September 16, 2025 • 54 mins
“There aren’t that many things that really are impossible. We just have to set aside boundaries and figure out how to make them real.”
Episode Highlights
[02:53] Bob on managing creativity and building environments where big ideas thrive
[05:27] Disney embedding safety and security into their culture
[10:20] Brainstorming approach for tackling “impossible” challenges
[17:03] Balancing creativity and connection in remote work
[28:25] Cross-disciplinary collaboration sparking new ideas
[31:09] Tackling massive projects with limited resources
[46:48] Internal marketing to gain buy-in for creative and security initiatives
[50:00] Building a culture of information security
Former Walt Disney Imagineering President Bob Weis joins Jody, Meghan, and Matt to explore the surprising parallels between Imagineering and healthcare security. They discuss building a culture of safety, leveraging creativity through charrettes, sparking innovation in remote teams, and gaining buy-in for security as a shared responsibility.
Resources
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Matt Mock mmock@redoxengine.com
Meghan McLeod mmcleod@redoxengine.com
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Foreign.
Welcome to Shut the Back Door, brought to you by Redox. Shut
the Backdoor is a healthcare security podcast dedicated to
keeping health data safe one episode at a time. I'm your
host, Jody Mayberry. And of course, with me is the
wonderful Megan McLeod. Hello, Megan. Hi, Jody. It's good
(00:22):
to have you here. And we've got Matt Mock with us who's
become familiar voice on this show. Hi, Matt. Hey, Jody.
Well, the big news is that Megan has moved from
Colorado to Idaho. And Megan, I'm just curious, on
your road trip, of all the book choices that you can
make to read as you're doing a cross country
(00:44):
move, you brought a 420 page book with
you on that trip. That just seems like an inconvenient book
to carry with you everywhere you go. Yes, I did, but
actually it was kind of a quick read for me because it was so interesting
that I just breezed by. So it was super helpful on the
transition to keep me entertained. Well, the good news is that
(01:06):
book that Megan Read, the 420 page
book, Dream My Four Decades of Success
and Failure with Walt Disney Imagineering, written by Bob
Weiss. Well, we have Bob Weiss here with us, the retired
president of Walt Disney Imagineering. Hello, Bob. Hey, Jody,
Matt, Megan, thanks so much for having me. It's just exciting to be able to
(01:28):
have a conversation with you. Well, it is so great to have you here with
us. And Matt and Megan, I have a question for you. First, even though
we have such a phenomenal guest with us, I have to ask you something.
We talk about healthcare data security every
episode and now we've got the president of Imagineering
on what's the connection here? So, yeah, I think that
(01:51):
that's something a few people have been asking me as they've heard that we're going
to have Bob on the podcast. And to me it's kind
of endless possibilities as far as how that connects. So especially
reading through Bob's book, there were just multiple times when I
was trying to take notes and think about things and ways that we could implement
his strategies into our security team and other security
(02:13):
teams. And so for one of these things, the first thing that I think of
is that security is always changing in healthcare, especially
critical to keep up with, or I mean, even better to stay
ahead of those latest innovations and threats. And oftentimes that
seems kind of like an impossible task for people. So the
idea of overwhelming and impossible projects and deadlines
(02:36):
is frequently something that I notice comes up in Bob's
career and in your book, in your Disney
Imagineer time. So I was wondering, Bob, if you could actually talk more
about how you turn these things that people might think of as
impossible into a reality. Well, thank you,
Megan, again. And it's very interesting
(02:57):
that I wrote a book, by the way Jodi mentioned. It's 420
pages. Disney Publishing asked me to write 250, and I said I didn't
think I could possibly write that many, but once I got started,
they couldn't shut me up. But, you know, I think
what I had hoped was that the experience
that I had with Disney Imagineering was applicable to
(03:20):
other businesses as well. And how do you manage creativity?
And how do you create, really an environment where
people can come to work, bring their whole selves, their whole ideas,
you know, everything they have to work and be encouraged to
dream, be encouraged to think big. And, you know, so often we're in
environments where we might have big ideas, but they just kind of like fall by
(03:43):
the wayside because there isn't an opportunity for people to be able to pursue
them. So I'd love for people to think bigger in every business.
And I've. I've had the opportunity because of the book to speak to, you know,
insurance companies and, you know, manufacturing companies and design
professions of all kinds who are simply interested in fostering
creativity. So that's been, you know, such an important part. And it was really a
(04:06):
hope that I had. You know, now once in a while, I go into a
Barnes and Noble and find the book on a shelf, and it's usually in the
business section, which I love. It's not in the entertainment section, it's not in the
Disney section. It's in the business. So I hope people will take a
look at it. And I'd love to hear from people about how it may have
stimulated in their businesses ideas about pushing
creativity. But I was thinking as we prepared for this,
(04:28):
Megan and Matt, that several years ago, quite a few years ago,
the Disney Parks Imagineering, which designs all the Disney parks and the
cruise ships and all that stuff, we realized that we were
incredibly focused on the safety of our visitor, our guests, what we call
our guests, on the safety, all
that kind of thing. But our record, our focus on the
(04:50):
safety of our cast members, the employees, our
imagineers, our construction people, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't really
consistent with the high level that was there for guests.
So what did we do? We got together, and it's
impossible to have a conversation at Disney without talking about safety.
It just became a pervasive issue. And Safety
(05:13):
is always at the forefront of design reviews and trips and
everything else. So you talk about story, you talk about experience, you
also talk about safety of the people involved then. And
this, this gets to your point, Megan. Then we had
an issue of security of information. And
when you're in the entertainment business, the care with which you put
(05:36):
into projects means you don't want stuff just leaking out all over
the place into the marketplace because then people have an opportunity to
form opinions and you have strategic, important
things related to patents and things like that. So we really
did the same thing. You cannot have a meeting at Disney now
without talking about safety, but also without talking about security of information.
(05:59):
And we just became a culture of people who
respected the fact that there was plenty of people out
there who would love to hear little tidbits about what we were about to do,
but that it was inappropriate to your team members, to
your culture, all those things, to not have an incredible focus on the
security of information. So that's one of the first things I thought about as we
(06:21):
were talking about talking was that's something we have in common. Plus we have,
obviously we're in the healthcare business where people are
fulfilling an aspiration to have a better life than they had
before. Right. They're trying to do something with their life when they're in a
healthcare experience and they're hoping to be supported by that whole system.
Disney is very similar. People have an aspiration to get their
(06:44):
families together, to have a break from the normal kind of
stressful world they live in. There's a lot of commonality, I think, between
what we do. So I hope that we'll find some commonalities in this
conversation. Yeah, definitely. I think that like you mentioned, just
having the intersection of all of those kinds of
ideas is something that we have to deal with too. I mean,
(07:05):
yes, we are security, but we also have to meet demands
for our products and for other elements of customer
interactions, all sorts of things like that. So just because it's security
doesn't mean that that's the only thing we're focused on, especially when security
is such a people forward kind of industry, because people often
think about just the technical element, but the people element with
(07:27):
security. So like how you're saying to keep information,
you know, from leaking when you're trying to create these projects on
security side of things, having a different, you know, you have, you have a
lot of employees. And so yes, there's an element of keeping information secure, but then
there is also an element of teaching people and training them on how not to
click on things because they really are the line of defense. If you could have
(07:49):
all of these technical controls in place. But it's really the people. Each individual
person is. We say, you know, everyone is responsible for security,
not just our team. So it's everyone's responsibility. And it's also,
I think, everyone in a company's responsibility to think
creatively, to think outside the box, to think about the future. What could we do
that we haven't done before that would make our experience
(08:12):
with. I'm going to call them your guests, your customers, to make
your guests feel better and more inspired and all those
things. So I think it's that too. I think there's lots of learnings in terms
of how we create experiences and how we
create an environment, a work environment that people feel
free to express impossible ideas. Because
(08:34):
our job is really to sort of figure out how to do things that are
impossible. And there aren't that many things that really are impossible. We find out how
to do them, you know, step by step, so. Well. Yeah, I think a lot
of people would have thought, you know, some of the parks across the globe that
you worked on would be impossible. And yet here we are decades later.
And, you know, yeah, we, you know, seven years I
(08:55):
spent developing Disneyland in Shanghai, you know, which
involved land and, you know, talents from
throughout China, talents from throughout the world in terms of Disney talents,
train lines and roads and just so many things that you would think
this is a Herculean task to just come to China,
where you couldn't imagine a culture more different than kind
(09:18):
of the American culture that Disney grew up in. But by
embracing innovation, by embracing the market, by
embracing the talent that we could partner with over there, we were able to
do things something that none of us thought was possible. And
that's kind of what it's about. It's just about, you know, it doesn't matter how
big it is, how impossible it sounds, it's probably got a
(09:39):
route to success if it's meaningful enough. And people have a. People
have to have a passion for what they do. They have to have a desire
to do it if they have that. Boy, if you have a company where people
have a strong passion for doing creative things, that's the best thing in the world.
I think that's a great point. Yeah. And I think something that.
Like when I was reading your book, something that really stood out to me is
(10:00):
when you were thinking about starting with an impossible task.
You mentioned that charrettes, which I hadn't. Am I Saying that
correctly. Yes, you are. Yes, you are. Okay, so you mentioned that those
were a really important part to getting that process started.
So I'd be interested to hear, you know, a bit more about, like, what that
means. Yeah, I'd. I'd love to talk about charrettes, because I think charrettes are.
(10:23):
Are something that is. Are applicable to many people's
businesses. And what is a charrette? I'll go back a little bit. Let me
tell you the deep history of what a charrette is. A charrette is a
wagon, a wagon with big wooden wheels. And it's a
term that referred to wagons in the Beaux Arts period of France.
And there were these wagons that kind of go down the cobblestone streets.
(10:45):
And art students at the School of Beaux Arts in
Paris at that time, when their projects were due,
they would send this charrette around, and they'd have to put their project
on the wagon to be taken over to be reviewed by their instructors. And.
And if your painting wasn't done, the only option you had was to get
on the wagon or the charrette with all the paintings and
(11:08):
be going through the cobblestones of Paris trying to finish your drawing at
the same time that this thing was driving through Paris. So it's come to
mean a group of people in a
frantic environment who get together in a short time period,
in a rush and kind of do the impossible thinking.
And so when we think of charrettes, we think of a room with
(11:30):
a group of creative people in it. Maybe they know each other, maybe they don't.
Maybe it's a combination of people that know each other and don't know each other,
and they set up an impossible task. Look, we're going to have two days, and
we're going to have a solution to some, you know, security idea or some, you
know, innovative product for our guests. And it seems
impossible at the beginning, but first, you have kind of.
