C'est long à lire mais... intéressant!!
Meg StoryThe online Disney fan community erupted in shock and horror last week at the news that Meg Crofton was being promoted to the title of President of operations for Disney’s American and European theme park properties, a portion of the job duties that Al Weiss has held for the previous six years. On its surface the news was disheartening, and for Disneyland fans especially it seemed to be a giant step back to the days of Paul Pressler and Cynthia Harriss when the Anaheim parks languished and dimmed as attractions were run to failure, yet blow-dried executives glossed over the gloom with fake declarations that everything was fabulous and this was exactly the direction Disneyland needed to take in the new century.
For the Disney fan base, other than a few photos of her in the Mommy blogs Disney is so fond of cultivating these days, Meg has a rather lackluster resume; starting her career out of college as a manager in the marketing department of Disney’s internal phone company back in 1977, a time when most big companies ran their own telecommunications networks to get around the monopoly of the Bell System. Meg left Disney for a time in the early 1980’s, and then hired back in to the phone company before rising quickly through the management ranks of Orlando’s Human Resources department in the 1990’s.
This is not a Disney leader who has pictures of themselves bussing tables at Tomorrowland Terrace in a polyester jumpsuit, or can tell funny stories at cocktail parties about the time they were working the Hall of Presidents in college when the animatronics went on the fritz and George Washington slapped Richard Nixon and the audience applauded. Meg is a product of a solely white-collar, administrative, paper-pushing career with none of the glamour and street-cred associated with spending time working onstage in the theme parks. On top of that staid history, she’s been in charge of WDW for over five years as it went through a noticeable decline.
To be blunt, despite the many excuses offered by online apologists, the comparison to the Disneyland of a decade ago is rather apt for the Walt Disney World of today. The core WDW properties around the Magic Kingdom complex are hitting the same mid-life crisis that Disneyland hit around its 40th birthday in the mid to late 1990’s, with attractions and facilities looking worn and tired, and the basic infrastructure around the Magic Kingdom park in particular seemingly falling apart at the seams with weekly problems with transportation or rapidly aging hotels.
As Crofton (shown above) has been in charge of the entire Walt Disney World property for the last five years, the buck has to stop with her, and people lay most of the blame at her feet for the stale and neglected state of too much of the WDW property. At the very least you would have thought the lessons learned at Disneyland from 1996 to 2003 would have been used by the Florida team to stave off the same types of problems, but apparently WDW is doomed to repeat Disneyland’s mstakes, even if they’ve been more liberal with the new paint lately than Pressler ever was. We won't even mention how they were caught so flat-footed by the Harry Potter jauggernaut that has fueled the Universal complex down the road.
In the meantime, back in California, several well placed executives in Anaheim, Glendale and Burbank had been able to convince Tom Staggs that the setup of the “One Disney” structure Jay Rasulo dreamed up was too stifling to the Anaheim operation. (Not to mention the Parisians who had been weighing in with similar thoughts) While there is still great merit in streamlining some of the administrative and back-of-house tasks shared by the various properties, the thought that Disneyland could ever operate just like Walt Disney World, or vice versa, was the fatal flaw to the One Disney structure cooked up by Jay Rasulo.
Tom Staggs had repeatedly acknowledged those concerns about a bloated bureaucracy in Florida over the past six months, and he was agreeable to creating a different hierarchy that would give Anaheim leaders further autonomy while allowing them to tap into the streamlined One Disney structure when and where it suited the local culture and operation. TDA executives were then quite pleased to hear of the rumored changes coming after Al’s retirement.
To his credit, Al Weiss (shown above) was technically in charge of the Anaheim property for the past five years, but he knew well enough to stay out of the operation except for some long-term strategizing. As a lifelong Floridian, Weiss would visit Southern California regularly if a bit grudgingly, but he primarily stayed in Burbank and Glendale, with a rare drive down to Anaheim only once or twice a year. He had absolutely no facial recognition at the Anaheim property, and very little name recognition amongst anyone below the executive ranks. Weiss could walk around Disneyland completely anonymous, and his rare visits out in the park over the last few years usually consisted of polite conversation with middle management about how pleasant the SoCal climate was and how well-maintained the attractions were in Anaheim.
Weiss allowed the local leaders to run their property as they see fit, and he stayed out of the way. In that executive environment, Anaheim has had what many consider a new Golden Age for the past six years of countless new and updated attractions, new parades and night spectaculars, and well maintained facilities young and old, with the 1.2 Billion extreme makeover of DCA the big prize waiting for 2012. The reality out in Florida during that same time frame, however, was almost a complete opposite experience; and again it should be noted that Crofton was in charge of the entire property during that whole time.
