Undisruptable

13Di‘S’ney Curves

‘A person should set his goals as early as he can and devote all his energy and talent to getting there. With enough effort, he may achieve it. Or he may find something that is even more rewarding. But in the end, no matter what the outcome, he will know he has been alive’.

— Walt Disney

Walt Disney came from humble beginnings to achieve phenomenal success. He was the first to add sound and colour to animation, to create a feature-length animated movie, to reinvent the theme park and so much more. He followed the path of reinvention, driven by a vision, managing contrasts, facing fear, building capabilities and reinventing himself along the way.

To learn from his journey, we will plot his progress onto a series of S curves. We will see how not every leap yielded financial success. Sometimes the success was the skills he and his teams developed in the attempt, or as we now call it: return on capability. Whether he was aware of it or not, those skills fuelled his future endeavours.

Building Capability

The year was 1910 and ten-year-old Walt Disney lived in Kansas City. He began each day at 3:15 a.m. as a paperboy. His family was poor, so his paper round contributed towards the household bills. His passions included drawing, comic books, amusement parks, acting, and movies. To fuel these passions, he secretly worked in a candy store during school recess and even began his newspaper round earlier to squeeze in some extra sales. He saved that extra money for ...