that one time, when he was new and there was no history. He got the green light easily.
The winning strategy for the VPs in that company was to put all their eggs in that one basket. If it worked, they came out smelling of roses. If it doesn't they go find a new gig. But playing the long game didn't work.
Sometimes I was hoping that this change will come sooner than later. Most notably after a change from a capable CIO to a person who replaced the goal of the company from devops to 1970s application silos.
I thought it was analyzing satire, then the more I read, it was gospel. Then I found out the author worked where I was at one point (large enterprise) and it all made perfect sense. Internal re-orgs made sense, acquisitions made sense. I didn't agree with how they played out but they were understood.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
That said, that article should come with a disclaimer: "sociopaths" act unconsciously, not consciously. Purposefully trying to implement the lessons of that series is dangerous.
The other reason you bring your own people in at very senior levels is because, when battle lines are drawn (do X or Y, where X is better but Y has a collective millenia of man-hours already sunk in), a sr exec has to know their reports have latched their careers to them, and not the rest of the company. Because if that's not the case, the sr exec has no chance at all.
It's Hobbes' leviathan: you are your org, and vice verse. Gotta make sure everyone acts like it.
Underneath the fancy slide show is the formula for success, which usually looks like 'Magic + ? = Profit', with the ? being a bunch of tough sledding that inevitably turns into a death march. By the time the death march comes to a head, the executive have moved on or been replaced.
The best move I've seen in a senior reshuffle is to setup a 1:1 with the new leaders, I've done this with leaders up to 3 managers up. They like the initiative, and it gives you a chance to find out which projects they like, and which they want to end, and what they want to see come talent review time.
The ineptitude of the decisions that resulted from this were often hard to believe. And getting ahead was really a matter of getting in good with a new exec long enough to put you in a good position to move upwards to a different part of the company (or elsewhere).
Rather, aligning yourself with the correct (choose wisely) new executive and being a yes-person even to things that you know might have long-lasting negative impacts on the company (and thus your peers) was too often the winning strategy. Even then, it's navigating a political minefield, and one misstep could spell disaster.
The approach tends to put personal gain ahead of the well being of the company. I've seen too many people get ahead by setting vast fires and then walking away. That's not something I can get behind.
My first exposure to that idea was the process of re-mything after a regime change, as described in The Chalice and the Blade (Riane Eisler). Yesterday's godhead, deity, creation myth, ledger of debts was obviously deeply wrong. Appropriate, subvert, coopt, as able, all the narratives and levers of power. Utterly obliterate the rest.
Then there's The Prince, of course. Sage advice that usurpers should immediately behead any potential challengers, lest they organize and rebel, covertly or overtly, at some future date.
Same as it ever was. I'm only ever surprised, nay disappointed, when someone doesn't clean the slate. They're either not very good, non-serious, or worse.
Other way to think about it: to Netflix, streaming and content is the product. To Disney (especially with the promotion of Chapek over Mayer), it's just a marketing expense for Disneyland.
However, COVID really threw a wrench in that strategy. So it's going to be interesting to see how they attempt to pivot now that shareholders expect it to be the future of the company, whereas internally its literally a ghost town built by the lowest bid contractor.
I think it's pretty clear from their last shareholder news release. 18,000 Star Wars expanded universe spin off series & movie trilogies, coming right up! Not that I'm really complaining :o)
On one end, you have Netflix practically leading the field with the best of the best engineers and practices.
Then you have Disney with makeshift off-the-shelf solutions assembled and aligned by multiple siloed armies of overseas contractors that rotate out every year as their contracts expire and some very expensive vendors.
Doesn't Disney own star wars nowadays. Is that sequel-mill of terrible writing really what passes for quality?
I have many qualms about The Mandalorian, but compared to the dumpster fire called the "sequel trilogy" it's very good content.
Each to their own!
However I would agree it's seems better so far than Netflix which aims somewhat more on quantity over quality.
Regions probably vary.
I mean, if you count all the content they own and you already saw before on cinema or other medias then you're right.
But after paying 1.5 years for Disney+ I think I'm paying 120 dollars a year just to watch Baby Yoda. I cannot find any other content over there really worth the Disney+ membership price.