In this delicate environment of a visibly declining Florida property, Crofton doesn’t do much to put fans or Cast Members at ease with her carefully crafted corporate personality that never veers off-script and always includes the latest marketing buzzwords. For all their alleged marketing savvy and attempts to harness social media, Disney’s senior executive structure in Orlando still thinks it’s communicating with a mentally-challenged audience who has nowhere else to go for news or information. Crofton personifies this unfortunate executive trait, and she appears to shy away from actually appearing in the parks or engaging the fans and her Cast.
A perfect example was the recent D23 Destination D event celebrating WDW’s 40th anniversary at the Contemporary Hotel, where Crofton and the rest of the Orlando execs chose not to show their face that weekend, even if just for a 30 or 45 minute window of working the crowd in the lobby at one of the pre or post-event mixers. (George Kalogridis, on the other hand, gladly appeared at Disneyland’s Destination D last summer for an onstage interview and then wandered through the lobby afterwards shaking hands and posing for photos.) Key insiders have acknowledged that Crofton and the Orlando team have embraced the trendy social media technology not so much for the desire to communicate, but because they think it absolves them of having to actually appear at fan events or walk through a crowded theme park on a steamy Orlando day. Yet there are very few people left who can’t see right through that.
A few banners popped-up backstage at Disneyland noting a website's readers had voted DCA
third place for best theme park in the US. USA Today also ran a story last week about how
Disney has improved DCA. Note some of the comments there about WDW's decline.So, with that all said, it took lots of folks in TDA by unfortunate surprise when Crofton was elevated to a newly created role that technically oversees the Disneyland Resort. Interestingly, the announcement was not put on any of the usual internal communication devices, like Disney’s intranet site or other online resources that are normal venues for executive communication and that were all used to boldly announce Weiss’s retirement just a few weeks earlier. There was just the one memo, sent electronically only to top executives who were then expected to forward it on as they saw fit. The local media in SoCal didn’t cover the story at all, and if it weren’t for a single blog post by Orlando Sentinel reporter Jason Garcia that was endlessly circulated around TDA and theme park offices, it would have been nearly impossible to tell anything had happened.
The good news here is that after the announcement, the Burbank organization was dispatched for some damage control in Anaheim to help explain that it’s not as bleak as it looks. On the contrary, this change is going to offer the TDA team more of the reins on their own destiny while Crofton stays even busier in Orlando. Crofton still retains sole ownership of the WDW property, as she wasn’t outright promoted to a new position with someone else to fill her old role; rather she was just given a new slate of committee meetings to schedule in to her traditional workload. The shakeup Staggs rolled out also cut loose the DVC business, the struggling Adventures by Disney group, the successful Disney Cruise Line, and the three Asian properties from Weiss’s old role, sending those key facets of the Disney Parks empire to their own presidents and executive hierarchy that no longer intersects with the domestic theme parks.
Crofton’s executive strengths, primarily in Disney’s famously out-of-touch Human Resources group, will come in handy if a proposal that has been kicking around for a few years gets the green light; the outsourcing of the HR department at all the American properties. The new executive structure also doesn’t help to stifle pesky rumors that Disney might be open to shopping their various Parks & Resorts division around to an outside buyer; either the newly-created Asian division to a Chinese government-backed concern flush with cash, or the Euro-American parks division and/or the Cruise Line/DVC group to an interested party on either side of the Atlantic. We honestly can’t get a better read on that rumor, other than we have heard about an internal list of negatives for the company that is currently longer than the positives.
But back in the current situation, TDA appears assured Crofton will be a figurehead who already has enough charity boards to sit on to keep two or three people busy. She sits on the board of the Metro Orlando Economic Development Commission, the board of the Central Florida Regional Commission on Homelessness, she’s an acting executive at Orlando’s Phillips Performing Arts Center, and just last month she was named to the 13-member Board of Trustees for her alma mater, the University of Central Florida. No wonder she didn’t have time to stop by the Contemporary for Destination D!
What the Anaheim team will have to get through, however, is the upcoming goodwill trip Meg has to make to Disneyland to pander to the locals at the park with the little, tiny castle. You can bet Crofton’s executive handlers are researching some Disneyland history for her to memorize on the plane, and her speechwriter will soon be preparing her schmoozy talking-points that are heavy on the Walt references. If Crofton gets desperate with the Disneylanders, she may even un-casually mention the fact that she was born in San Diego (before her family moved to Orlando when she was in kindergarten), since nothing goes over like a lead balloon at Disneyland than a native Floridian on a tight-smile executive tour.
There’s still no word on whether Crofton will make an appearance at Anaheim’s D23 Expo next month, but she could kill two birds with one stone and fold her goodwill tour of Disneyland in with a strategic appearance at the Expo since Staggs and Iger will both be there on Friday, August 19th.
http://miceage.micechat.com/allutz/al071211a.htm
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Mar 5 Juil - 13:24
