The Disney Institute

Last summer my family and I took a trip to Disneyland, and I wrote about it in this space in a post I called “We’re Not Worthy!” As I noted at the time, going to Disneyland when you’re a management scientist is a lot like going to visit a cutting-edge NASA facility if you’re a physicist: you spend most of your time wandering around staring at things and muttering “These guys are GOOD!” under your breath. And, in fairness, they are; the heart of any Disney park is essentially one huge tie-in product to dozens of motion pictures and cartoons, some of them decades old, with some of the best marketing (best in terms of dollars made per dollar spent) and merchandising the world has ever seen. Until your business can convince your customers to pay you 500% markups on food, shell out 800% markups on souvenirs, and wait for up to 3 hours to go on a five-minute ride, don’t even think of embarrassing yourself by comparing your business to a Disney theme park.

But as impressive as all of that is, there’s a new Disney venture that leaves all of those achievements in the dust. It’s a consulting/professional and corporate training operation called The Disney Institute. The basic concept is simple: since Disney management techniques are obviously so superior, every other business should want to study how they do things and apply these Disney techniques to their own operations. For a very reasonable price, Disney will sent a team of their own management scientists to your company to teach you how they do things, and to consult with you about how to apply these Disney principles to your own operational issues. An article in this morning’s Los Angeles Times details just such a training program going on at the Miami International Airport, which could definitely use some help with customer satisfaction issues (it consistently rates as the least favorite U.S. airport)

“So, what is so impressive about all of this?” I hear some of you asking. Granted that Disney has some really good management techniques, isn’t it simply logical that they would form their own consulting division and offer to teach them to you – for a price? Well, I suppose that on the face of it this is a very simple idea – which fails to explain why there is no comparable operation being run by any other successful corporation. IBM will not offer to teach you how to duplicate their tech support, Nordstrom will not come to your headquarters and teach you about customer service, and Apple is not about to share their thoughts about product design or marketing with you. Although any of these companies probably could develop a consulting/training division if they really wanted to. Certainly, they all have the necessary reputation for excellence in their respective fields.

Which brings me to the whole point about the Disney Institute. The Disney people have, in effect, applied their reputation for management and marketing excellence to a new service – in other words, they have expanded their existing brand to cover an entirely new line of services. All of the information they are offering to share with you has been divulged to the general public numerous times over the years; in documentaries, in Harvard Business School case studies, in management textbooks, even in existing Disney products. Any half-baked MBA student could explain the bulk of the Disney management techniques to you, and any reasonably good management consultant could explain to you how to apply these ideas to your business. But because the Disney brand name is so strong, people are willing to pay a premium to have genuine Disney personnel come and fulfill these same functions. Once again, the ingenious part isn’t what they’re doing, any more than a cheap plastic trinket with a Disney character printed on it is a great value; the ingenious part is that they’ve successfully marketed it to their customers at that preposterously high markup…

Say it will me, everyone: “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!”