...HOLY ANGEL UNIVERSITY S.Y. 2012-2013 YORGBEV PIXAR MAGIC CASE STUDY Submitted to : I. Viewpoint II. Significant Case Facts * Robert Iger, Walt Disney Co. new CEO, first task was to acquire Pixar Animation Studios. * Walt Disney Animation Studios, the studio that brought us Mickey Mouse and The Lion King, had become moribund over the past decade because of Pixar’s award-winning productions. * John Lasseter, now the Chief Creative Officer of both Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, explained that from the very beginning, they had to get the best people from the computer science world and from the artistic film making animation world and get them working together. * In this case, Pixar also stated how they enabled people to work together in several ways; First, is the company relies on long-term employment rather than short-term project contracts. Second, Pixar’s campus in Emeryville, California, was designed to cluster people into teams yet also encourage chance encounters with people from other projects. And third, Pixar’s egalitarian, no-nonsense, perfectionist culture is another reason the animation studio’s staff work effectively. III. Problems / Questions 1. Explain Pixar’s effectiveness as an organization using any two perspectives of organization effectiveness. 2. Scanning through the chapter titles of this book, which topics seem to dominate Pixar’s organization practices? Why would these practices be emphasized...
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...Walt Disney Co.: The Entertainment King (Harvard Business School Case No. 701035-PDF-ENG) Team F: Erin Webster, Garvey Young and Jennifer Zammataro 1. Disney’s long-term success can be linked to their well-instilled corporate values and their commitment to maximizing synergy throughout the corporation. Page four of the case lists their corporate values as “quality, creativity, entrepreneurship, and teamwork.” Throughout Disney’s history, these four values have propelled the company forward to the leader it is today. In order to maintain the level of quality associated with the Disney brand, Eisner believed that a high level of toughness was needed. The first page of the case has a quotation from Michael Eisner stating, “If you aren’t tough, you just don’t get quality.” This quote exemplifies Eisner’s management style and the value he placed on strong decision-making throughout the firm. Even before Eisner’s time, however, Disney had built a corporation around tough decisions and detail oriented management in order to maintain quality. Throughout each expansion of the Disney brand, Walt maintained control of the “complete entertainment experience.” One example of this strict quality management can be seen in how Disney opened their first theme park, Disneyland. In order to cut back on the investment capital in the beginning stages of the park’s opening, they licensed the food and merchandising operations. As soon as the park had generated enough...
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...Mgt. Employee Empowerment: A Walt Disney Company Case Study Employee empowerment refers to the development of a person's confidence as well as abilities in a business setting. Companies utilize employee empowerment to create strong operating partnerships with personnel and enlighten them various business practices. Common attributes of employee empowerment include instructing employees to understand and feel good about themselves, showing them how to relate to other employees and customers, and offering resources for training and increasing an employee business understanding. The Walt Disney Company is an organization commonly utilized as an example for the use of employee empowerment strategies with their associates. The Walt Disney Company has actually invested copious amounts of time and work in creating a strong organizational society to teach their workers on the Disney Company’s mission and values. According to Disney's corporate website, one of the five crucial characteristics of working for Walt Disney is the passion as well as devotion from actors and staff. Disney, in some cases, describes their workers as cast members in an attempt to break the regular boundaries of the manager/employee relationship. Disney likewise makes use of advancement, quality, community, positive outlook, and decency in their organizational culture for empowering staff members as well as making the Disney Company a unique workplace. Disney provides many numerous extras and benefits...
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...strategic planning and financial planning for Disney. The first section will cover Disney’s strategic planning initiative and identify a strategic initiative discussed in the organization’s annual report. This will be followed up with a description on how this initiative affects Disney’s financial planning. The next section will address how Disney’s initiative will affect the costs. The third section will discuss how Disney’s initiative will impact sales. The fourth section will describe the risks associated with the initiative and the financial impact that these risks have. This will be followed up with a conclusion. Strategic Planning Initiative for Disney Within many elements of strategic planning, the scope of a corporation such as Disney must be broken down into numerous factors, and the initiatives derived from those business components looked upon a step-by-step process to glean advantages from the wide array of contingencies. Team A has looked at an initiative from the Disney Annual Report for 2009, which is the strategy for handling foreign currency exchange risks. As with numerous large multi-national corporations both their future growth and expansion lie in the ability to do business in foreign markets. The management at Disney is astutely aware of this factor and has made inroads into these markets. The major drawback is financing these operations with local currencies and the foreign exchange rates, and as such Disney has modeled a hedging system to address these...
