Apply the Walt Disney Leadership Model to Your Business
Below is a Q&A with Pat Williams who wrote the book Lead Like Walt. One area many businesses and business owners fail on is leadership. Walt Disney was one of the great entrepreneurs who led a team and changed the world. As you’re well aware, Disney is one of the prime vacation spots for families as well as the Disney line of movies. If you want to build something great, take some advice from Walt.
How did you become interested in Walt Disney and their leadership model?
In 1986, I moved to Orlando to build a new NBA franchise, the Orlando Magic. I found all of Central Florida steeped in the lore of Walt Disney. I talked to executives from Walt Disney World who had known Walt personally, and they told me many stories about Walt. He had already accomplished what I was trying to do, turning a dream into reality. So I studied his life and career. Without Walt as a role model, I don’t know if the Orlando Magic would exist today.
You’ve written previous books about Walt Disney. How has the Disney family responded to your books?
One of the great thrills of working on these books was getting to meet and talk to members of the Disney family, including Walt’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, and Walt’s nephew, Roy Disney. Diane was especially gracious, and welcomed me to the opening of the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco. That was one of the unforgettable moments of my career.
What was Walt Disney’s greatest achievement?
You could say that the Walt Disney Company, which he started in the rented backroom of a realty office in 1923, is his greatest achievement. Disney is now the world’s largest entertainment conglomerate with assets of around $100 billion.
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But you could also say that his greatest achievements were the ones he had planned for the future—the ones he never got to build because cigarettes and cancer cut his life tragically short at age 65. There’s no telling what he could have achieved with another 15 or 20 years.
In Lead Like Walt, you talk about the Seven Sides of Leadership, seven traits all great leaders must have: Vision, Communication Skills, People Skills, Character, Competence, Boldness, and A Serving Heart. Where did you learn those seven traits?
I learned them from Walt Disney! I studied his life and distilled those seven traits into the leadership formula I’ve been speaking and writing about for more than two decades. Walt demonstrated those seven traits in abundance. That’s why films like Snow White and Mary Poppins were made despite incredible obstacles and opposition. And that’s why the Disney theme parks and Disney entertainment empire exist today. It’s all because Walt was a complete seven-sided leader.
You say that the Seven Sides of Leadership—Vision, Communication Skills, People Skills, and the rest—are learnable skills. Which of those traits was Walt’s strongest? And did it come naturally to him—or did he learn it?
There was nothing in Walt’s background as a Missouri farm boy that suggested he would become one of the most successful business leaders of all time. I think he probably learned and acquired all of his leadership skills as he gained experience and reached for bigger, bolder challenges. I think his most important skill was Vision. Walt had the ability to look into the future, see exciting possibilities, and turn them into realities. In Lead Like Walt, I talk about how we can learn all seven of these essential leadership skills.
Another Disney leadership trait is Boldness, the willingness to take calculated risks to achieve great things. Where do you think Walt learned to be a bold leader?
He learned Boldness by going bankrupt when he was 22 years old. He once said, “It’s important to have a good hard failure when you’re young because it teaches you so much.” Walt learned that he could take a risk and he could fail, then he could pick himself up and start over again. The lessons of his early failure taught him to take on big challenges, like Disneyland and Snow White, and astonish the world.
You say in Lead Like Walt that Walt Disney is partly responsible for the United States sending astronauts to the moon. How did he do that?
In the 1950s, Walt Disney aired three episodes of his Disneyland TV show about our future in space. In 1955, a 13-year-old Iowa boy named Steve Bales watched the episode called “Man and the Moon.” That show inspired him to study aerospace engineering and join NASA. During the Apollo 11 moon landing, an alarm sounded that might have caused the landing to be aborted. Steve Bales made the critical decision to continue with the landing. The rest is history. If Walt hadn’t produced that show, Steve Bales wouldn’t have been in Mission Control, making that crucial decision.
Lead Like Walt is packed with stories. Is there one story in the book that best expresses the kind of leader Walt was?
My favorite story in the book tells how Walt loved to serve others. One day he was sitting on the porch at Disneyland’s Town Hall, watching the crowds streaming into the park. He saw two nuns with more than 20 orphans in tow. Walt jumped up, rushed to the nuns, refunded their admission, gave them free tickets for the rides, and vouchers for free meals at the Red Wagon Inn. “I don’t want you to pay for anything here today,” he said. “You’re my guests.” That’s Walt Disney—a leader with a serving heart.
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