Tag Archives: values

How to Capture the Vision Lesson Behind “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”

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NOTE: Continuing reflections on the replacement of Bob Chapek, Disney CEO, with Bob Iger, former CEO.

Tucked inside the entrance gates to Disney’s California Adventure is an iconic reproduction of the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles. One of the most important theaters in the Golden Age of Movies during the Twenties and Thirties, it represents the premier of a tremendous achievement by Walt Disney – the first full length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Though we now view Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as an animation classic, in the mid-1930’s the idea of a full-length “cartoon” was unheard of. Walt Disney took one of the biggest risks of his career, putting almost all of his resources – both business and personal – into the film. Called “Disney’s Folly” by most of Hollywood (and more than a few inside Disney Studios itself), the film opened to critical and financial success, paving the way for Disney to continue expanding his creative genius.

With critics becoming more vocal, Walt Disney knew he would have to inspire his team of artists and writers as never before.

Ken Anderson, Art Director for Snow White, remembered it this way:

When we walked into the soundstage  it was all dark so we could save money. There was just a light on the floor in front of the seats. About forty of us sat there and we got all settled. 

Walt came down in front of us and said, “I’m going to tell you a story. It’s been with me all my life. I’ve lived it!”

He started in and told the story of Snow White better than we put it on the screen. From eight o’clock to eleven thirty, he portrayed all the parts. We were spellbound. He had to go forward and back and forward and back in order to get it all in. He became the queen, became the huntsman, became the dwarfs, and even Snow White.

In front of us, he wasn’t embarrassed to do anything. He became all of those creatures. The guy changed right in front of us.

He had enormous talent as an actor. He could really sell things. And he sold the story to us in such a way that we could’t believe our ears. He so thrilled us with the story that we were just carried away. We came away from that meeting know that it could be done, even though no one else had ever done it.

One animator later claimed, “that one performance lasted us three years. Whenever we’d get stuck, we’d remember how Walt did it on that night.”

The rest is history…

Disney history, that is!

It’s also a telling story of why there will never be another Walt Disney, and why even the best intentions of Bob Iger will not meet that mark.

Acclaimed Disney expert Jim Korkis tells the stories of what Walt did right, what he did wrong, and how you can follow in his footsteps. Drawing upon his unparalleled knowledge of the Disney Company and its legacy, Korkis distills the essence of Walt Disney’s leadership principles into an exciting narrative of popular history and self-help.

You’ll read not just about what Walt did but why he did it, and how you can apply the lessons to your own life or your own enterprise.

Who’s the Leader of the Club will teach you how to lead like Walt. You don’t have to be producing animated films or running theme parks to benefit from the innovative but common-sense approaches Walt Disney took to every challenge. In just a few hours, you’ll learn what it took Walt a lifetime to perfect, and you’ll learn how to put it to work for you.

Just as important, Korkis will teach you how not to lead like Walt. No leader is perfect, and Walt had traits that cost him, such as his berating employees in public, never praising an employee for good work, and trying to get the best out of people by pitting them against one another. Despite these flaws, Walt inspired great personal loyalty and devotion. Korkis explains why.

Packed with lessons, anecdotes, and quotes, Who’s the Leader of the Club? comes with all you need to master the Disney way, start telling your story, and become the leader of your club!

About the Author

Jim Korkis grew up in Glendale, CA, immediately adjacent to Burbank, the home of Disney Studios. Eager to learn about animation, as a young boy he wrote down the names of Disney staff members from the credits of Walt Disney’s weekly television series, and proceeded to look them up in his local phone book. When Korkis called them up to ask about Disney animation, he was often invited to their homes and spent hours enthralled by their stories. 

As they recommended him to other Disney staff members, he developed a network of animators, Imagineers, and others who had personally know Walt Disney. As the years progressed, he even developed a friendship with Diane Disney Miller, Walt’s oldest daughter, who was supportive of his work and shared personal insights about her father.

In the mid-90’s, Korkis moved to Orlando Florida and began working with the Disney Institute and Disney University, meeting many executives who had worked with Walt Disney and been trained by him.

As he had done in California, he listened and took extensive notes about their stories and experiences.

The leadership lessons of Walt Disney contained in Who’s the Leader of the Club created an organization respected and admired around the world. Unfortunately, these lessons have not been officially taught at Disney University to new leaders for well over two decades.

Korkis felt it was time to share them again, making every effort to use Walt Disney’s words as well as the words of those how had experienced him in action to help elaborate and describe the concepts.