(11:51):
Everybody has their own individual ideas, and it feels kind of guarded for a
little while. And then after a while, people start to really get along, and they
start to say, well, why couldn't we do that? One of the things we always
say about charrettes is don't start with node. Don't say, well, we did that
10 years ago, and it didn't work. Start with, well,
what if we could do that? And you just do silly
(12:13):
stuff like you write things on index cards or flip charts, and
you kind of paper the room with ideas. And it is remarkable how much we
can think outside the box that way. And at the end of a couple
days or a week, or even a half a day, you will
have ideas that you hadn't thought about before. And you'll have also a group
of people who were a part of developing that idea who
(12:35):
now want to go take their passion for that idea and go try to figure
out how to make it happen. So it's a very common way that we come
up with ideas like Star Wars, Galaxy's Edge or
Iron Man Attractions or Pandora. It's a very common way at Disney
you come up with creative ideas. But I think it's applicable to
many kinds of businesses. Well, yeah, and I really like the
(12:57):
element of having like a buy in too. When you're
like you said, like people, when they're getting passionate about it, you actually
maybe are more likely to see those same people than go actually forward
with the task that they're now passionate about because of a session like that. Well,
and also, you know, part of the reason why you try to get people to
go in and you try to kind of select people who are good at this,
(13:18):
but you try to get them to go in and say, let's not evaluate every
idea when it comes up, let's not critique it. After a while
you find what people focus on is adding to the idea.
So Megan had this crazy idea and then Matt
came in and said, well, wait a minute, maybe that's not so crazy. Maybe we
have done something that could support that, you know, and then I contribute something,
(13:41):
Jody contributes something. And within an hour or so, or,
you know, a day or so, depending on the length of it, you find that
nobody knows whose idea this was. It's a really a group process that
came up with something that was completely out of the box. And I know we're
going to talk about AI here, but one of the big things about AI, I
think, is AI contributes a certain pattern of
(14:02):
thinking based on historical patterns of thinking. But
we as humans can think way outside the box. We can make
connections that don't make any sense at all, but they are a
creative way. We didn't think about it before. And that, I think is why
a charrette or creative sessions or brainstorming or encouraging
brainstorming, creative thinking is really important because we can all really
(14:25):
think outside the box of what we know, way out into the
unknown. That's really the hope that the book was
for me, was to encourage people to never feel limited
by a crazy idea. That sounds impossible at the beginning.
Yeah. But I really love the thought of Those and I also
like your approach to something that may seem impossible. One of
(14:48):
my kind of pet peeves is people saying that, like, this is impossible
and just kind of drawing a line in the sand. And I think rarely
is something impossible. It may be not feasible for your company
or something else might come into play. But the idea itself,
at least have people brainstorm around it and see what you can come up
with. Especially today in like healthcare, there especially a lot of
(15:11):
these teams, you know, they may be smaller, you have a lot of challenges,
you have to worry about patient care, you have to worry about AI.
And it just seems daunting that you can't even move forward with trying to
tackle this stuff. And I really love that idea of just, you know,
getting a team together and start working through it and
seeing what could you come up with and then how can you build off of
(15:33):
that and what do you have at your disposal? And you know, maybe you
can't accomplish that main goal of making everything
safe every day, but maybe you can make a huge dent in
that with what you have. Yeah. And chances are if you, if you
have a group of people who discount something as being, we've
tried it or it's impossible or whatever, these days, the thing's going to happen
(15:55):
is that somebody else is going to take that idea and start a new company
with it. Right. It's just, you know, somebody's got to figure it out.
So the creative capacity internal to companies is
remarkable. But usually the boundaries are set by
ourselves. If we could just set those aside. We have
tremendous capacity for creative thinking. And you just have to be
(16:16):
willing to say, look, just for today, we're going to set aside that
comment about how impossible this sounds and we're all going to put our minds to
how do we create something that's completely out of the box that would be great
for our customers or our guests. There's plenty of time to figure it out
after that. What you really need is a raw idea or ideas
that are completely, you know, haven't been done before and the opportunity
(16:39):
to go out and figure them out. And one question I have so
specific to, like, our company, we are all remote. We don't have
any offices. So, you know, we do get together from time to
time. But our day to day is we're all remote. There's a lot
more people remote these days. Now how do you take that same
concept and do it when you have people, you know,
(17:01):
remote all over the place? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a common problem that
so many companies have now and, or a common situation, I won't call
it a problem. And we had during, you know, I was president of
Imagineering during COVID so we had all remote work and
everybody went home and people who were used to being
storytellers, artists, designers, architects, constant interaction,
(17:23):
we're suddenly having to work, you know, on Zoom or teams all
the time. And it was the only way we could get projects in, you know,
Hong Kong and Paris and all over the world to keep them going was by
empowering those local teams to, and then checking in with them by Zoom.
I'd say, though, that I think we undervalue face
to face communication when it comes to creativity. And
(17:45):
so to the degree that you could say,
let's all get together, let's figure out we can all be in St.
Louis the beginning of next month and let's get the
Marriott Ballroom, I think it's not
that you can't do a big Zoom call and do a creative session. I know
you can, and there's lots of other formats besides that. But I
(18:07):
do think people tend to come away after just
an, you know, a day or so in a common environment like that.
And they say, you know, these are people. I haven't, I've never even met them
personally before and I, I know them so much better now. We
were able to talk about things. So I'm a real proponent
of trying to find a venue where people can
(18:28):
spend a little bit of time together physically, you know, and personal. Face
to face doesn't mean you can't do it, but I think you'll find an
intensity in the passion that people have when you do
that. And, you know, it doesn't take that much. You just have to find out,
you know, okay, we're going to do it once a quarter and we'll do it
in different markets and we'll get 10 or 15 or 20 people together and
(18:51):
we'll, we'll have a session because then once you come out of that charrette or
that creative session, you have content that's going to drive you for the next
six months or, you know, you know, you have, you have an agenda that you
come out of. So it's not that you have to do all the work there's.
But I do think that creative interaction is undervalued right now
by us to some degree. Not undervalued, but I don't think people know
(19:12):
how much greater it could be if they could spend some time together.
I know that sounds, it probably makes me sound old Fashioned. But Bob, I've heard
you mention in the past how important hallway talk is to
creativity. Just bump into Matt and Matt says, what are you
working on? And I tell him and he has an idea I hadn't thought of.
Is there any way to enhance a
(19:34):
sense of hallway talk when you all work remotely? You know, I had an experience.
I had an experience when during the depths of COVID I mean, I know what
you guys schedules must be like, but I was scheduled to the max. Like, you
know, we started talking to Paris in the morning, then Orlando and then la
and then Tokyo and then Hong Kong and then Shanghai. So we
were 10 hours solid. Zoom, you know, 15
(19:57):
minute break for the bathroom sandwich at the table, you know, during the
zoom call and there wasn't that serendipity of,
oh, I just, you know, I woke up last night and I had this crazy
idea because everybody knows you've only got an hour for this call
and everybody's probably got a pretty strong agenda for it. So one way
to do it, I think, is to say this little group of people that we're
(20:18):
going to entrust with some creativity and some dream chasing, we're going to
let them get together on a regular basis, but we don't want them
to have a fully planned agenda. We actually just want them to get together
and chat about ideas and brainstorm a little bit.
I don't think we do enough of that. I think you can do it on
Zoom, I think, or whatever format you use, I think you can do it,
(20:39):
but you have to kind of have the serendipity of, hey, I read this article
last night or I saw this movie, or you have
to have the freedom of the schedule to be able to have that kind of
interaction. If everything is driven by an agenda, you don't have just kind
of like surprises happen. And I think surprise is one of those
things. The other thing I advise a lot of people, and I advise even
(21:02):
Disney of this is go out and look at stuff that you don't know. I
think one of the greatest things for creativity is traveling around and
looking at other people's stuff. If you're in the hotel
business looking at hotels that other people are doing, or if you're in the restaurant
business looking at restaurants that other people are doing. If you're in, in Disney,
you try to look at other people's cruise ships, other people's attractions, not to
(21:24):
copy them, but to say, okay, what was it
about that that they did that was good, what was bad and how should it
influence the way we think about our guests and guest experiences. So
thinking outside the box, having time where people just get
together to chat and think creatively without a really
strong agenda, traveling and seeing things that other people are
(21:47):
doing or researching things that other people. I think those are all really strong,
important aspects of creativity. Yeah. And like you mentioned, they're
not. There's not necessarily time set aside. No. We're sort
of in a such a programmed world that we're losing that. And I think
it's really. It's really important. I. During COVID when I
had all those schedules, I started doing this thing
(22:09):
where I had everybody's cell numbers. So I just started
calling people. And, you know, the president of WDI is supposed to have
a schedule for everything. Right. I just call people on their phone and say, hey,
how's it going? They're like, what are you calling me for? It's like,
you know, in the olden days, we weren't so planned. You just called somebody and
said, hey, can I ask you a question? It feels like
(22:30):
a weird thing today to just call somebody out of the blue, but,
you know, who's not your friend or is just an associate in another city or
something. But think how great it is if you could just say, hey, I had
this idea last night. That's what Jodi's talking about, which is hallway talk.
So how do you create hallway talk when people are in multiple countries and
multiple, you know, cities and stuff like that? Just have more informal
(22:52):
venues like that. That's what you have to have. Well, yeah, and having a leader
who is that way, who is open like that is really helpful, because
I know. I mean, with Matt, I do feel like you get from me frequently,
hey, do you have five minutes to just hop on a chat real fast? Because,
like, I have. My wheels are turning, and Matt is a
great person to just do that with because I know you have a busy
(23:12):
schedule. But if I'm like. I look at his calendar and I'm like, oh, I
think he has a little bit of time right now. A little bit of time.
Yeah, we. I mean, in the entertainment business,
you know, we talk about pitches all the time. A pitch is, you know,
two guys going to a bar and buy a horse or whatever. You know, this
is the idea, the first idea for a movie or something like that. And it
has to be pretty compact. It has to be a compact pitch.
(23:35):
We started talking about the fact that, okay, an elevator pitch
is. Let's say you want to call Matt because you have an idea. If you
get into the elevator with Matt and you're going to go up three floors. That
means you have about 30 seconds to make that pitch. Okay, you're going to go
12 floors, maybe you have 80 seconds to make that pitch. Right.
But you should never go out of the house without that pitch in your
(23:57):
mind because you don't know if you're going to step into that elevator with
Steven Spielberg and be able to pitch him. And you only got one floor to
do it. So we always sort of said you always have to carry
creative ideas with you. You always have to be ready to express yourself. You
always have to be ready to run into somebody and say, hey, you know, I
thought about this thing and I should tell you about it. That churn
(24:19):
rate is what makes a creative organization
function. Well, I think, and I do think it's a thing that
we have to work on because the more programmed we become, the
harder it is to keep that churn rate going and the more important it is
to our creative thinking. Yeah. When you, when you say that, what
really resonates is all of our schedules
(24:42):
get so jammed packed. To your point, like nobody is
really building in that creative time anymore. If you are in the office,
you might be able to build it in by just walking to and from
a meeting. But even then it seems like most people are
jam packed with meetings these days. And yeah. Finding
ways to just block off a little bit of time to be able to
(25:04):
chew because maybe you do have a good idea and then you like, I need
to reach out to this person and they're just meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting,
meeting. And maybe that is you just call them because they see the phone call
come in and it's not a chat message and you take it differently.
Cause that does really help. And to make it. Yeah, we
do that often on our team and it's. That's how we get some of
(25:26):
our best ideas. That's the way to do it is to just have people feel
comfortable with the idea that there are programmed
moments and then there are some free moments and
give somebody a heads up, say, hey, I got a crazy idea. Could we talk
about it on the phone? You know, so they know. It's a lot of times
I will do that. In my past I would do that with executives. Let's say
(25:47):
you're going to have Bob Iger come over. And I would always give Bob
a heads up as what is he walking into?