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...ULMS 157 Recruitment, Selection and Performance Management at Epcot Theme Park Introduction This case study examines the concept and management of performance in organizations. In organization and management studies the word performance has two meanings (Fineman, Sims and Gabriel, 2005). On the one hand it simply refers to how well individuals are doing the tasks, duties and job responsibilities assigned to them, whether or not they are achieving output targets and productivity goals, product and service quality standards and meeting customer expectations. It is also refers to personal performance, how well a person is doing in achieving the goals they set for themselves. On the other hand the word performance also relates to how people at work conduct or, more specifically, present themselves to others; how they interact with fellow employees, management, clients, customers, the general public, and so on. In this context the concept of performance takes on a rather different meaning. It refers to how everyday behaviour in organizations is about ‘putting on a performance’. In recent years this latter use of the term ‘performance’ has become increasingly popular in organizational and management studies, and is widely used to illustrate how the nature of everyday behaviour and social interaction at work - verbal and non-verbal communication, such as greetings gestures, posture, etc. - are essentially performances. ’The presentation of self in everyday life’ (Goffman, 1959:...
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...Disney Case Analysis 3. What sort of company did Eisner inherit? Provide a brief summary of the company at the time Eisner took over (discuss each of its business lines in 1-2 sentences that highlight the most important issues). Eisner inherited a family entertainment company that began as a nonhierarchical organization where no one had titles and everyone was on a first name basis. Walt’s theory was that you didn’t need a title because you knew if you were important. Disney’s philosophy was to create universal timeless family entertainment and believed in the importance of family life maintaining its adherence to the Disney formula for family recreation. The company believed and always aimed to provide an experience that the families would be able to participate in and take joy in together and always with a commitment to excellent in all facets of the business. When Eisner took over the company’s financial performance had deteriorated. Disney was incurring heavy costs trying to complete projects on time i.e. EPCOT center and Euro Disney and the Disney Channel. He viewed “managing creativity” as Disney’s most distinctive corporate skill and pursued with the development of synergy through vertical integration. With this philosophy, Eisner inspired and managed Disney. Disney mushroomed with Eisner’s extreme corporate vision which he targeted at an annual revenue growth target and return on stockholders’...
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...High performance teams are extremely adaptive, challenging to construct, expensive to continue/maintain, and glorious to behold. Every aspect of the high performance team needs to be operating at its optimal potential. All of these elements can not properly fuse together without effective leadership. Brian Camastral states that the “high performance team is not a leaderless team, but a team of leaders”. All members of a high performance team are essentially leaders. The leadership role is constantly revolving, which makes high performance teams very unique. The characteristics of the high performance team are very dynamic and it takes a determined team with exceptional leadership working together to put into play these elements. Our team will identify the characteristics of the leader in a high performance team through exploring the keys to effective leadership. Leadership is defined by Richard Daft as an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes and outcomes that reflect their shared purposes. High performance teams excel because their shared purpose, mission, and or goals are all aligned. Daft states that “leadership involves influence, it occurs among people, those people intentionally desire significant changes, and the changes reflect purposes shared by leaders and followers.” Many leaders possess characteristics and or traits that researchers believe affect their leadership impact. “Traits are the distinguishing personal characteristics...
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...Using Case Studies in Real Estate and Finance Courses By Su Han Chan Department of Real Estate The Preliminaries Setting expectations Focus is on decision making Requires judgment No “right” answers Setting ground rules The student contract (4Ps) Knowing your participants Selecting cases and readings Using a mix of short (“breather”) and long cases Assigning a term project Case seminar series_Su H Chan A Short Case Phuket Beach Hotel: Valuing Mutually Exclusive Capital Projects* (4 pages) Synopsis Phuket Beach Hotel has an opportunity to lease its underutilized space to a karaoke pub and earn a rental income. Alternatively, the hotel could develop the unused space and create its own pub. The general manager of the hotel must decide which of the two capital projects to recommend to the hotel owners. This case presents sufficient information to build cash flow forecasts for each project and to rank the mutually exclusive projects using various evaluation criteria. *The case is available from HBSP.com Case seminar series_Su H Chan Using the case Undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels Exposes students to a wide range of capital budgeting issues Questions built into the case Student group presentations (2 teams presenting the same case) Class members evaluate team presentations Instructor debriefs case Lessons learned Evaluator__Please write your name on the back__________________ Group ___________________________ Grading Checklist for...