It is Korkis’ desire that his book will prove to be an informative workbook on Walt’s leadership philosophy as well as an entertaining glimpse into a different perspective of his life.

Walt Disney was Walt Disney, and he does not fit into today’s limited categories of leadership. He used different leadership styles, depending upon the person and project, but always kept true to a core set of values that are highlighted in the seven lessons presented in Who’s The Leader of the Club?.

Jim Korkis

Here is a summary of Korkis’ seven lessons of leadership lived out by Walt Disney, along with a quote by Walt for each of the seven:

Know the Story

A leader’s vision is most effectively presented in the format of a story, the most powerful communication in the world for centuries.

The Wisdom of Walt: It is a curious thing that the more the world shrinks because of electronic communications the more timeless becomes the province of the storytelling entertainer.

Share the Story

In order to accomplish his vision, a leader must passionately share the complete story with everyone involved and actively encourage contributions to strengthen the story.

The Wisdom of Walt: I’m a storyteller. Of all the things I’ve done, I’d like to be remembered as a storyteller.

Take a (Calculated) Risk

So that the organization can avoid stagnation, a leader must occasionally take calculated risks to expand into new areas.

The Wisdom of Walt: To some people, I am kind of a Merlin who takes lots of crazy chances, but rarely makes mistakes. I’ve made some bad ones, but fortunately, the successes have come along fast enough to cover up the mistakes. When you go to bat as many times as I do, you’re bound to get a good average. That’s why I keep my projects diversified.

Make ‘em Laugh

It is the responsibility of the leader to establish a tone in the work place that allows people to feel safe and comfortable and to be able to smile and laugh.

The Wisdom of Walt: In bad times and good, I have never lost my sense of humor.

Eager to Learn

It is important for a leader to gather information from a variety of sources and encourage his team to do the same.

The Wisdom of Walt: We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious…and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

Understand People

A leader needs to know, understand, and listen to his team in order to lead them to success.

The Wisdom of Walt: You can dream, create, design, and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make the dream a reality.

Live the Story

The most important quality a leader can have is integrity, demonstrating by his words and actions that he stands for what he says he believes.

The Wisdom of Walt: Our heritage and ideals, our codes and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

Still to come:

Succeeding as the new CEO of the Walt Disney Company was not going to be easy.

It wasn’t going to be easy for the new leader of the Walt Disney Company…even if his last name was Disney.

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Your VALUES Guide Why You Do What You Do

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Remember the last time you sat down to do a jigsaw puzzle? The work proceeds in two basic steps. First, you put the edges together. Finding all of the little pieces with straight edges is the easiest way to begin. As you piece together the top and bottom and sides, the puzzle is framed up within a relatively short period of time.

The second part of the process is now ready to begin, because you have defined the basic shape and outline of the puzzle. Before building the frame, it would have been exceedingly difficult to put many of the middle pieces together. But now, all of those elusive jigsaw shapes and unclear image fragments have perspective and boundaries.

Even though the frame makes the puzzle-building project easier, more work remains. You pick up awkward shape after awkward shape, twisting and turning them and turning again, until you get just the right fit and-snap-the image develops, one piece at a time. After a long journey that may take days or even months, the final image emerges.

Articulating your church’s vision is like working on a jigsaw puzzle.

Auxano co-founder Will Mancini developed the Vision Frame concept to show you how to articulate your vision the same way you would build a puzzle: in two basic steps.

This SUMS Remix will introduce the Vision Frame, guiding you to first think about the four outer edges – the components of your church’s identity that frame everything else you do. These edges anchor the second part of the process (a future SUMS Remix), which involves the direction of living and articulating the dynamic vision of your Church Unique through the daily work of turning and twisting the pieces of the organization. The edges of the frame are definitive, but the middle of the puzzle is dynamic. The fixed nature of step one, building the frame, anchors the fluid nature of step two, where your vision picture slowly develops into the better intermediate future God has entrusted to you. 

THE QUICK SUMMARY – The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are.

In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides.

Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent, and complete, when its management, operations, and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion, and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave.

Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health complete with stories, tips, and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way, one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION – Values: Why are we doing it?

A church without values is like a river without banks – just a large puddle. It is missing an opportunity for white-water movement. As with any organization, your church has a set of shared motives, or values, underneath the surface of everyday activity. The problem is that they stay weak because they are unidentified and unharnessed in guiding the future.