Is he walking into a formal meeting where we're going to
propose something or is he walking into something that we want to engage him
in a dialogue. And it helped a lot if he knew which was
which, because his expectation was, I'm kind of coming in casually,
(26:10):
we're going to talk about this, or, you know, you guys have been working on
this for three months. I'm expecting a formal presentation. I
think that helps a lot. It helps with us just at the working level. But
also I think it helps with executives to have a heads up of whether
they're. Because you don't want them to walk in and say no either. Right. You
want them to kind of get into the idea. The best thing would be if
they come in and say, you know, this is the craziest thing I ever said
(26:32):
I ever saw. But I have an idea of how we could make it even
better. That's the kind of dialogue you want to have. Right. So the more
you can give them a kind of a heads up, that's what they're walking into.
The other thing, Matt, I think, and I don't know if this relates to
your business or not, is I think we tend to deal with
on a daily basis people that are like us. And they might be very different
(26:53):
in personality, but they're in the same part of the business.
And part of what you want to do when you want to stimulate creative thinking
is have, you know, an operation person and a development
person and a finance person and an art, you know, art
marketing person together in the same room or together in the same
zoom call, meaning cross those discipline lines
(27:16):
so that people hear how other people are thinking about the business.
Because that was really, really the way you get some electricity
if everybody's the same. And you know, part of the, the value
of, I think Disney Imagineering is we used to say there's like 50,
you know, different disciplines of people, from stained glass experts to
architects to artists to anthropologists, that you could pull together a little
(27:39):
group that was a wild, crazy, you know, diverse
group. You want that because if everybody's kind of on the
operations side, they will develop a way of thinking. If they're all on the marketing
side, they'll develop a way of thinking. You will really want to mix it up.
Yeah, I think that's something that we hear. I mean, not just, you
know, in our company, but in general. Maybe it's, I don't know if it's more
(28:00):
with remote workforces or if it's, you know, larger companies too, just all
over. But the idea of kind of being feeling more
siloed and not having that cross collaboration and it is a little more
Difficult, I feel, remotely, unless you're being intentional about
it, unless actually saying, yeah, we need the diversity of
thought for this kind of project or whatever we're working on, because
(28:22):
you're not going to cross them in the hallway. You have to actually set it
up. So, yeah, we had, I set up a program
at Imagineering where we would have. We would invite
companies or organizations if they wanted to, just on a
pro bono basis to come to Imagineering and spend. Sometimes
they would come spend a week there, sometimes they would come spend two or three
(28:44):
days. We'd give them a tour, we'd talk about creativity, and then we would
brainstorm on what they did. And it was great for them because they got
a group of imagineers who were thinking outside the box. They got
some fresh perspective. But it was also great for the imagineers because we got
to talk about somebody's business that was not running theme parks. And I
remember we had one with the Mayo Clinic. And the first
(29:07):
time that I heard the Mayo Clinic wanted to come to Imagineering, I'm like, what
could we possibly do to help the Mayo Clinic? This is crazy.
We shouldn't even do this. This is like there's nothing we can help them with.
We don't have any expertise in this area. It turned out to be one of
the most magical weeks we spent because they came in
wanting to talk about that patient aspiration and
(29:28):
also the fact that the people who came to the Mayo
Clinic, the majority of them were not patients, they were family members,
they were health professionals, and that they felt like they didn't
really do anything to improve their lives, which would then
improve the patients lives. Right. So we had an incredibly
gracious, wonderful, exciting conversation for three or four days. I think it
(29:51):
influenced their thinking and it influenced our thinking too, to think about how
a family dealing with a crisis. We get a lot of families
who have dealt with a crisis who then go to Walt Disney World and want
to have a great experience together. So you never know where those
synapses are going to fire. And so having a little bit of
unpredictability in your daily life is a good thing. Yeah, no, I think
(30:13):
that sounds wonderful. Kind of switching gears to another element of
kind of a difficulty that I feel like resonates maybe
between both Imagineering and security, is that
frequently security teams, especially in health care,
they are operating with a small team, but still need to
tackle these big problems. I mean, health care security, you know, it's
(30:36):
critical to people's lives and their very
sensitive data. But a lot of times Those resources and
health care are going elsewhere because there's, you know, important patient care
and all of these other considerations. And I
found that in dream chasing, you talk about how oftentimes the
Imagineers had to tackle these huge projects, but didn't necessarily
(30:58):
have a huge team to do it with. So I was wondering
how you worked within those kind of constraints but still able to
make lasting and impactful changes.
Well, I certainly don't want to make light of challenges that people have
in their work, but I can tell you that, you know, people think of
Disney as being huge budgets and unlimited resources.
(31:21):
We never had the resources we needed. We never had enough people.
We never had enough artists or designers or architects.
But the passion to do something unique was what drove it.
And people tended to try to prioritize
their creative time or prioritize those
aspects of this launch that were the most important. So set
(31:43):
aside the things that don't really matter and let's go for the core experience,
the thing that really is going to make a difference. And we can add those
other things later. You know, what can we do to launch it? And then
we know we can enhance the product later on. All of our
projects at Imagineering were time driven. Usually,
you know, three years or something sounds like a long time, but three
(32:05):
years to do a six year project is not a long, is not a long
time. It's accelerated. Right. So obviously there's a. There
becomes a big challenge since we're talking about healthcare. There becomes a big challenge of
work, life balance, because people would just put in everything,
you know, to get something done. And so that can have a negative effect too.
But generally speaking, I think people focused on
(32:26):
invention and the importance of having a passion
for something that has not been done before. And
it's easy to forget that. It's easy to say, well, I have so much on
my plate that I can't really go to this creative session today. But
the creative session might have such a huge impact. Especially I think
I really feel this, working with students and working with organizations on
(32:49):
AI, feeling like there's going to be a whole lot of stuff that AI
is going to help us do and get done that is on a
more routine or straightforward basis.
And we as the humans in this equation have to be the ones that
say, why are we doing this at all? Why aren't we doing something completely
different? What's our moonshot that really is outside the box?
(33:11):
I think that more and more we have to prioritize our time
against the craziness that nobody has thought about.
And that's hard. It's hard from a management point of view to justify it. It's,
you know. But one of the things it does is
it really makes people excited. People would much rather
think about crazy ideas and think about ways to do things different
(33:34):
because we are creative people. One of the things I find with traveling with this
book and Jody's been with me, we've gone
to see other people and talk about the book is people love
creativity. People want to be creative, so
they're holding back. I feel like we're all kind of holding back, and we shouldn't.
That is really what we should do. And we as managers should look at
(33:56):
our talent and say, that person really kind of
thinks outside the box of everybody else. Let's put them into a meeting with some
other people. You know, that's the hardest part of our job. But it might be
the part that's. The most important when you're hitting on AI,
being able to do the routine kind of stuff. I think that is a really
good point that, you know. Well, we've talked about AI a bit on this
(34:17):
podcast before from some different technical aspects. We're going to talk about,
you know, some potential security issues with it and some
future work. But something that I don't really think that
I've necessarily thought of is how much it can unlock that creative time.
Because, you know, I can go ahead and do the
mundane, like, routine, daily things that it might have been taking
(34:39):
up a few of my hours of the day, but then now I have that
time to be able to actually try to innovate and solve these
bigger problems that we shouldn't be relying on AI for. Yeah,
I think that's the key, Megan and Matt, is
how do we make sure that whatever creative resource we have
in our company, we're leveraging. And
(35:00):
people at Imagineering used to say I had like a hidden imagineering,
because they'd say, well, nobody's funded this Blue sky project,
you know, this. This creative project. And we'd walk in with a whole bunch of
stuff that we just created about it, and they'd say, well, how did you get
the funding to do this? I say, I didn't get any funding. I just got
people together. I bought sandwiches, and we spent the last six weeks
(35:22):
in lunch every day, and we did this. And people did drawings at home, you
know, or whatever is figure out a way to pull.
Imagine you could take 10%, 5%. Imagine
you could take 5% of your organization's capacity and put
it against creativity. Think of 5% of the incredible people you
have every week going to creative ideas. You would
(35:45):
be. And maybe you do it. I'm not saying you don't, but just think of
any company like that, the leadership capability that they would
have if they took 5 or 10% of their people's time and
focused it on creativity. It's incredible. And people will do it
because it's a break from what they normally do.
Not that they're. What they normally do isn't important, but that it's kind of their
(36:05):
ability to think outside the box and think about the future really is a,
you know, it's really a strategy we should all take, I think. Well, yeah, and
future thinking and security, I mean, that's. We have to,
like, it's not. It's not really an optional element of the job. Like, we
have to be future thinkers. So, you know, like, we've talked about innovations
and stuff like that. That's kind of what we, as a team, as
(36:28):
a, like our department or just the security as a whole.
Like, innovation is critical to stay ahead because the threat
actors are going to keep innovating. They're taking creative time. They're.
They're using their resources in that way. So we need to be doing the same
thing. And I think it does tell us, like, one of our big
jobs as leaders is to get to know
(36:51):
people and get to know something about them outside of what they
normally have been prescribed to do. And know that
I have been fascinated, Megan, when I find out that
someone is like an engineer at the office
and a pastry chef at home or
something else like that. And it is an incredible opportunity
(37:14):
to find out a little bit about them, what do they like to do, and
you find that you have a whole creative resource out there that you just
haven't exercised on. Yeah, I love these points, and
I think that's so key, is leveraging the talent that you have and
giving them the opportunity to have that time. You know, your
AI right now on security, everybody's trying to figure it out. And
(37:37):
it's. The solutions to AI security are not going to
come from AI itself. It's going to come from smart people
getting in a room, brainstorming, and coming up with some creative ideas
around it. And you have to just make room for that
and also not say no on a lot of these ideas. We
preach a lot in my team about the whole, how do you eat an elephant?
(37:59):
Thing. And I think that comes back to this, is these
impossible tasks. They seem like there's no way to Even start
it. And the easiest way is just to start talking about it and throw
out the crazy ideas and see what sticks and then
start taking it piece by piece and do a little bit here and then
iterate on it and see where you can get. And yeah, I think that's what's
(38:22):
going to bring up some great ideas for companies. Yeah,
at Disney we had still have a research and development
division that is a part of imagineering. And they did lots of
exploration throughout the year. You know, all kinds of just crazy ideas
about ways you could change the parks or change the way it operates or
new technologies could be applied. But it was something kind of all over the place
(38:44):
and different scientists working and stuff like that. So they
came up with this idea of an annual R and D open house. And
the open house was you'd go over there and it was like a three
hour agenda and they'd walk you through labs and walk you through pitches
and things like that, big and small. And it was kind of a really incredible
journey for that day. It turned out to be something that was like the
(39:07):
hottest ticket throughout Disney that people would say, I have to go. I have to
fly to California to be in the R and D open house. It's a sweet
because you didn't want to miss all this creative thinking. But part of it
was, or still is getting it all together
and focusing it on a message for some period of time
saying we're going to have a quarterly thing where anybody that's got an
(39:28):
idea can come in and pitch it and we're going
to give out some kind of a reward or recognition to
the top 10 ideas that grow out of this process. But there's something that
encourages people to want to put their time together. We did a thing
where we would do attraction ideas and people had the
opportunity to pitch them to the whole company. And most of the people who pitched
(39:51):
ideas were the younger people in the company that hadn't yet
reached the point where they would be the ones who would be pitching these ideas
to Bob Iger or somebody like that. So we just finished
last year the Zootopia land in Shanghai. Big new attraction
land. All that stuff that came out of one of these young people that pitched
in this session just walked up and said, here's what I would do if you
(40:12):
asked me to do a land based on this new movie that's coming out for
Zootopia. So some just think about formats
where you could say on this day, each quarter,
it's going to be creative day and everybody has to have
some kind of a creative meeting in their department and bring in another department,
work together or something. You just never know what's going to come out.