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...ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVOIR AND MANAGEMENT (205KM) CASE STUDY CHAPTER 10 CASE 10.1: ELECTROLUX CLEAN UP STUDENTS NAME : NUR FARAH ‘AIN BINTI ZULKIFLI STUDENTS ID : CVB110711837 SECTION : 2 LETURER’S NAME : MISS ABIDAH BTE SAAD QUESTION 1 How would you describe the conflict between Michael Eisner and the Weinstein brothers, two board members (Disney and Gold), and Steve Jobs? Was it functional or dysfunctional? ANSWER Functional conflict defined as a confrontation between groups that enhances and benefits the organization’s performance’ while dysfunctional conflict defined as any confrontation or interaction between groups that harms the organization or hinders the achievement or organizational goals. From our point of view, this case study’s conflict was mostly dysfunctional, though, with some degree of functional conflict. They were functional in that even though the conflicts existed between Eisner and the Weinstein brothers and with Steven Jobs, the company was successful despite these widely publicized issues. For example, Eisner did lead the company to 67th in the Fortune 500 ranks and to a value of $40 billion; with his actions in the early ‘80s, he turned the company around with several company acquisitions. Also, even though the conflicts were high profile in the media, Disney was still successful. As a conclusion, it can be said that a company will perform low either there are no or when there is too high conflict existed...
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...Pace University DigitalCommons@Pace Case Studies Lubin School of Business 3-1-2002 Disney in Asia, Again Raymond H. Lopez Pace University Recommended Citation Lopez, Raymond H., "Disney in Asia, Again" (2002). Case Studies. Paper 3. http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/business_cases/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Lubin School of Business at DigitalCommons@Pace. It has been accepted for inclusion in Case Studies by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Pace. For more information, please contact rracelis@pace.edu. CASE STUDIES No. 26 March 2002 Disney in Asia, Again? by Raymond H. Lopez, Ph.D. Professor of Economics and Finance Lubin School of Business Pace University DISNEY IN ASIA, AGAIN? by Raymond H. Lopez, Ph.D. Raymond H. Lopez is Professor of Finance at the Lubin School of Business of Pace University. Introduction INTRODUCTION “We could be getting close to the time for a major Disney attraction in the world’s most populous nation.” 1 “I am completely confident that Chinese people love Mickey no less than they love a Big Mac.” 2 Early in 1999, Michael Eisner, CEO of The Walt Disney Company, voiced his opinions concerning potential markets for his firm’s entertainment products and services. A major thrust for the new millenium would be development in Asia. The firm had now achieved a certain level of experience with owning and/or managing assets and operations outside the United States...
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...facts -price -product -promotion -channels of distribution Since the cost of Disney World Florida was cheaper, customers preferred to fly to the US. This meant that prices in Paris could also be controlled. There were several other mistakes made by the management, for instance, alcohol was banned although consuming wine with meals was a French tradition. The reason for banning alcohol in the park could be justified but it was not acceptable by the French due to their tradition 3) The Disney belief was that what it sells in the U.S and Japan would sell just as well in Europe. So when Disney opened Euro Disney in Paris the park was a symbol of American culture. However, the culture was so different from America or Japan. Believing all Europeans enjoyed the same sausage or Europeans vacationed in the same way that Americans did was easily corrected by cultural awareness that would not have cost much but they were too ethnocentric to even know the questions to ask. 4) In the early stage, Disney had poor cross-cultural skills. Disney management team failed to recognize the importance of cultural adaptation in Euro Disney as they misinterpreted the culture and behaviour of European customers. After Euro Disney suffering for the huge losses, they realized the problems and made appropriate changes in their marketing strategy to cater the needs of Europeans customers. 5) Disney management team were not certain of the success of the first international venture because they just...