The role of the leader is to identify the most important values and pull them above the waterline of people’s perception. Once they are in clear view, the leader can nurture their development, enabling the church to do more of what it does best. Once your people know and own the values, it’s like creating the banks of a river to channel energy and momentum. 

As you clarify your deeply held values, they become tools for shaping culture only to the extent that they are captured and carried. 

If an organization is intolerant of everything it will stand for nothing.

The importance of creating clarity and enabling a company to become healthy cannot be overstated. More than anything else, values are critical because they define a company’s personality. They provide employees with clarity about how to behave, which reduces the need for inefficient and demoralizing micromanagement.

That alone makes values worthwhile. But beyond that, an organization that has properly identified its values and adheres to them will naturally attract the right employees and repel the wrong ones. This makes recruiting exponentially easier and more effective, and it drastically reduces turnover.

An important key to identifying the right, small set of behavioral values is understanding that there are different kinds of values. Among these, core values are by far the most important, and must not be confused with others.

Core values are the few – just two or three – behavioral traits that are inherent in an organization. Core values lie at the heart of the organization’s identity, do not change over time, and must already exist. In other words, they cannot be contrived.

An organization knows that it has identified its core values correctly when it will allow itself to be punished for living those values and when it accepts the fact that employees will sometimes take those values too far. Core values are not a matter of convenience. They cannot be extracted from an organization anymore than a human being’s conscience can be extracted from his or her person. As a result, they should be used to guide every aspect of an organization, from hiring and firing to strategy and performance management.

Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage

A NEXT STEP

Values Defined

Values are the motivational flame of the church. They are the shared convictions that guide your actions and reveal your strengths. Values answer, “Why do we do what we do at our church?” They are springboards for daily action and filters for decision-making. Values represent the conscience of the organization. They distinguish your philosophy of ministry and shape your culture and ethos.

While values are a leadership tool like the mission, they are not expressed verbally everywhere and all the time. Therefore, people coming to church will encounter the atmosphere that is shaped by values before they hear the values themselves. Ideally, values will define the experience for an attender before they are a conscious thought. Values are “what Joe feels” at the church.

Values Reminders

  • Anchor your values in reality (actual vs. aspirational is 3:1)
  • Consider not “what we do” but “what characterizes everything we do”
  • Remember “a river without banks is just a large puddle”
  • Avoid ideas of individual spiritual growth and think “organizational glue”
  • Do the organizational “checkbook test” – prove the value with church finances
  • Capture uniqueness and personality, be distinct
  • Think essence not event
  • Articulate at four levels: name, definition, “demonstrated by” statements, and scriptural support

Gather the team and ask this question: If a new guest was to report back after six months of consistent worship attendance, what would they saw we truly value based on their experience and observation? How does this influence our current values language or inspire us to create new values?

Excerpt taken from SUMS Remix 115-2, released March 2019

 

Part of a weekly series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader

Regular daily reading of books is an important part of my life. It even extends to my vocation, where as Vision Room Curator for Auxano I am responsible for publishing SUMS Remix, a biweekly book “excerpt” for church leaders. Each Wednesday on 27gen I will be taking a look back at previous issues of SUMS Remix and publishing an excerpt.

>>Purchase SUMS Remix here<<

>> Purchase prior issues of SUMS Remix here<<

6 Principles That Shape the Culture of Your Organization

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A church without values is like a river without banks-just a large puddle. It is missing an opportunity for white-water movement. As with any organization, your church has a set of shared motives, or values, underneath the surface of everyday activity. The problem is that they stay weak because they are unidentified and unharnessed in guiding the future.

The role of the leader is to identify the most important values and pull them above the waterline of people’s perception. Once they are in clear view, the leader can nurture their development, enabling the church to do more of what it does best.

Once your people know and own the values, it’s like creating the banks of a river to channel energy and momentum. Think of values not as what we do but rather as what characterizes everything we do.

Is it time to shape a culture change?

THE QUICK SUMMARY – Built on Values, by Ann Rhoades

Most leaders know that a winning, engaged culture is the key to attracting top talent—and customers. Yet, it remains elusive how exactly to create this ideal workplace —one where everyone from the front lines to the board room knows the company’s values and feels comfortable and empowered to act on them.

Based on Ann Rhoades’ years of experience with JetBlue, Southwest, and other companies known for their trailblazing corporate cultures, Built on Values reveals exactly how leaders can create winning environments that allow their employees and their companies to thrive. Companies that create or improve values-based cultures can become higher performers, both in customer and employee satisfaction and financial return, as proven by Rhoades’ work with JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, Disney, Loma Linda University Hospitals, Doubletree Hotels, Juniper Networks, and P.F. Chang’s China Bistros.