(40:34):
And it drives people's passion. It makes them excited to be there.
Because it says that's the coolest thing we do all year is when we all
get together and just think outside the box for a day or two days, whatever.
Yeah, I think it'd be something really interesting to pitch or like for companies as
a whole, but to pitch, you know, internally here too, because we do, you
know, get together maybe like once a year or something and have like
(40:56):
a day where we are creative, but then maybe that's kind of where that
stops. So it would be kind of cool to have preparation up to the
session where people are actually bringing stuff before that, because we often don't know what
we're doing until we get there or something. Like you said quarterly. Or
to kind of build it more into the day to day. Because we got like
a lot of positive feedback from being able to have this one hour creative
(41:18):
session once a year. You know, everyone's really excited about it, but
if it stops there, then it's. We're not utilizing as much of the resources
we could be. Yeah, I think that's one of the things about it is that
from a talent retention point of view, get. Just kind
of get to get HR here for a minute, Jodi, is that it
makes people feel like they work in a great organization that listens
(41:40):
to and wants to hear ideas. And if there is some
expectation that says, we know we do this on
the fourth Thursday of the quarter or something like that, we
get ready. And the people you find that younger talent, especially,
I think, who aren't necessarily in the most advanced
positions, see it as an opportunity to break through. Right. To have
(42:02):
their crazy idea recognized in some ways. So
it's worthwhile. I think so. Pivoting just a little bit. I'm just making sure that
unfortunately we're in a podcast and we can't see Jody's shirt.
But sure, Jody's shirt is definitely outside the box. I think here
on the dark. It's dark shirt day and Jody's wearing
red with palm trees. And I don't know what else is on it. So it's
(42:25):
good. Well, I'm glad you noticed, Bob. This. This is actually
a shirt that has been in my closet for two
years. I bought it. Maybe it should go back. Maybe it should go back. Well,
that's the thing. It should perhaps. But I thought
we're talking Creativity. Today I'm going to wear a creative
shirt. So that's what led to this. There you go. Okay.
(42:47):
See? Well, speaking of shirts, I feel like Matt's is creative too. I can't tell
exactly what's on it. Matt's has Disney characters on it. I think I saw
Buzz Lightyear and oh yeah, I feel very welcome when I look
at, I see, I'm looking at. Yeah, it's all Disney characters,
Buzz and. Yeah, it's all artwork. So it's like the hand drawn.
It's a hand drawn blue. I feel very comfortable in the
(43:09):
company of Matt when I look at all his stuff on his shelves and his
shirt and you know, I'm ready to. Come Disney
fans here. I'm ready to come do a charrette with you guys. I
was going to say because this is not. Matt is not just wearing this just
for today. You will see Matt in Disney themed shirts, shirts
throughout the week. This is not just for
(43:32):
today. Well, you know, Jody and I were just at an
event in Seattle, an annual get together of Disney
fans. And you know, you think of them, okay, they're a bunch of Disney fans,
right. But what it really is is people who like to think creatively.
And you know, they had this great room, this great night
where they had people decorate their rooms and stuff like that. It's crazy. And their
(43:54):
doors, their rooms. But the common thing you find, and it's not
just Disney fans, it's people who have fandoms of a lot of stuff
is that people love an opportunity to think creatively. They just
really. And to interact with people and to share
it, to have an opportunity to share their creativity.
So using that as a cultural advantage in a company
(44:16):
I think has just got to be a great opportunity. Yeah, you
had another question, Megan? Yeah, it's kind of pivoting a little bit, but
it was something that also resonated with me from dream chasing.
So you kind of talk a bit about how, I
don't know, I don't know if it's the same now, but especially, you know, back
when you were there and I know that was still somewhat recently
(44:38):
having to kind of prove the value and importance of imagineering. Even
though from reading your book it seems like it's a no
brainer. It's something that is like clearly mission critical.
But that's also a challenge that a lot of security teams face because
resources aren't necessarily allocated to security. It's not
necessarily seen for one as something that is like
(45:00):
a profit driver. Even though, you know, like you can
market your, your work sometimes like based on, oh, we're like the most
secure form, especially for healthcare things. But with healthcare, you know,
there's, there's all the other necessities such as patient care
and other services like that, which makes security take a backseat.
But we are increasingly see, especially in healthcare, that security
(45:23):
can have a direct impact on patient lives and their actual health.
Absolutely, yeah. If there's a breach while you're in the hospital or if
your private records get, you know, leaked to
the public and now your boss knows something that you don't want them to know
it, like, it changes your interactions with the world. So how did you work
to kind of like solidify imagineering this like critical piece
(45:45):
that others didn't see that way as more of a
partner. You mentioned specifically a partner rather than a service provider. So
like, how did you try to make that shift? Yeah, I would say that in
the context of an organization that is
always competing for resources. Right. You're saying that. And
Disney's not really different. The idea
(46:06):
of building a new attraction in the parks
competes with a Pixar movie because it's one
Disney and everybody's got creative ideas and they
know that one Pixar movie, if it's successful, has this
much revenue stream and retail stream and new attractions
based on it and all that stuff. An attraction at Disneyland
(46:28):
is a different kind of economics. Depending on how much, how popular
it becomes, it may drive all of Disneyland's attendance for the next five years.
So internal marketing is incredibly
valuable, incredibly important to, to be able to internally
market what you're trying to do to all of your constituency.
And when you talk about marketing, marketing meaning
(46:51):
saying this is important and this is what we're doing, it's that it kind of
goes back to my open house example, is you've got to figure out
ways to get people excited about what you're doing. And
that takes creativity. It takes two, you know,
young people on your team who came out of, who just got out of
school, who make a crazy video on TikTok about what you're doing
(47:13):
or something like that that it takes. You have to have people
talking about crazy ideas and wanting
to be a part of it. And so you can think of it as internal
marketing, you can also think of it as creativity. But some way you've got to
create, focus on things that people said, oh, I had
no idea that we could do that, you know, and go after the
(47:35):
successes when you have them, but also internally market
the ideas you have. I mean, Everybody talks about the old Post IT
example that, you know, the folks that invented Post IT notes
who they were working for, you know, a company that stuck things
together. And their pitch was, this is something that doesn't stick
together. Right. It was crazy. It was like, why would anybody want something that doesn't
(47:57):
stick together? But my understanding is what they did is they made them,
they handed them out in the office, they did anything they could do to
internally sell this idea. It's one of the great business stories of all
time. But I think we all have are in that business all the time. We
always are trying to pitch cool new stuff a little
bit crazy, a little bit outside the box. And you got to find out a
(48:19):
way to, you know, in imagineering, we had people who
would go out who did a blast every day, who would do like a
30 second video, they would just send out by email. And it was whatever
crazy thing happened last weekend in the parks or in somebody else's park or the
news or something like that. And people loved getting this blast because you didn't
have to do anything. You just clicked on it and you. And it played for
(48:41):
30 seconds and it was like a cool new thing. I think those
kinds of things that you encourage, you try to find
the creative people and encourage them to want to do that stuff
and be, you know, if they need a little bit of resource, give them a
little bit of resource to do it, a little bit of time to do it,
time to make a trip someplace. But the payback is always
(49:02):
huge. The payback is. It sounds like it costs money.
It's. The payback is giant, I think. Well, yeah, and especially with,
I mean, with security, like I mentioned, there's the people aspect of it too,
where all of the employees are members of the security
team, whether they, you know, officially by title are or not. Yeah,
yeah. We need everyone on board for it. Otherwise
(49:25):
there's other points of failure that we can't control. If not everyone
has bought into the idea of security. Oh,
absolutely. You know, we had that with information security at Disney where
you have, you know, when I was doing the concept finishing the concepts
for Shanghai, Disneyland, I had 720 people.
So it's very hard to say 720 people
(49:47):
have to keep something a secret. Right. It's going to go somewhere. Right.
And then you have to go out to people to do permits and
contractors to do construction and stuff like that. But it turned out it
was a culture that had to be built up. People had to know
procedures and stuff like that. But Also, people had to care about it. We
had to convince people it was important, that it was strategically important to
(50:09):
the company and that it was kind of. It ended up to be kind of,
like, disrespectful to your colleagues, to
leak information, that it was kind of breaking a trust, if you know what
I mean. So. But it was all culture. It was all working with
culture to make a difference, and we all had to talk about it and focus
on it. Yeah, no, I think that's great advice, because security culture
(50:30):
is something that's talked about a lot. So culture. Yeah, that's culture.
Unlocking the keys to figuring that out. And I like the idea of internal
marketing, too, because I don't know that a lot of times, you know, people think
of security and they think of the hoodies and just the people behind the
scenes who. You don't know their names. You don't know who they are.
That's not your goal for your company. Then internally marketing could
(50:53):
be helpful to fix that. I think internally marketing and having
executives realize that a certain amount of their time has to
be. And again, it's hard when you're mostly virtual. But
walking the halls, if you can figure out how to walk the halls, is a
huge thing, because just meeting up with somebody who you
didn't know, who's working, who's got a passion for something, wants to tell you about
(51:15):
it. Those things are huge drivers of both, I think,
employee satisfaction and also of collecting ideas.
And I don't know how you do it in a. In a mostly remote office
situation, but you have to figure out a way to have that kind of
serendipitous conversation and have people feel comfortable with saying,
well, this is not a formulated idea. This is not a presentation.
(51:37):
I just, you know, last week I woke up and I thought, this is a
crazy idea. What is it? And you don't know. It might be
pill pack. It might be. You know, who knows what it might be?
But it might be something nobody thought about. And it sounds insane. Why would
anybody do that? And it ends up to be a company. Right.
So you got to have that license to think creatively.
(51:59):
You challenged me. Well, this has been a fabulous
conversation. If you had any doubt whether or not there was a connection
between imagineering and data security, I think
Bob and Megan have bridged that gap very easily. The
book Again Dream My Four Decades of Success
and Failure with Walt Disney Imagineering. Just
(52:22):
a wonderful book. I've read it twice. I'm sure there'll be a
third time coming up. Join us in the next episode as we
discuss more security challenges impacting healthcare and
practical ways to address them. Bob, after this
wonderful conversation, is there anything else you would
like to add? And also please let us know. We can buy the book
(52:44):
anywhere books are found, but where else can we connect with you? Well, I
love to hear people's creative journeys and
you can find me on LinkedIn. Bob Weiss B O B W E I S
I love to hear people's reactions to the book if you have a chance to
read the book. I spent 26 sessions, Jody, recording the
audiobook. So I love to pitch the audiobook because it was
(53:06):
a lot of work to create. But the book is on audible.com and wherever you
get your audiobooks. But I simply love to hear people's views about
organizational creativity and if the book has
perhaps inspired organizations to help their people
express that creativity. So enjoy the book if you have a chance to read it.
Enjoy the audiobook if you have a chance. And reach out if you've got
(53:28):
a journey that you can share about how creativity is
helping drive great stuff for people. Yeah, I just wanted to say
thank you Bob for coming on. This has been fantastic.