On the other hand it's really hard for me to decide what to watch on netflix because of the amount of content I'm interested.
I wouldn't pay for Disney+ on its own, but getting it as part of a bundle with Hulu (ad free) was ok. ESPN+ is worthless.
If you don't count that then Disney+ probably isn't for you. It's ideal for parents who want a bunch of good kids movies and shows. Mandalorian, although it was the "killer app" is an outlier. The rest of the original content I've watched on there is almost literally advertisements for Disneyland. Just buy a membership for a month and watch Mando.
shrug. ymmv
Disclaimer: work at Hulu, opinions are my own
I don't really think users will care at all about this, though. They just want high quality content. The users and the their dollars will flock to the high quality content.
Netflix is feeling like H&M "fast fashion" where they churn out a bazillion low quality shows to throw everything against the wall and hope something sticks to keep people subscribing.
Meanwhile the entire field is getting diluted by other platforms popping up and customers are getting fatigued enough to pay for premium content only (HBO/Disney/ESPN) and then pirate everything else, imo.
For example, over the holidays I watched 3 different streaming platforms:
BBC iPlayer - occasionally cut out and dropped back to main menu requiring me to find the program again.
Amazon Prime - often had buffering problems requiring me to manually lower resolution (on a 150Mb/s connection...)
Netflix - No problems, hit start on a movie and watch it to the end.
This kind of thing does get remembered; I certainly ended up watching a heck of a lot more Netflix than any other platform.
I haven't had any issues with the service of Disney+, so they're at least doing good enough (on my devices, on my home network).
On the other side of the spectrum, Apple TV on my devices takes about 8 attempts to start a stream, including a reboot. They would have to have a big exclusive that I really wanted to see for me to use that again.
Smallish differences in how long it takes to get a stream started (including browse/search time) probably drive long term behavior, when content quality is similar enough though; because I'll tend to use the service that gets me into watching something I'll enjoy sooner; and when the same content is available on multiple services, I use the one that's faster to get started.
They may have the best engineers but content wise all I hear are complaints. Mediocre shows and cancelling shows after one season if specific metrics aren't good enough. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
It's an EU country! You know what Netflix shows me on an incognito browser?
"Unlimited movies, TV shows, and more. Watch anywhere. Cancel anytime."
It's 2021 and the internet has been around long enough. How is the company this poorly managed?
Disney and Fox have a huge amount of legacy agreements, running for a decade or more.
Serious answer, probably just lack of launch partner or people on the ground to help Disney navigate the local laws and distribution (which may include plopping down some servers in a data center).
I think a better way to say this is that Netflix is in the content business, but Disney is in the intellectual property business. The parks are just one aspect of that difference, and Disney’s by necessity is a long-term strategy.
To put it another way, Baby Yoda alone is going to be making more money for Disney 20 years from now than Netflix’s entire 2020 slate of programming will be for them.
Netflix loses money and is still funded by considerable debt, ever year. Streaming and content aren't so much the product, the subscriber number is the product and what shareholders continue to tolerate more cash burn for. Netflix will, if it ever hopes to become cash positive, probably have to diversify into other forms of IP exploitation, because otherwise it is hard to see how. They are unlikely to be able to radically increase revenue (though they will absolutely do what they can to increase ARPU with price rises and higher tiers). They are pretty much tapping out in subscriber growth without significant increases in content spend. They have significant competition and long tail content generally performs badly, so they won't be able to reduce spend much.
But, that said, the circumstances have shifted following The Mandalorian's success. Now, Disney+ has a new baseline for not failing: It must produce a new Mandaloranian-level hit every season. This suggests that, like Fox's TV programming in the 90s and 2000s, Disney+ will have to invest in many risky experiments in order to continue being worthwhile, even though the bulk of their subscribers only care about the shows currently being milked.
Kids will rewatch more than adults will
That includes consolidated equity ownership of corporations that you have outsized controlled over.
Anyone that derives their confidence from your perpetual participation is playing by a completely different and ineffective set of rules. Investors that need constant placating need to grow thicker skin or get out of the market, employee opinions about the executive's ongoing participation have never mattered they aren't part of the conversation.