Built on Values provides a clear blueprint for how to accomplish culture change, showing:

  • How to exceed the expectations of employees and customers
  • How to develop a Values Blueprint tailored to your organization’s goals and put it into action
  • Why it’s essential to hire, fire, and reward people based on values alone, and
  • How to establish a discipline for sustaining a values-centric culture

Built on Values helps companies get on the pathway to greatness by showing the exact steps for either curing an ailing company culture or creating a new one from scratch.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION

Many leaders know what a great culture looks like. They are just unsure as to how to implement one.

Culture develops, regardless of whether or not it is defined. And if the values you’ve formally written down don’t match the existing culture, those values will be ignored.

You can create a model for culture change that will energize your teams every day, and their energy will carry throughout your church’s ministries.

A high-performing culture doesn’t just happen. It can’t be forced into being through willpower. But it can become an inevitability if you create the right environment to foster it.

Six fundamental principles inform every successful values-based culture.

Principle 1 – You can’t force culture. You can only create environment.

A culture is the culmination of the leadership, values, language, people, processes, rules, and other conditions, good or bad, present within an organization.

Principle 2 – You are on the outside what you are on the inside – no debate.

Many leaders do not understand that you cannot create a great organization if you treat your team members badly.

Principle 3 – Success is doing the right things the right way.

By defining your values and the behaviors based on them, you simplify the task of day-to-day decision-making.

Principle 4 – People do exactly what they are incented to do.

Reward the behaviors you want, taking into account how they lead to an outcome.

Principle 5 – Input = Output.

Organizations will only get out of something what they are willing to put into it.

Principle 6 – The environment you want can be built on shared, strategic values and financial responsibility.

Conscious action, beginning with determining a set of shared values, can set up the necessary condition for encouraging a culture that will make an organization great.

Ann Rhodes, Built on Values

A NEXT STEP

List each of the six principles above on a separate chart tablet sheet. Gather your leadership team together for a two-hour discussion, spending 15 minutes on each, brainstorming your team’s thoughts and comments about how each of the six principles are – or are not – in place in your organization.

After you have completed all six, spend the last 30 minutes reflecting on how you can use these principles to improve the values and culture at your church.

Remember, values are the motivational flame of the church. They are the shared convictions that guide your actions and reveal your strengths. Values answer, “Why do we do what we do at our church?” They are springboards for daily action and filters for decision-making. Values represent the conscience of the organization. They distinguish your philosophy of ministry and shape your culture and ethos.

If your values fail to inspire the staff, there is no way that they will shape the culture you are seeking. If your values are boring and predictable, maybe it is time for an update. Click here to schedule a conversation with an Auxano Navigator around values development.

Excerpt taken from SUMS Remix 89-1, released March 2018.

 

Part of a weekly series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader

Regular daily reading of books is an important part of my life. It even extends to my vocation, where as Vision Room Curator for Auxano I am responsible for publishing SUMS Remix, a biweekly book “excerpt” for church leaders. Each Wednesday on 27gen I will be taking a look back at previous issues of SUMS Remix and publishing an excerpt.

>>Purchase SUMS Remix here<<

Bring the Heat

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The ability to control the temperature of food involves a set of kitchen skills and food knowledge that, more than anything else, defines the excellence of the cook. An expertise in temperature control won’t turn poor ingredients into good ones, but it will determine much of what follows once the ingredients are in your house.

The Elements of Cooking, by Michael Ruhlman

 In other words, it’s all about heat.

courtesy aventarte.wordpress.com

courtesy aventarte.wordpress.com

 Bill Hybels, writing in axiom, has exactly this process in mind when he writes:

Anytime you see God-honoring values being lived out genuinely and consistently, it’s fair to assume that a leader decided to identify a handful of values and turn up the burner under them.

When you heat up a value, you help people change states.

  • Want to jolt people out of business as usual? Heat up innovation.
  • Want to untangle confusion? Heat up clarity.
  • Want to eradicate miserliness? Heat up generosity.

New “states” elicit new attitudes, new aptitudes, and new actions. It’s not rocket science – it’s just plain chemistry. Which is a lot about heat.

Leaders must determine what values they believe should be manifested in their organizations. And then put them over the flame of a burner by teaching on those values, underscoring them with Scripture, enforcing them, and making heroes out of the people who are living them out.

Over time, sufficiently hot values will utterly define your culture.

It’s time to bring the heat.