Really appreciate it. A big fan of your work. So from all the
Disney fans out there, we want to thank you for giving us years and
decades of lots of fun and pretty much
(53:50):
forever hopefully, because stuff that you've done will be around
long past when we've been here. And just a reminder, anybody
out there, if you have any ideas, if you have any creative ideas, any
topics you know, please let us know. We'll have a link in the show
notes to feedback form and don't forget. To lock the
back door.
Foreign.
Welcome to Shut the Back Door, brought to you by Redox. Shut
the Backdoor is a healthcare security podcast dedicated to
keeping health data safe one episode at a time. I'm your
host, Jody Mayberry. And of course, with me is the
wonderful Megan McLeod. Hello, Megan. Hi, Jody. It's good
(00:22):
to have you here. And we've got Matt Mock with us who's
become familiar voice on this show. Hi, Matt. Hey, Jody.
Well, the big news is that Megan has moved from
Colorado to Idaho. And Megan, I'm just curious, on
your road trip, of all the book choices that you can
make to read as you're doing a cross country
(00:44):
move, you brought a 420 page book with
you on that trip. That just seems like an inconvenient book
to carry with you everywhere you go. Yes, I did, but
actually it was kind of a quick read for me because it was so interesting
that I just breezed by. So it was super helpful on the
transition to keep me entertained. Well, the good news is that
(01:06):
book that Megan Read, the 420 page
book, Dream My Four Decades of Success
and Failure with Walt Disney Imagineering, written by Bob
Weiss. Well, we have Bob Weiss here with us, the retired
president of Walt Disney Imagineering. Hello, Bob. Hey, Jody,
Matt, Megan, thanks so much for having me. It's just exciting to be able to
(01:28):
have a conversation with you. Well, it is so great to have you here with
us. And Matt and Megan, I have a question for you. First, even though
we have such a phenomenal guest with us, I have to ask you something.
We talk about healthcare data security every
episode and now we've got the president of Imagineering
on what's the connection here? So, yeah, I think that
(01:51):
that's something a few people have been asking me as they've heard that we're going
to have Bob on the podcast. And to me it's kind
of endless possibilities as far as how that connects. So especially
reading through Bob's book, there were just multiple times when I
was trying to take notes and think about things and ways that we could implement
his strategies into our security team and other security
(02:13):
teams. And so for one of these things, the first thing that I think of
is that security is always changing in healthcare, especially
critical to keep up with, or I mean, even better to stay
ahead of those latest innovations and threats. And oftentimes that
seems kind of like an impossible task for people. So the
idea of overwhelming and impossible projects and deadlines
(02:36):
is frequently something that I notice comes up in Bob's
career and in your book, in your Disney
Imagineer time. So I was wondering, Bob, if you could actually talk more
about how you turn these things that people might think of as
impossible into a reality. Well, thank you,
Megan, again. And it's very interesting
(02:57):
that I wrote a book, by the way Jodi mentioned. It's 420
pages. Disney Publishing asked me to write 250, and I said I didn't
think I could possibly write that many, but once I got started,
they couldn't shut me up. But, you know, I think
what I had hoped was that the experience
that I had with Disney Imagineering was applicable to
(03:20):
other businesses as well. And how do you manage creativity?
And how do you create, really an environment where
people can come to work, bring their whole selves, their whole ideas,
you know, everything they have to work and be encouraged to
dream, be encouraged to think big. And, you know, so often we're in
environments where we might have big ideas, but they just kind of like fall by
(03:43):
the wayside because there isn't an opportunity for people to be able to pursue
them. So I'd love for people to think bigger in every business.
And I've. I've had the opportunity because of the book to speak to, you know,
insurance companies and, you know, manufacturing companies and design
professions of all kinds who are simply interested in fostering
creativity. So that's been, you know, such an important part. And it was really a
(04:06):
hope that I had. You know, now once in a while, I go into a
Barnes and Noble and find the book on a shelf, and it's usually in the
business section, which I love. It's not in the entertainment section, it's not in the
Disney section. It's in the business. So I hope people will take a
look at it. And I'd love to hear from people about how it may have
stimulated in their businesses ideas about pushing
creativity. But I was thinking as we prepared for this,
(04:28):
Megan and Matt, that several years ago, quite a few years ago,
the Disney Parks Imagineering, which designs all the Disney parks and the
cruise ships and all that stuff, we realized that we were
incredibly focused on the safety of our visitor, our guests, what we call
our guests, on the safety, all
that kind of thing. But our record, our focus on the
(04:50):
safety of our cast members, the employees, our
imagineers, our construction people, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't really
consistent with the high level that was there for guests.
So what did we do? We got together, and it's
impossible to have a conversation at Disney without talking about safety.
It just became a pervasive issue. And Safety
(05:13):
is always at the forefront of design reviews and trips and
everything else. So you talk about story, you talk about experience, you
also talk about safety of the people involved then. And
this, this gets to your point, Megan. Then we had
an issue of security of information. And
when you're in the entertainment business, the care with which you put
(05:36):
into projects means you don't want stuff just leaking out all over
the place into the marketplace because then people have an opportunity to
form opinions and you have strategic, important
things related to patents and things like that. So we really
did the same thing. You cannot have a meeting at Disney now
without talking about safety, but also without talking about security of information.
(05:59):
And we just became a culture of people who
respected the fact that there was plenty of people out
there who would love to hear little tidbits about what we were about to do,
but that it was inappropriate to your team members, to
your culture, all those things, to not have an incredible focus on the
security of information. So that's one of the first things I thought about as we
(06:21):
were talking about talking was that's something we have in common. Plus we have,
obviously we're in the healthcare business where people are
fulfilling an aspiration to have a better life than they had
before. Right. They're trying to do something with their life when they're in a
healthcare experience and they're hoping to be supported by that whole system.
Disney is very similar. People have an aspiration to get their
(06:44):
families together, to have a break from the normal kind of
stressful world they live in. There's a lot of commonality, I think, between
what we do. So I hope that we'll find some commonalities in this
conversation. Yeah, definitely. I think that like you mentioned, just
having the intersection of all of those kinds of
ideas is something that we have to deal with too. I mean,
(07:05):
yes, we are security, but we also have to meet demands
for our products and for other elements of customer
interactions, all sorts of things like that. So just because it's security
doesn't mean that that's the only thing we're focused on, especially when security
is such a people forward kind of industry, because people often
think about just the technical element, but the people element with
(07:27):
security. So like how you're saying to keep information,
you know, from leaking when you're trying to create these projects on
security side of things, having a different, you know, you have, you have a
lot of employees. And so yes, there's an element of keeping information secure, but then
there is also an element of teaching people and training them on how not to
click on things because they really are the line of defense. If you could have
(07:49):
all of these technical controls in place. But it's really the people. Each individual
person is. We say, you know, everyone is responsible for security,
not just our team. So it's everyone's responsibility. And it's also,
I think, everyone in a company's responsibility to think
creatively, to think outside the box, to think about the future. What could we do
that we haven't done before that would make our experience
(08:12):
with. I'm going to call them your guests, your customers, to make
your guests feel better and more inspired and all those
things. So I think it's that too. I think there's lots of learnings in terms
of how we create experiences and how we
create an environment, a work environment that people feel
free to express impossible ideas. Because
(08:34):
our job is really to sort of figure out how to do things that are
impossible. And there aren't that many things that really are impossible. We find out how
to do them, you know, step by step, so. Well. Yeah, I think a lot
of people would have thought, you know, some of the parks across the globe that
you worked on would be impossible. And yet here we are decades later.
And, you know, yeah, we, you know, seven years I
(08:55):
spent developing Disneyland in Shanghai, you know, which
involved land and, you know, talents from
throughout China, talents from throughout the world in terms of Disney talents,
train lines and roads and just so many things that you would think
this is a Herculean task to just come to China,
where you couldn't imagine a culture more different than kind
(09:18):
of the American culture that Disney grew up in. But by
embracing innovation, by embracing the market, by
embracing the talent that we could partner with over there, we were able to
do things something that none of us thought was possible. And
that's kind of what it's about. It's just about, you know, it doesn't matter how
big it is, how impossible it sounds, it's probably got a
(09:39):
route to success if it's meaningful enough. And people have a. People
have to have a passion for what they do. They have to have a desire
to do it if they have that. Boy, if you have a company where people
have a strong passion for doing creative things, that's the best thing in the world.
I think that's a great point. Yeah. And I think something that.
Like when I was reading your book, something that really stood out to me is
(10:00):
when you were thinking about starting with an impossible task.
You mentioned that charrettes, which I hadn't. Am I Saying that
correctly. Yes, you are. Yes, you are. Okay, so you mentioned that those
were a really important part to getting that process started.
So I'd be interested to hear, you know, a bit more about, like, what that
means. Yeah, I'd. I'd love to talk about charrettes, because I think charrettes are.
(10:23):
Are something that is. Are applicable to many people's
businesses. And what is a charrette? I'll go back a little bit. Let me
tell you the deep history of what a charrette is. A charrette is a
wagon, a wagon with big wooden wheels. And it's a
term that referred to wagons in the Beaux Arts period of France.
And there were these wagons that kind of go down the cobblestone streets.
(10:45):
And art students at the School of Beaux Arts in
Paris at that time, when their projects were due,
they would send this charrette around, and they'd have to put their project
on the wagon to be taken over to be reviewed by their instructors. And.
And if your painting wasn't done, the only option you had was to get
on the wagon or the charrette with all the paintings and
(11:08):
be going through the cobblestones of Paris trying to finish your drawing at
the same time that this thing was driving through Paris. So it's come to
mean a group of people in a
frantic environment who get together in a short time period,
in a rush and kind of do the impossible thinking.
And so when we think of charrettes, we think of a room with
(11:30):
a group of creative people in it. Maybe they know each other, maybe they don't.
Maybe it's a combination of people that know each other and don't know each other,
and they set up an impossible task. Look, we're going to have two days, and
we're going to have a solution to some, you know, security idea or some, you
know, innovative product for our guests. And it seems
impossible at the beginning, but first, you have kind of.
(11:51):
Everybody has their own individual ideas, and it feels kind of guarded for a
little while. And then after a while, people start to really get along, and they
start to say, well, why couldn't we do that? One of the things we always
say about charrettes is don't start with node. Don't say, well, we did that
10 years ago, and it didn't work. Start with, well,
what if we could do that? And you just do silly
(12:13):
stuff like you write things on index cards or flip charts, and
you kind of paper the room with ideas. And it is remarkable how much we
can think outside the box that way. And at the end of a couple
days or a week, or even a half a day, you will
have ideas that you hadn't thought about before. And you'll have also a group
of people who were a part of developing that idea who
(12:35):
now want to go take their passion for that idea and go try to figure
out how to make it happen. So it's a very common way that we come
up with ideas like Star Wars, Galaxy's Edge or
Iron Man Attractions or Pandora. It's a very common way at Disney
you come up with creative ideas. But I think it's applicable to
many kinds of businesses. Well, yeah, and I really like the
(12:57):
element of having like a buy in too. When you're
like you said, like people, when they're getting passionate about it, you actually
maybe are more likely to see those same people than go actually forward
with the task that they're now passionate about because of a session like that. Well,
and also, you know, part of the reason why you try to get people to
go in and you try to kind of select people who are good at this,
(13:18):
but you try to get them to go in and say, let's not evaluate every
idea when it comes up, let's not critique it. After a while
you find what people focus on is adding to the idea.
