The Disney Recipe (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Disney Recipe (2013)

hbr.org

69 pointswglb22 comments

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?

and I just realised I don't give artists enough credit as business-people.

MBAs are pretty big fans of paying someone else to make their internal presentations look shiny...

here is bigger version: https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2013/05/disn...

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

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

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.

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...

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.

Superhero media today, owned by Disney.

Good catch :-) Time Warner too, though.

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/

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.

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgue#Alternate_meanings

I found a comment in the hbr's link(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?

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"

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

This is the better, link, imo. As the OP just swiped the image from this article.

Yes. We changed the url to that from http://flowingdata.com/2015/07/14/disney-business-strategy-c....

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

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

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

... what?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com