Now that John and Ed were in place, that problem was well on its way to being solved. Once Disney Animation was solid, I was open to other acquisitions, even if they werenât obviously âDisney.â In fact, I was much more conscious of not wanting to play it safe.
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In those first months, we also moved to bolster trust within the studio in another way: Just as we had refused to sign employment contracts, we now moved to eliminate contracts for everyone. At first, many people thought the move was an attempt to wrest power away from the employees and give them less security. In fact, my feeling about employment contracts is that they hurt the employee and the employer. The contracts in question were one-sided in favor of the studio, resulting in unexpected negative consequences. First and foremost, there was no longer any effective feedback between bosses and employees. If someone had a problem with the company, there wasnât much point in complaining because they were under contract. If someone didnât perform well, on the other hand, there was no point in confronting them about it; their contract simply wouldnât be renewed, which might be the first time they heard about their need to improve. The whole system discouraged and devalued day-to-day communication and was culturally dysfunctional. But since everybody was used to it, they were blind to the problem.
I wanted to break that cycle. I believed that it was our responsibility to make sure that Disney Animation was a place that people would want to work; if our most talented people could leave, then we would have to be on our toes to keep them happy. When someone had a problem, we wanted it to be brought quickly to the surface, not to fester. Most people know that they donât get their way on everything, but it is very important that they know they are being dealt with straightforwardly and that they, too, will be heard.
Peter saw no problem with a system in which he and the analysts who worked for him made so many of the companyâs decisions. Meanwhile, businesses around us were adapting to a world that was changing at blinding speed. We needed to change, we needed to be more nimble, and we needed to do it soon.
Remaking Strat Planning turned out to be the most significant accomplishment of that six-month period before I took over the company. I knew that it would have an immediate practical effect, but the announcement that they would no longer have such an iron grip on all aspects of our business had a powerful, instantaneous effect on morale. It was as if all the windows had been thrown open and fresh air was suddenly moving through. As one of our senior executives said to me at the time, âIf there were church bells on the steeples throughout Disney, they would be ringing.
The Pixar acquisition served our urgent need to revitalize Disney Animation, but it was also the first step in our larger growth strategy: to increase the amount of high-quality branded content we created; to advance technologically, both in our ability to create more compelling products and to deliver those products to consumers; and to grow globally.
Kevin Mayer couldnât stop fantasizing about what Disney could do if we added Marvel. Kevin is as intense and laser-focused as anyone Iâve ever worked with, and when he sets his sights on something of value, itâs very hard for him to accept my advice to âbe patient,â and so he harangued me on a near-daily basis to find some way to get to Ike, and I told him we needed to wait and see what David could do.