So Megan had this crazy idea and then Matt
came in and said, well, wait a minute, maybe that's not so crazy. Maybe we
have done something that could support that, you know, and then I contribute something,
(13:41):
Jody contributes something. And within an hour or so, or,
you know, a day or so, depending on the length of it, you find that
nobody knows whose idea this was. It's a really a group process that
came up with something that was completely out of the box. And I know we're
going to talk about AI here, but one of the big things about AI, I
think, is AI contributes a certain pattern of
(14:02):
thinking based on historical patterns of thinking. But
we as humans can think way outside the box. We can make
connections that don't make any sense at all, but they are a
creative way. We didn't think about it before. And that, I think is why
a charrette or creative sessions or brainstorming or encouraging
brainstorming, creative thinking is really important because we can all really
(14:25):
think outside the box of what we know, way out into the
unknown. That's really the hope that the book was
for me, was to encourage people to never feel limited
by a crazy idea. That sounds impossible at the beginning.
Yeah. But I really love the thought of Those and I also
like your approach to something that may seem impossible. One of
(14:48):
my kind of pet peeves is people saying that, like, this is impossible
and just kind of drawing a line in the sand. And I think rarely
is something impossible. It may be not feasible for your company
or something else might come into play. But the idea itself,
at least have people brainstorm around it and see what you can come up
with. Especially today in like healthcare, there especially a lot of
(15:11):
these teams, you know, they may be smaller, you have a lot of challenges,
you have to worry about patient care, you have to worry about AI.
And it just seems daunting that you can't even move forward with trying to
tackle this stuff. And I really love that idea of just, you know,
getting a team together and start working through it and
seeing what could you come up with and then how can you build off of
(15:33):
that and what do you have at your disposal? And you know, maybe you
can't accomplish that main goal of making everything
safe every day, but maybe you can make a huge dent in
that with what you have. Yeah. And chances are if you, if you
have a group of people who discount something as being, we've
tried it or it's impossible or whatever, these days, the thing's going to happen
(15:55):
is that somebody else is going to take that idea and start a new company
with it. Right. It's just, you know, somebody's got to figure it out.
So the creative capacity internal to companies is
remarkable. But usually the boundaries are set by
ourselves. If we could just set those aside. We have
tremendous capacity for creative thinking. And you just have to be
(16:16):
willing to say, look, just for today, we're going to set aside that
comment about how impossible this sounds and we're all going to put our minds to
how do we create something that's completely out of the box that would be great
for our customers or our guests. There's plenty of time to figure it out
after that. What you really need is a raw idea or ideas
that are completely, you know, haven't been done before and the opportunity
(16:39):
to go out and figure them out. And one question I have so
specific to, like, our company, we are all remote. We don't have
any offices. So, you know, we do get together from time to
time. But our day to day is we're all remote. There's a lot
more people remote these days. Now how do you take that same
concept and do it when you have people, you know,
(17:01):
remote all over the place? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a common problem that
so many companies have now and, or a common situation, I won't call
it a problem. And we had during, you know, I was president of
Imagineering during COVID so we had all remote work and
everybody went home and people who were used to being
storytellers, artists, designers, architects, constant interaction,
(17:23):
we're suddenly having to work, you know, on Zoom or teams all
the time. And it was the only way we could get projects in, you know,
Hong Kong and Paris and all over the world to keep them going was by
empowering those local teams to, and then checking in with them by Zoom.
I'd say, though, that I think we undervalue face
to face communication when it comes to creativity. And
(17:45):
so to the degree that you could say,
let's all get together, let's figure out we can all be in St.
Louis the beginning of next month and let's get the
Marriott Ballroom, I think it's not
that you can't do a big Zoom call and do a creative session. I know
you can, and there's lots of other formats besides that. But I
(18:07):
do think people tend to come away after just
an, you know, a day or so in a common environment like that.
And they say, you know, these are people. I haven't, I've never even met them
personally before and I, I know them so much better now. We
were able to talk about things. So I'm a real proponent
of trying to find a venue where people can
(18:28):
spend a little bit of time together physically, you know, and personal. Face
to face doesn't mean you can't do it, but I think you'll find an
intensity in the passion that people have when you do
that. And, you know, it doesn't take that much. You just have to find out,
you know, okay, we're going to do it once a quarter and we'll do it
in different markets and we'll get 10 or 15 or 20 people together and
(18:51):
we'll, we'll have a session because then once you come out of that charrette or
that creative session, you have content that's going to drive you for the next
six months or, you know, you know, you have, you have an agenda that you
come out of. So it's not that you have to do all the work there's.
But I do think that creative interaction is undervalued right now
by us to some degree. Not undervalued, but I don't think people know
(19:12):
how much greater it could be if they could spend some time together.
I know that sounds, it probably makes me sound old Fashioned. But Bob, I've heard
you mention in the past how important hallway talk is to
creativity. Just bump into Matt and Matt says, what are you
working on? And I tell him and he has an idea I hadn't thought of.
Is there any way to enhance a
(19:34):
sense of hallway talk when you all work remotely? You know, I had an experience.
I had an experience when during the depths of COVID I mean, I know what
you guys schedules must be like, but I was scheduled to the max. Like, you
know, we started talking to Paris in the morning, then Orlando and then la
and then Tokyo and then Hong Kong and then Shanghai. So we
were 10 hours solid. Zoom, you know, 15
(19:57):
minute break for the bathroom sandwich at the table, you know, during the
zoom call and there wasn't that serendipity of,
oh, I just, you know, I woke up last night and I had this crazy
idea because everybody knows you've only got an hour for this call
and everybody's probably got a pretty strong agenda for it. So one way
to do it, I think, is to say this little group of people that we're
(20:18):
going to entrust with some creativity and some dream chasing, we're going to
let them get together on a regular basis, but we don't want them
to have a fully planned agenda. We actually just want them to get together
and chat about ideas and brainstorm a little bit.
I don't think we do enough of that. I think you can do it on
Zoom, I think, or whatever format you use, I think you can do it,
(20:39):
but you have to kind of have the serendipity of, hey, I read this article
last night or I saw this movie, or you have
to have the freedom of the schedule to be able to have that kind of
interaction. If everything is driven by an agenda, you don't have just kind
of like surprises happen. And I think surprise is one of those
things. The other thing I advise a lot of people, and I advise even
(21:02):
Disney of this is go out and look at stuff that you don't know. I
think one of the greatest things for creativity is traveling around and
looking at other people's stuff. If you're in the hotel
business looking at hotels that other people are doing, or if you're in the restaurant
business looking at restaurants that other people are doing. If you're in, in Disney,
you try to look at other people's cruise ships, other people's attractions, not to
(21:24):
copy them, but to say, okay, what was it
about that that they did that was good, what was bad and how should it
influence the way we think about our guests and guest experiences. So
thinking outside the box, having time where people just get
together to chat and think creatively without a really
strong agenda, traveling and seeing things that other people are
(21:47):
doing or researching things that other people. I think those are all really strong,
important aspects of creativity. Yeah. And like you mentioned, they're
not. There's not necessarily time set aside. No. We're sort
of in a such a programmed world that we're losing that. And I think
it's really. It's really important. I. During COVID when I
had all those schedules, I started doing this thing
(22:09):
where I had everybody's cell numbers. So I just started
calling people. And, you know, the president of WDI is supposed to have
a schedule for everything. Right. I just call people on their phone and say, hey,
how's it going? They're like, what are you calling me for? It's like,
you know, in the olden days, we weren't so planned. You just called somebody and
said, hey, can I ask you a question? It feels like
(22:30):
a weird thing today to just call somebody out of the blue, but,
you know, who's not your friend or is just an associate in another city or
something. But think how great it is if you could just say, hey, I had
this idea last night. That's what Jodi's talking about, which is hallway talk.
So how do you create hallway talk when people are in multiple countries and
multiple, you know, cities and stuff like that? Just have more informal
(22:52):
venues like that. That's what you have to have. Well, yeah, and having a leader
who is that way, who is open like that is really helpful, because
I know. I mean, with Matt, I do feel like you get from me frequently,
hey, do you have five minutes to just hop on a chat real fast? Because,
like, I have. My wheels are turning, and Matt is a
great person to just do that with because I know you have a busy
(23:12):
schedule. But if I'm like. I look at his calendar and I'm like, oh, I
think he has a little bit of time right now. A little bit of time.
Yeah, we. I mean, in the entertainment business,
you know, we talk about pitches all the time. A pitch is, you know,
two guys going to a bar and buy a horse or whatever. You know, this
is the idea, the first idea for a movie or something like that. And it
has to be pretty compact. It has to be a compact pitch.
(23:35):
We started talking about the fact that, okay, an elevator pitch
is. Let's say you want to call Matt because you have an idea. If you
get into the elevator with Matt and you're going to go up three floors. That
means you have about 30 seconds to make that pitch. Okay, you're going to go
12 floors, maybe you have 80 seconds to make that pitch. Right.
But you should never go out of the house without that pitch in your
(23:57):
mind because you don't know if you're going to step into that elevator with
Steven Spielberg and be able to pitch him. And you only got one floor to
do it. So we always sort of said you always have to carry
creative ideas with you. You always have to be ready to express yourself. You
always have to be ready to run into somebody and say, hey, you know, I
thought about this thing and I should tell you about it. That churn
(24:19):
rate is what makes a creative organization
function. Well, I think, and I do think it's a thing that
we have to work on because the more programmed we become, the
harder it is to keep that churn rate going and the more important it is
to our creative thinking. Yeah. When you, when you say that, what
really resonates is all of our schedules
(24:42):
get so jammed packed. To your point, like nobody is
really building in that creative time anymore. If you are in the office,
you might be able to build it in by just walking to and from
a meeting. But even then it seems like most people are
jam packed with meetings these days. And yeah. Finding
ways to just block off a little bit of time to be able to
(25:04):
chew because maybe you do have a good idea and then you like, I need
to reach out to this person and they're just meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting,
meeting. And maybe that is you just call them because they see the phone call
come in and it's not a chat message and you take it differently.
Cause that does really help. And to make it. Yeah, we
do that often on our team and it's. That's how we get some of
(25:26):
our best ideas. That's the way to do it is to just have people feel
comfortable with the idea that there are programmed
moments and then there are some free moments and
give somebody a heads up, say, hey, I got a crazy idea. Could we talk
about it on the phone? You know, so they know. It's a lot of times
I will do that. In my past I would do that with executives. Let's say
(25:47):
you're going to have Bob Iger come over. And I would always give Bob
a heads up as what is he walking into?
Is he walking into a formal meeting where we're going to
propose something or is he walking into something that we want to engage him
in a dialogue. And it helped a lot if he knew which was
which, because his expectation was, I'm kind of coming in casually,
(26:10):
we're going to talk about this, or, you know, you guys have been working on
this for three months. I'm expecting a formal presentation. I
think that helps a lot. It helps with us just at the working level. But
also I think it helps with executives to have a heads up of whether
they're. Because you don't want them to walk in and say no either. Right. You
want them to kind of get into the idea. The best thing would be if
they come in and say, you know, this is the craziest thing I ever said
(26:32):
I ever saw. But I have an idea of how we could make it even
better. That's the kind of dialogue you want to have. Right. So the more
you can give them a kind of a heads up, that's what they're walking into.
