Become the Leadership Excellence Category

Lead the category or be the category?

Striving to lead your industry isn’t entirely bad if you’re ok with waiting for someone else to beat you to the next breakthrough.

Why does that sound ridiculous?

Why is it important?

Because some ridiculously important (some would say game-changing) events have happened, are happening now, and will continue to happen.

It’s called disruption for a reason.

Waiting for it to happen can destroy an organization (and sometimes an industry).

Making it happen can launch competitive immunity and have your competition scrambling to recover.

Remember how the music industry let Napster reinvent music file sharing?

Music executives got blind-sided.

As if that wasn’t enough, the music industry never saw a computer company coming either.

Apple, iPod, iTunes, and now, Apple Music.

Apple is a category of one.

The music industry had their chance to become the category.

Kodak had their chance too, but they held so tightly to film, they suffocated themselves.

How does this train of thought affect Disney?

For decades we had a top-down approach to Disney Leadership. Classic command and control, do-what-you’re told, follow orders, don’t question authority.

Enter the 1990’s.

What is remarkable about this topic is the Walt Disney Company didn’t change. Not as a whole. Rather, it was a single business unit, Walt Disney World, that took a game-changing leadership risk.

Judson Green, a visionary leader at Walt Disney World, saw the future of Disney Leadership differently and led the change.

Judson became a leadership category of one because he took action contrary to the way Disney ran its businesses since 1923.

Judson saw a future where employees would literally be in charge of continuous improvement and managers would become facilitators, teachers, and coaches.

One-third of our leaders rejoiced, one-third took a wait and see attitude, and one-third said it would never work. The distribution percentage was roughly 20-60-20.

Personally, i thought it was pure genius.

i also thought it was long overdue.

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This website is about our MIND. To read today’s post about our BODY, click here.

jeff noel Deconstructed Disney to reconstruct Leadership, for your future enjoyment

If you’ve visited a Disney Theme Park, the odds are high you’ve seen at least one sign like this:

Please pardon our appearance while we refurbish this attraction for your future enjoyment.

Walt Disney Attractions

Why are the odds high?

The odds are great because Disney is always working to improve the Guest Experience.

Consider the effort, though. Every Attraction is unique, and each one comes with a different set of issues, opportunities, and strengths.

Closer inspection then will yield you a quick, and much deeper, appreciation.

Now imagine the difference between one closer inspection versus a lifetime of seeing it under a microscope.

When you see the actual DNA, the smallest pieces that hold the Disney Culture together, everything you believe in, and why, changes.

When i saw the Disney Institute participants struggle with our Leadership Excellence content, which focused on what we do and how we do it, i set out to find a breakthrough for those struggling business professionals.

i was on a mission to crystallize why, and how, we do what we do.

The why took me to the microscope, which led to brilliantly simplistic discoveries.

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This website is about our MIND. To read today’s post about our BODY, click here.

The Leadership Gospel According To Walt Disney

Gospel: gos·pel, noun: Something regarded as true and implicitly believed: to take his report for gospel. A doctrine regarded as of prime importance: political gospel.

The good news, Disney’s Approach to Leadership Excellence is simple and serves as the world’s business gospel.

The bad news is it’s not easy.

When i first discovered i had high cholesterol, the doctor recommended two simple steps to lower the risk of heart disease.

Diet and exercise.

Simple.

Not easy.

Disney’s Approach to Leadership Excellence, you’ll see in a moment, is ridiculously simple.

And yet finding an organizational culture of overwhelming leadership excellence is roughly as statistically similar as finding a large number of vibrantly healthy American adults.

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This website is about our MIND. To read today’s post about our BODY, click here.

The second greatest human fear

Most people know this, the second greatest human fear is the fear of death.

What’s the top human fear?

The only thing scarier than dying is public speaking.

So yeah, no, i never wanted to be a public speaker.

No dream.

No wish.

Not even a remote thought that just randomly came and went.

No desire nor interest ever happened before the day Carol called.

After that, the idea of being a Disney professional speaker consumed my thinking.

Like a broken record, i kept repeating the same question over and over, “Why me?”

Never thought about becoming a Disney Leadership Excellence expert.

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This website is about our MIND. To read today’s post about our BODY, click here.

You’ve got the wrong Jeff

Note: Today’s posts have identical content, not even a few different words tweak on each. Why? Creating a benchmarkable template. The content will be unique to each book. However, the prelude and intro/outro will be similar. As always the photo-story is unique to each post.

It was a typical day at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and Spa.

Busy.

Crazy busy, you could say.

In the Main Building, the Concierge Building, The Disney Company’s highest level of service, for any of our Resorts worldwide, was delivered exclusively here.

When it’s all you know, and all 1,400 Cast Members (including 100 leaders) have the same understanding of and commitment to the Disney Mission, you adapt and thrive in spite of the relentless pressure to be excellent with every breath you take.

So when the phone rang, i didn’t have time to answer it, and all the back office phones are internal numbers, so i knew it was a Cast Member.

i normally let internal calls go to voice mail on a super busy day, because if it’s urgent, they can page me – this was 1998, in the pre-mobile phone era.

“May I speak with Jeff please, this is Carol from Disney Institute.”

“This is Jeff?”

“I need to schedule a lunch meeting with Steve Heise.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve got the wrong Jeff.”

“You’re Jeff Noel, right?

“Yes. But i have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Carol said she’d investigate and call me back.

Sometime later we spoke again, and she proceeded to share how my first Disney Supervisor, Neal McCord, had lunch with a Disney Institute (DI) hiring manager and Neal recommended me as a potential speaker because of my 15 years of Disney Operations experience. DI was looking for someone with those exact credentials.

Steve Heise was the DI Director and he wanted to meet me.

i was so confused.

“Why me?”

All i could think about after Carol’s phone call was, “God must want me to become a preacher or a comedian, and i’ll need this public speaking experience.”

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This website is about our MIND. To read today’s post about our BODY, click here.