Disney Brand Loyalty Keynote Speaker
Five daily blogs about life's 5 big choices on five different sites.
The good reason for doing the hard stuff first is that the easy stuff is always easier than the hard stuff.
Draw the blueprints first.
Sweat the foundation, the infrastructural, the design.
You can decide later whether the family room floor will be tile, wood or carpet.
It doesn’t matter if you are certain about your floor if the house never gets built.
The easy stuff should always come last when it comes to organizational architecture.
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Let’s pretend you own land close to your main business and you convert this property, which includes a private lake, into an employee recreational complex.
You name this complex, Little Lake Bryan, after the official name of the lake.
Years later you rename it.
Why?
Because the words we use are one of several key ways to intentionally shape an organizational culture by design instead of letting culture happen ‘by default”, or unintentionally.
If Disney ran your business they’d change the name of your employee recreation facility from Little Lake Bryan to Mickey’s Retreat.
Much more powerful. Intentional. Meaningful.
By design.
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This post went live yesterday. Wrote it 100 days prior. So the emotional excitement motive was cancelled out because of the three-plus month delay.
The motive was, and still is, to record a monumental milestone in a journey that was overwhelmingly destined to fail, but did’t.
It didn’t fail because i never quit even though i didn’t make a dime in over six years. The very first speaking engagement was a turning point. A catalytic milestone that will get lost and forgotten when success becomes the norm.
And now, today, 200 days later, we remember yet again how most success is arduous until it isn’t.
Much of an organization’s heritage is lost on future employees because it’s not perpetuated. Being intentional (like this post) is key to a culture by design.
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Two days ago, i wrote this response to an email question about corporate priorities:
• • • • •
Without a common purpose, or unifying goal (as i call it), there’s no irrefutable, self-evident rallying point. This is the beacon for creating a culture by design.
Without being crystal clear on why you exist this powerful question, when addressing everything in your organization, is meaningless:
Does this allow us to better deliver our unifying goal?
For executives, profit is the unifying goal. No harm no foul right? But no one on the front line (onstage or backstage) gives a damn about that. Ignoring this fact does not make it false.
This is one of the early points in my leadership keynote speech.
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Culture is what people think and do without thinking.
Culture runs on energy.
Energy must be constantly replenished.
Yet it rarely is.
Why?
Because everyone is busy.
And so it goes.
And cultural vibrancy wanes. Even to the point of sickness.
And organizations simply default to getting used to surviving in an unhealthy environment.
Leaders must understand this context. You see, employees have a deep understanding of their reality and an unerringly accurate perception and predictability to what will happen and why. This applies to all the diverse, daily circumstances.
Employees, at every level, know how the company will react, with few exceptions.
Employees need a deep sense of self and of belonging. Without feeling a deep sense of leadership commitment, they band together to survive. And leadership becomes the “problem”, not the antidote.
People have always asked me, “What was it like working at Disney?”
To which the most accurate answer is, “It depends on your leader.”
Most leaders have no idea how much their direct reports think they are not walking the talk.
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