About The Company

As with many successful corporations, the Walt Disney Company started with a dream.  The dream was to be a cartoonist, and the owner of that dream was Mr. Walt Disney.  From an early age, Walt Disney wanted to be a cartoonist.  As the years passed, he sharpened his skills and continued to dream.  At the time, animation was a newly emerging technology and was very crude in art and execution.  Disney saw the potential market for quality animations, and developed a cartoon character known as Oswald the Rabbit.  The character was a hit, and Disney used it's success as a springboard to launch himself into a career of not only making his own dreams come true, but the dreams of many others as well.  The success of Oswald brought with it a very important lesson for Disney.  In his effort to launch his career, Disney has given up control over some of his ideas and his Oswald character.  His business partners seized the opportunities that their control offered, and ran away with Disney's Oswald character.  Disney learned that in order to survive, he must never again lose control.  Although his character idea had been stolen, his ambition and creativity were still his own and led to a new character called Mickey Mouse.  Mickey Mouse is considered to be the character that built Disney's legacy.  Mickey's immediate and overwhelming success gave Disney the money he needed to create more characters and fine tune his animation skills.  This theme carried itself out over and over again.  Disney would launch a character, and in turn use the money from that character's success to build the next.  This is demonstrated by Oswald leading to Mickey; Mickey leading to Donald Duck, Goofy, and the Three Little Pigs; and finally the success of these characters brought about Disney's Full Length Movies. With the expertise and resources now owned by Disney, the next logical step was to create larger and more complex works: Full-Length Movies and Motion Pictures.  Disney was true to form and released a wildly successful string of movies.

The success of each was the foundation upon which the next was built.  The last achievement for Disney came in the form of his theme park: Disneyland.  Through brilliant marketing and business savvy, Disney was able to cross-promote each of his ventures.  His television show promoted his movies, motion pictures, and theme park.  His theme park, Disneyland, used the characters and their personalities to make the public want to consume even more of his movies, etc.  His cross-promotion strategies had a snowball effect, and the snowball grew quite large up until his death in 1966.  After Disney's death, the company felt his passing in many ways.  One of which was the lack of leadership that now plagued Disney's company.  Walt's brother Roy took the helm and attempted to once again give the Disney Corp. the drive and ambition that it had under his brother's control.  Roy saw all of his brother's projects and idea through to completion, one of which was Disney World in Florida.  Though Disney Corp. continued to survive, the snow ball was no longer growing or gaining momentum.  In fact, the company began to lose large amounts of money on every project it undertook.

Disney Corp. needed a strong leader again. In 1984, through an aggressive take over by the Disney family and new investors, the company's old and conservative management team was removed, and a new leader was found in the form of a gentleman named Michael Eisner.  Eisner quickly assumed a role of leadership and strength at Disney.  Eisner turned over every single stone and made some interesting discoveries.  As it was discovered, Disney was a jack of many trades but a master of few.  Every division in the company suffered from a lack of leadership, commitment, and a view.  Eisner filled all of these voids.  Many changes were made to the business practices of Disney Corp.  Theme park prices were dramatically raised to help fund new additions and attractions.  New parks were built to combat the arrival of competitors.  Disney contracts were reviewed and revised to discontinue the use of outside vendors within the parks.  Hotel operations were revamped and expanded.  Motion Pictures (outside of their previous 1960s genre boundaries) became a new and very lucrative part of the Disney empire.  Finally, the consumer products division was given the attention it needed to maximize the amount of money earned through licensing, etc. With it's newfound leader and newfound focus, Disney's sales skyrocketed to $4.59 billion in 1984.  It would seem that Disney and Eisner could do no wrong, but that was far from the truth.  Disney was becoming a very large company.  The Disney name and products were flooding the market place, and there were fears that over exposure might damage the Disney empire.  In the spirit of perpetual growth and development, Disney did indeed start to falter due to it's size and ambition.  Euro Disney was built and has lost huge sums of money ever since the opening day.  Many movies were released, and nearly every one of them was a flop.  A merger with ABC proved to be a very costly endeavour.  Cruise ships were purchased and country clubs were built.  Disney was clearly growing at a phenomenal rate.  So much so, that they even opened the doors to their very own high-tech city. Disney was, and remains, and extremely successful company with holdings in many sectors of the entertainment market.  With so many diverse interests, Disney has opened itself up to enormous potential for greater prosperity or monumental failure.  Only time will tell which

 Source: www.nevada.edu