The other thing, Matt, I think, and I don't know if this relates to
your business or not, is I think we tend to deal with
on a daily basis people that are like us. And they might be very different
(26:53):
in personality, but they're in the same part of the business.
And part of what you want to do when you want to stimulate creative thinking
is have, you know, an operation person and a development
person and a finance person and an art, you know, art
marketing person together in the same room or together in the same
zoom call, meaning cross those discipline lines
(27:16):
so that people hear how other people are thinking about the business.
Because that was really, really the way you get some electricity
if everybody's the same. And you know, part of the, the value
of, I think Disney Imagineering is we used to say there's like 50,
you know, different disciplines of people, from stained glass experts to
architects to artists to anthropologists, that you could pull together a little
(27:39):
group that was a wild, crazy, you know, diverse
group. You want that because if everybody's kind of on the
operations side, they will develop a way of thinking. If they're all on the marketing
side, they'll develop a way of thinking. You will really want to mix it up.
Yeah, I think that's something that we hear. I mean, not just, you
know, in our company, but in general. Maybe it's, I don't know if it's more
(28:00):
with remote workforces or if it's, you know, larger companies too, just all
over. But the idea of kind of being feeling more
siloed and not having that cross collaboration and it is a little more
Difficult, I feel, remotely, unless you're being intentional about
it, unless actually saying, yeah, we need the diversity of
thought for this kind of project or whatever we're working on, because
(28:22):
you're not going to cross them in the hallway. You have to actually set it
up. So, yeah, we had, I set up a program
at Imagineering where we would have. We would invite
companies or organizations if they wanted to, just on a
pro bono basis to come to Imagineering and spend. Sometimes
they would come spend a week there, sometimes they would come spend two or three
(28:44):
days. We'd give them a tour, we'd talk about creativity, and then we would
brainstorm on what they did. And it was great for them because they got
a group of imagineers who were thinking outside the box. They got
some fresh perspective. But it was also great for the imagineers because we got
to talk about somebody's business that was not running theme parks. And I
remember we had one with the Mayo Clinic. And the first
(29:07):
time that I heard the Mayo Clinic wanted to come to Imagineering, I'm like, what
could we possibly do to help the Mayo Clinic? This is crazy.
We shouldn't even do this. This is like there's nothing we can help them with.
We don't have any expertise in this area. It turned out to be one of
the most magical weeks we spent because they came in
wanting to talk about that patient aspiration and
(29:28):
also the fact that the people who came to the Mayo
Clinic, the majority of them were not patients, they were family members,
they were health professionals, and that they felt like they didn't
really do anything to improve their lives, which would then
improve the patients lives. Right. So we had an incredibly
gracious, wonderful, exciting conversation for three or four days. I think it
(29:51):
influenced their thinking and it influenced our thinking too, to think about how
a family dealing with a crisis. We get a lot of families
who have dealt with a crisis who then go to Walt Disney World and want
to have a great experience together. So you never know where those
synapses are going to fire. And so having a little bit of
unpredictability in your daily life is a good thing. Yeah, no, I think
(30:13):
that sounds wonderful. Kind of switching gears to another element of
kind of a difficulty that I feel like resonates maybe
between both Imagineering and security, is that
frequently security teams, especially in health care,
they are operating with a small team, but still need to
tackle these big problems. I mean, health care security, you know, it's
(30:36):
critical to people's lives and their very
sensitive data. But a lot of times Those resources and
health care are going elsewhere because there's, you know, important patient care
and all of these other considerations. And I
found that in dream chasing, you talk about how oftentimes the
Imagineers had to tackle these huge projects, but didn't necessarily
(30:58):
have a huge team to do it with. So I was wondering
how you worked within those kind of constraints but still able to
make lasting and impactful changes.
Well, I certainly don't want to make light of challenges that people have
in their work, but I can tell you that, you know, people think of
Disney as being huge budgets and unlimited resources.
(31:21):
We never had the resources we needed. We never had enough people.
We never had enough artists or designers or architects.
But the passion to do something unique was what drove it.
And people tended to try to prioritize
their creative time or prioritize those
aspects of this launch that were the most important. So set
(31:43):
aside the things that don't really matter and let's go for the core experience,
the thing that really is going to make a difference. And we can add those
other things later. You know, what can we do to launch it? And then
we know we can enhance the product later on. All of our
projects at Imagineering were time driven. Usually,
you know, three years or something sounds like a long time, but three
(32:05):
years to do a six year project is not a long, is not a long
time. It's accelerated. Right. So obviously there's a. There
becomes a big challenge since we're talking about healthcare. There becomes a big challenge of
work, life balance, because people would just put in everything,
you know, to get something done. And so that can have a negative effect too.
But generally speaking, I think people focused on
(32:26):
invention and the importance of having a passion
for something that has not been done before. And
it's easy to forget that. It's easy to say, well, I have so much on
my plate that I can't really go to this creative session today. But
the creative session might have such a huge impact. Especially I think
I really feel this, working with students and working with organizations on
(32:49):
AI, feeling like there's going to be a whole lot of stuff that AI
is going to help us do and get done that is on a
more routine or straightforward basis.
And we as the humans in this equation have to be the ones that
say, why are we doing this at all? Why aren't we doing something completely
different? What's our moonshot that really is outside the box?
(33:11):
I think that more and more we have to prioritize our time
against the craziness that nobody has thought about.
And that's hard. It's hard from a management point of view to justify it. It's,
you know. But one of the things it does is
it really makes people excited. People would much rather
think about crazy ideas and think about ways to do things different
(33:34):
because we are creative people. One of the things I find with traveling with this
book and Jody's been with me, we've gone
to see other people and talk about the book is people love
creativity. People want to be creative, so
they're holding back. I feel like we're all kind of holding back, and we shouldn't.
That is really what we should do. And we as managers should look at
(33:56):
our talent and say, that person really kind of
thinks outside the box of everybody else. Let's put them into a meeting with some
other people. You know, that's the hardest part of our job. But it might be
the part that's. The most important when you're hitting on AI,
being able to do the routine kind of stuff. I think that is a really
good point that, you know. Well, we've talked about AI a bit on this
(34:17):
podcast before from some different technical aspects. We're going to talk about,
you know, some potential security issues with it and some
future work. But something that I don't really think that
I've necessarily thought of is how much it can unlock that creative time.
Because, you know, I can go ahead and do the
mundane, like, routine, daily things that it might have been taking
(34:39):
up a few of my hours of the day, but then now I have that
time to be able to actually try to innovate and solve these
bigger problems that we shouldn't be relying on AI for. Yeah,
I think that's the key, Megan and Matt, is
how do we make sure that whatever creative resource we have
in our company, we're leveraging. And
(35:00):
people at Imagineering used to say I had like a hidden imagineering,
because they'd say, well, nobody's funded this Blue sky project,
you know, this. This creative project. And we'd walk in with a whole bunch of
stuff that we just created about it, and they'd say, well, how did you get
the funding to do this? I say, I didn't get any funding. I just got
people together. I bought sandwiches, and we spent the last six weeks
(35:22):
in lunch every day, and we did this. And people did drawings at home, you
know, or whatever is figure out a way to pull.
Imagine you could take 10%, 5%. Imagine
you could take 5% of your organization's capacity and put
it against creativity. Think of 5% of the incredible people you
have every week going to creative ideas. You would
(35:45):
be. And maybe you do it. I'm not saying you don't, but just think of
any company like that, the leadership capability that they would
have if they took 5 or 10% of their people's time and
focused it on creativity. It's incredible. And people will do it
because it's a break from what they normally do.
Not that they're. What they normally do isn't important, but that it's kind of their
(36:05):
ability to think outside the box and think about the future really is a,
you know, it's really a strategy we should all take, I think. Well, yeah, and
future thinking and security, I mean, that's. We have to,
like, it's not. It's not really an optional element of the job. Like, we
have to be future thinkers. So, you know, like, we've talked about innovations
and stuff like that. That's kind of what we, as a team, as
(36:28):
a, like our department or just the security as a whole.
Like, innovation is critical to stay ahead because the threat
actors are going to keep innovating. They're taking creative time. They're.
They're using their resources in that way. So we need to be doing the same
thing. And I think it does tell us, like, one of our big
jobs as leaders is to get to know
(36:51):
people and get to know something about them outside of what they
normally have been prescribed to do. And know that
I have been fascinated, Megan, when I find out that
someone is like an engineer at the office
and a pastry chef at home or
something else like that. And it is an incredible opportunity
(37:14):
to find out a little bit about them, what do they like to do, and
you find that you have a whole creative resource out there that you just
haven't exercised on. Yeah, I love these points, and
I think that's so key, is leveraging the talent that you have and
giving them the opportunity to have that time. You know, your
AI right now on security, everybody's trying to figure it out. And
(37:37):
it's. The solutions to AI security are not going to
come from AI itself. It's going to come from smart people
getting in a room, brainstorming, and coming up with some creative ideas
around it. And you have to just make room for that
and also not say no on a lot of these ideas. We
preach a lot in my team about the whole, how do you eat an elephant?
(37:59):
Thing. And I think that comes back to this, is these
impossible tasks. They seem like there's no way to Even start
it. And the easiest way is just to start talking about it and throw
out the crazy ideas and see what sticks and then
start taking it piece by piece and do a little bit here and then
iterate on it and see where you can get. And yeah, I think that's what's
(38:22):
going to bring up some great ideas for companies. Yeah,
at Disney we had still have a research and development
division that is a part of imagineering. And they did lots of
exploration throughout the year. You know, all kinds of just crazy ideas
about ways you could change the parks or change the way it operates or
new technologies could be applied. But it was something kind of all over the place
(38:44):
and different scientists working and stuff like that. So they
came up with this idea of an annual R and D open house. And
the open house was you'd go over there and it was like a three
hour agenda and they'd walk you through labs and walk you through pitches
and things like that, big and small. And it was kind of a really incredible
journey for that day. It turned out to be something that was like the
(39:07):
hottest ticket throughout Disney that people would say, I have to go. I have to
fly to California to be in the R and D open house. It's a sweet
because you didn't want to miss all this creative thinking. But part of it
was, or still is getting it all together
and focusing it on a message for some period of time
saying we're going to have a quarterly thing where anybody that's got an
(39:28):
idea can come in and pitch it and we're going
to give out some kind of a reward or recognition to
the top 10 ideas that grow out of this process. But there's something that
encourages people to want to put their time together. We did a thing
where we would do attraction ideas and people had the
opportunity to pitch them to the whole company. And most of the people who pitched
(39:51):
ideas were the younger people in the company that hadn't yet
reached the point where they would be the ones who would be pitching these ideas
to Bob Iger or somebody like that. So we just finished
last year the Zootopia land in Shanghai. Big new attraction
land. All that stuff that came out of one of these young people that pitched
in this session just walked up and said, here's what I would do if you
(40:12):
asked me to do a land based on this new movie that's coming out for
Zootopia. So some just think about formats
where you could say on this day, each quarter,
it's going to be creative day and everybody has to have
some kind of a creative meeting in their department and bring in another department,
work together or something. You just never know what's going to come out.
(40:34):
And it drives people's passion. It makes them excited to be there.