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...MBA Case Brief Number 6 November 9, 2010 What? In the short term, Hong Kong Disney need to minimize the amount of guest allowed into the park on a daily basis to reduce capacity. In the long term, Hong Kong Disney needs involve China in more of their management operations and decision making. Why? Short Term: It was clear that there was a capacity problem during the 4 weeks of testing prior to the grand opening of Hong Kong Disney. During the test run, they invited 30,000 individuals per day to visit the park to test the rides and attractions. For example, on September 4, 2005, approximately 29,000 local visitors went to the park. The average queuing time was 45 minutes at the restaurants and more than two hours for the rides. In addition, customers also complained that the park was too small. Hong Kong Disney only has 22 attractions; 18 fewer than the other Disney theme parks, making the capacity level much smaller and the lines much longer for each attraction due to overcrowding. Furthermore, Hong Kong Disney introduced a new discounted, one-day ticket that can be used at any-time during a six month period. However, they did not take into consideration specific holidays such as the Lunar New Year. The influx created a major problem when the park could not accommodate additional guests. The steel gates were locked and guests were understandably upset. Long Term: Hong Kong Disney had tried to use the mistakes during the opening...
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...Eisner, chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, was sitting down with Frank Wells, president and chief operating officer, and Gary Wilson, executive vice president and chief financial officer, to discuss Disney's prospects for the new year. These men were still basking in the glow generated by another record revenue- and profit-breaking year in Disney's history. Disney's businesses were performing at an unprecedented level, and confidence was high. The problem facing the trio who had engineered Disney's turnaround was how to maintain Disney's explosive growth rate and its return-on-investment goal of increasing earnings per share by 20 percent over any five-year period to achieve a 20 percent annual return on equity. Paradoxically, the very success of their strategy, which had originated to protect an underperforming Disney from the rampages of corporate raiders and the threat of takeover, was causing the opposite problem: how to maintain the company's explosive growth in a business environment where attractive opportunities for expansion were becoming increasingly scarce. The men were reflecting on how to develop a five-year plan that would cement the strategy that had led to their present enviable situation and make the 1990s the "Disney Decade." This case is intended to be used as a basis for class discussion rather than as an illustration of either effective or ineffective handling of the situation. This case was prepared by Gareth R. Jones,Texas...
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...focused more in the implementation of performance management in the workplace in general, he advised me that it could be a good subject concerning the hospitality industry, precisely at the level of the reception where the performance can be measured easily. Following his advice and being interested by the subject, I therefore decided to study more precisely this process and how it was implemented, rightly or not, in the Disneyland Hotel. Apart from this person, I would also like to thank my manager Mr. Oliver Drutschmann who hired me as a Team Leader intern and allowed me to work in this environment, involving me in several projects such as the transformation process of the majority our standard rooms in terrace rooms situated in the main floor of our hotel (in order to get a higher average price / room) or empowering me and other team leaders in taking operational decision related to management. I had also the opportunity to work with a wonderful team, always available if needed and I’m grateful to them as my time at the Disneyland Hotel was very positive in terms of personal and professional experience. 3. Table of contents 2. Acknowledgments 4. Development I) Introduction II) Disneyland Paris: the Disneyland Hotel III) The overall quality of the reception of the DLH 5. Conclusion 6. Sources 7. Appendixes 4. Development Introduction The Disneyland Hotel is a five star...
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...Governing the House of the Mouse: Corporate Governance at Disney from 1984-2006 CASE ASSIGNMENT At the departure of Eisner, Chairman George Mitchell and new CEO Robert Iger are preparing to move the company forward. They have invited your consulting firm to meet with the new Board of Directors and discuss the situation at Disney. To familiarize yourself with the client, your first task is to prepare a background report which analyzes Disney's business environment and strategy. 1. What external forces and industry conditions have had an impact on Disney's performance over the years? 2. How did the internal organization and culture at Disney influence its performance? 3. How has Disney strategically responded to its competitive environment and internal capabilities? You have been asked to present a five-minute overview of the root causes of Disney's governance issues. The content of this brief presentation should achieve the following goals. 4. Identify the causes and consequences of the Board of Directors' ineffectiveness. 5. Highlight other governance weaknesses that have made Disney vulnerable to managerial opportunism. To be prepared for the ensuing discussion, you'll also need to be familiar with the following items. 6. How have governance mechanisms at Disney been used in the past, and what was their effect? 7. What unprecedented maneuvers were made by Disney stakeholders to overcome internal governance weaknesses? During the discussion,...
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