What Do They Know?

Very early on in this blog I wrote about our family trip to Disneyland; a few months later I wrote about my amazement at learning about the Disney Institute program (where members of the Company will teach your organization to do things the Disney way) and my overall admiration for the company. Since then, a number of people have expressed their surprise to me when I’ve acknowledged that I do not own stock in the company, and that the 2007 trip was the first time I’d been to the park in at least twenty years. It’s important to note that while I admire the company, and in particular the way the park operations have made money during times when no other aspect of their business was profitable, I don’t have any personal connection to Disney – and most of the people I’ve known who have worked there have been dubious at best about wanting to go back. But when I see the company making moves that do not make sense, I find myself wondering what they know that we don’t…

A note that turned up in the Orlando Sentinel website last week mentioned that Disney is raising prices at the Disney World facility for the second time in less than a year; they’re also planning price increases in their other amusement parks, including Disneyland in California. With families all over the country still struggling to make mortgage payments and afford food and clothing this seemed a bit tone-deaf to me – an impression that was rendered even more surreal by the little temperature information block at the top of the Sentinel website (it was 99 degrees Fahrenheit as of 6:00 PM on June 13th). Coming as this does on the same day when we’re hearing about further increases in both gasoline and airline ticket prices, even more preposterous TSA outrages, and air traffic control failures, it doesn’t sound like the best of times to be doing things to discourage travel. If any other company were to do such I thing I’d just assume it was another boneheaded move, but when it’s Disney, you have to wonder…

Do the folks running the Disney Empire know something we don’t? Is it possible that improvements in the economy will result in greater disposable income, which will lead people to take summer vacations in Orlando? Or that recovery in various International economic indicators will bring enough foreign visitors to South Florida to make up the difference? Does this Disney pricing change constitute their belief that many exceptional experiences will be had this summer and fall, causing people to commemorate them by “going to Disneyland!” as the commercials urge them to? Or does this action suggest that calamity and woe are going to spread across the American scene, forcing people to book Disney vacations just to get their children to stop crying for long enough to acknowledge the trip?

I kid, of course, but as usual there is a serious point under my humorous mockery. No corporation is anything more than the sum of its people, and even the combined insight and knowledge of dozens of forward planners and thousands of employees will not keep such institutions from making disastrous (and stupid) choices from time to time. But it’s also true that the Walt Disney Company is much larger than you or me; it’s also much wealthier, much more powerful, and has many more resources to gain and analyze data. So when I see such an entity doing things that seem like madness to me, I always want to ask: “What do they know that I don’t?”