Because it says that's the coolest thing we do all year is when we all
get together and just think outside the box for a day or two days, whatever.
Yeah, I think it'd be something really interesting to pitch or like for companies as
a whole, but to pitch, you know, internally here too, because we do, you
know, get together maybe like once a year or something and have like
(40:56):
a day where we are creative, but then maybe that's kind of where that
stops. So it would be kind of cool to have preparation up to the
session where people are actually bringing stuff before that, because we often don't know what
we're doing until we get there or something. Like you said quarterly. Or
to kind of build it more into the day to day. Because we got like
a lot of positive feedback from being able to have this one hour creative
(41:18):
session once a year. You know, everyone's really excited about it, but
if it stops there, then it's. We're not utilizing as much of the resources
we could be. Yeah, I think that's one of the things about it is that
from a talent retention point of view, get. Just kind
of get to get HR here for a minute, Jodi, is that it
makes people feel like they work in a great organization that listens
(41:40):
to and wants to hear ideas. And if there is some
expectation that says, we know we do this on
the fourth Thursday of the quarter or something like that, we
get ready. And the people you find that younger talent, especially,
I think, who aren't necessarily in the most advanced
positions, see it as an opportunity to break through. Right. To have
(42:02):
their crazy idea recognized in some ways. So
it's worthwhile. I think so. Pivoting just a little bit. I'm just making sure that
unfortunately we're in a podcast and we can't see Jody's shirt.
But sure, Jody's shirt is definitely outside the box. I think here
on the dark. It's dark shirt day and Jody's wearing
red with palm trees. And I don't know what else is on it. So it's
(42:25):
good. Well, I'm glad you noticed, Bob. This. This is actually
a shirt that has been in my closet for two
years. I bought it. Maybe it should go back. Maybe it should go back. Well,
that's the thing. It should perhaps. But I thought
we're talking Creativity. Today I'm going to wear a creative
shirt. So that's what led to this. There you go. Okay.
(42:47):
See? Well, speaking of shirts, I feel like Matt's is creative too. I can't tell
exactly what's on it. Matt's has Disney characters on it. I think I saw
Buzz Lightyear and oh yeah, I feel very welcome when I look
at, I see, I'm looking at. Yeah, it's all Disney characters,
Buzz and. Yeah, it's all artwork. So it's like the hand drawn.
It's a hand drawn blue. I feel very comfortable in the
(43:09):
company of Matt when I look at all his stuff on his shelves and his
shirt and you know, I'm ready to. Come Disney
fans here. I'm ready to come do a charrette with you guys. I
was going to say because this is not. Matt is not just wearing this just
for today. You will see Matt in Disney themed shirts, shirts
throughout the week. This is not just for
(43:32):
today. Well, you know, Jody and I were just at an
event in Seattle, an annual get together of Disney
fans. And you know, you think of them, okay, they're a bunch of Disney fans,
right. But what it really is is people who like to think creatively.
And you know, they had this great room, this great night
where they had people decorate their rooms and stuff like that. It's crazy. And their
(43:54):
doors, their rooms. But the common thing you find, and it's not
just Disney fans, it's people who have fandoms of a lot of stuff
is that people love an opportunity to think creatively. They just
really. And to interact with people and to share
it, to have an opportunity to share their creativity.
So using that as a cultural advantage in a company
(44:16):
I think has just got to be a great opportunity. Yeah, you
had another question, Megan? Yeah, it's kind of pivoting a little bit, but
it was something that also resonated with me from dream chasing.
So you kind of talk a bit about how, I
don't know, I don't know if it's the same now, but especially, you know, back
when you were there and I know that was still somewhat recently
(44:38):
having to kind of prove the value and importance of imagineering. Even
though from reading your book it seems like it's a no
brainer. It's something that is like clearly mission critical.
But that's also a challenge that a lot of security teams face because
resources aren't necessarily allocated to security. It's not
necessarily seen for one as something that is like
(45:00):
a profit driver. Even though, you know, like you can
market your, your work sometimes like based on, oh, we're like the most
secure form, especially for healthcare things. But with healthcare, you know,
there's, there's all the other necessities such as patient care
and other services like that, which makes security take a backseat.
But we are increasingly see, especially in healthcare, that security
(45:23):
can have a direct impact on patient lives and their actual health.
Absolutely, yeah. If there's a breach while you're in the hospital or if
your private records get, you know, leaked to
the public and now your boss knows something that you don't want them to know
it, like, it changes your interactions with the world. So how did you work
to kind of like solidify imagineering this like critical piece
(45:45):
that others didn't see that way as more of a
partner. You mentioned specifically a partner rather than a service provider. So
like, how did you try to make that shift? Yeah, I would say that in
the context of an organization that is
always competing for resources. Right. You're saying that. And
Disney's not really different. The idea
(46:06):
of building a new attraction in the parks
competes with a Pixar movie because it's one
Disney and everybody's got creative ideas and they
know that one Pixar movie, if it's successful, has this
much revenue stream and retail stream and new attractions
based on it and all that stuff. An attraction at Disneyland
(46:28):
is a different kind of economics. Depending on how much, how popular
it becomes, it may drive all of Disneyland's attendance for the next five years.
So internal marketing is incredibly
valuable, incredibly important to, to be able to internally
market what you're trying to do to all of your constituency.
And when you talk about marketing, marketing meaning
(46:51):
saying this is important and this is what we're doing, it's that it kind of
goes back to my open house example, is you've got to figure out
ways to get people excited about what you're doing. And
that takes creativity. It takes two, you know,
young people on your team who came out of, who just got out of
school, who make a crazy video on TikTok about what you're doing
(47:13):
or something like that that it takes. You have to have people
talking about crazy ideas and wanting
to be a part of it. And so you can think of it as internal
marketing, you can also think of it as creativity. But some way you've got to
create, focus on things that people said, oh, I had
no idea that we could do that, you know, and go after the
(47:35):
successes when you have them, but also internally market
the ideas you have. I mean, Everybody talks about the old Post IT
example that, you know, the folks that invented Post IT notes
who they were working for, you know, a company that stuck things
together. And their pitch was, this is something that doesn't stick
together. Right. It was crazy. It was like, why would anybody want something that doesn't
(47:57):
stick together? But my understanding is what they did is they made them,
they handed them out in the office, they did anything they could do to
internally sell this idea. It's one of the great business stories of all
time. But I think we all have are in that business all the time. We
always are trying to pitch cool new stuff a little
bit crazy, a little bit outside the box. And you got to find out a
(48:19):
way to, you know, in imagineering, we had people who
would go out who did a blast every day, who would do like a
30 second video, they would just send out by email. And it was whatever
crazy thing happened last weekend in the parks or in somebody else's park or the
news or something like that. And people loved getting this blast because you didn't
have to do anything. You just clicked on it and you. And it played for
(48:41):
30 seconds and it was like a cool new thing. I think those
kinds of things that you encourage, you try to find
the creative people and encourage them to want to do that stuff
and be, you know, if they need a little bit of resource, give them a
little bit of resource to do it, a little bit of time to do it,
time to make a trip someplace. But the payback is always
(49:02):
huge. The payback is. It sounds like it costs money.
It's. The payback is giant, I think. Well, yeah, and especially with,
I mean, with security, like I mentioned, there's the people aspect of it too,
where all of the employees are members of the security
team, whether they, you know, officially by title are or not. Yeah,
yeah. We need everyone on board for it. Otherwise
(49:25):
there's other points of failure that we can't control. If not everyone
has bought into the idea of security. Oh,
absolutely. You know, we had that with information security at Disney where
you have, you know, when I was doing the concept finishing the concepts
for Shanghai, Disneyland, I had 720 people.
So it's very hard to say 720 people
(49:47):
have to keep something a secret. Right. It's going to go somewhere. Right.
And then you have to go out to people to do permits and
contractors to do construction and stuff like that. But it turned out it
was a culture that had to be built up. People had to know
procedures and stuff like that. But Also, people had to care about it. We
had to convince people it was important, that it was strategically important to
(50:09):
the company and that it was kind of. It ended up to be kind of,
like, disrespectful to your colleagues, to
leak information, that it was kind of breaking a trust, if you know what
I mean. So. But it was all culture. It was all working with
culture to make a difference, and we all had to talk about it and focus
on it. Yeah, no, I think that's great advice, because security culture
(50:30):
is something that's talked about a lot. So culture. Yeah, that's culture.
Unlocking the keys to figuring that out. And I like the idea of internal
marketing, too, because I don't know that a lot of times, you know, people think
of security and they think of the hoodies and just the people behind the
scenes who. You don't know their names. You don't know who they are.
That's not your goal for your company. Then internally marketing could
(50:53):
be helpful to fix that. I think internally marketing and having
executives realize that a certain amount of their time has to
be. And again, it's hard when you're mostly virtual. But
walking the halls, if you can figure out how to walk the halls, is a
huge thing, because just meeting up with somebody who you
didn't know, who's working, who's got a passion for something, wants to tell you about
(51:15):
it. Those things are huge drivers of both, I think,
employee satisfaction and also of collecting ideas.
And I don't know how you do it in a. In a mostly remote office
situation, but you have to figure out a way to have that kind of
serendipitous conversation and have people feel comfortable with saying,
well, this is not a formulated idea. This is not a presentation.
(51:37):
I just, you know, last week I woke up and I thought, this is a
crazy idea. What is it? And you don't know. It might be
pill pack. It might be. You know, who knows what it might be?
But it might be something nobody thought about. And it sounds insane. Why would
anybody do that? And it ends up to be a company. Right.
So you got to have that license to think creatively.
(51:59):
You challenged me. Well, this has been a fabulous
conversation. If you had any doubt whether or not there was a connection
between imagineering and data security, I think
Bob and Megan have bridged that gap very easily. The
book Again Dream My Four Decades of Success
and Failure with Walt Disney Imagineering. Just
(52:22):
a wonderful book. I've read it twice. I'm sure there'll be a
third time coming up. Join us in the next episode as we
discuss more security challenges impacting healthcare and
practical ways to address them. Bob, after this
wonderful conversation, is there anything else you would
like to add? And also please let us know. We can buy the book
(52:44):
anywhere books are found, but where else can we connect with you? Well, I
love to hear people's creative journeys and
you can find me on LinkedIn. Bob Weiss B O B W E I S
I love to hear people's reactions to the book if you have a chance to
read the book. I spent 26 sessions, Jody, recording the
audiobook. So I love to pitch the audiobook because it was
(53:06):
a lot of work to create. But the book is on audible.com and wherever you
get your audiobooks. But I simply love to hear people's views about
organizational creativity and if the book has
perhaps inspired organizations to help their people
express that creativity. So enjoy the book if you have a chance to read it.
Enjoy the audiobook if you have a chance. And reach out if you've got
(53:28):
a journey that you can share about how creativity is
helping drive great stuff for people. Yeah, I just wanted to say
thank you Bob for coming on. This has been fantastic.
Really appreciate it. A big fan of your work. So from all the
Disney fans out there, we want to thank you for giving us years and
decades of lots of fun and pretty much
(53:50):
forever hopefully, because stuff that you've done will be around
long past when we've been here. And just a reminder, anybody
out there, if you have any ideas, if you have any creative ideas, any
topics you know, please let us know. We'll have a link in the show
notes to feedback form and don't forget. To lock the
back door.
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