Posts Tagged ‘Disney’

Blind Vision

Monday, March 8th, 2010

When I was a student at Notre Dame, Marc Maurer (pronounced MAU-er) walked the campus faster than anyone else I knew, and I don’t just mean faster than any other blind person.  I mean faster than anyone, period.  Like twice as fast as the next fastest person.  His cane, which he used to sweep the sidewalk in front of him like a hockey player on a breakaway, was as much for our benefit as his, because he was a man on a mission, he was coming through, and it was clear even back then that nothing or no one was going to stand in his way.

Marc was, to my knowledge, the best auto mechanic on campus.  He’d wheel his Low Boy under a car chassis, listen to an engine, or spider around under the hood and demonstrate that while you might have had the supposedly functional eyes, you couldn’t look at a car with the skill that he could.

He was one of the best students at Notre Dame.  And a party animal.  And a ladies man.  He had a great sense of humor.  In Sorin Hall, where Marc and I lived, nobody thought of him as handicapped.  Quite the contrary.  He was gifted.  By comparison, most of us were lazy, ignorant slugs.

I have not stayed in touch with Marc over the years, but I have kept tabs on him.

A few years ago, for example, Disney planned to release a feature film based on the sight-impaired Mr. Magoo cartoon character.  At first I heard the rumors coming out of Disney’s film marketing department.  “Someone in Washington representing blind people is causing trouble.”  And then I heard the name Marc Maurer, and I had to smile, because I knew it was game over, a mismatch from the get-go.  Dr. Maurer, who today is President of the National Federation of the Blind, chewed up the Mouse and spit it out.  Making fun at the expense of the sight-impaired is a mistake Disney will never make again.

Later this week, I will be conducting a GameChangers workshop for Executive MBA students at Notre Dame, and I intend to mention Dr. Maurer.  In researching him, I came across one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard.  In keeping with the character of the Marc Mauer I knew at Notre Dame, the speech is by turns intelligent, inspiring, and hilarious.  Take the time to listen to it.MarkMaurer1

Some of the beautiful ideas Dr. Maurer expresses in this speech:

If we let a single characteristic become the identifier of a person, it ensures that our estimate of them will be wrong.  Value is measured not by a single characteristic, but by the aggregate of those possessed by each individual.  Each characteristic contributes to the whole, and each may strengthen or hinder the person possessing it.

We live in a society in which blindness is thought to be a condition to be repaired.  Eyes that cannot see are broken.  However, it is false to say that the person who owns them is broken.

We, the blind, do not need to be fixed.  We are fine the way we are.  We can find our meaning and our purpose without modification or alteration.

I do not believe that blindness and helplessness are synonymous.  I carry the cane because it is a tool that helps me travel.  It is a tool of my independence, not a badge of my helplessness.

Learning should not be limited to what trains the mind, it should also train the spirit.

Your life belongs to you!

Note that it’s Federation OF the Blind.  Not FOR the Blind.  It’s not about what we can do for blind people.  It’s about what blind people can do for themselves, and if we’re lucky, for us.  Yeah, Dr. Marc Maurer is blind.  And his vision is just fine.

Miley Cyrus Naked! 99 Pieces of Spam on the Wall

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

I know, huh.  A message doesn’t have to be profound to be effective, and nowhere is this more true than in your spam folder.  Spams are designed to work on the most visceral and immediate level of human communication.  They have maybe one second to get their idea across.  For this reason, it’s useful to study their communication strategies.

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Like anyone participating in the Networked World, we get our share of spam at GameChangers.  Here are some stats on the last 99 pieces of spam we’ve filtered: (more…)

Solar Paneling the Hollywood Sign

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Today, Earth Day, at 1:30 PDT at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, a group of five people, including me, will meet with the ten members of the Hollywood Sign Trust to propose the installation of solar paneling on the Hollywood Sign. I can’t think of a better or quest for Earth Day than this one.SPHS1

‘Solar Paneling the Hollywood Sign’ exemplifies what we at GameChangers call a productive game.  Here’s how the game has played out before today… (more…)

Flexible Essence

Monday, April 20th, 2009

FlexEssence4Catherine Stephens, a Disney executive, coined this phrase last week in casual conversation when she and I were discussing the studio’s new eco-brand, Disneynature.   I am captivated by the pairing of these words, because it describes perfectly the relationship between what a brand stands for, and what it has the potential to become.  This tension between fixity and fluidity, between discipline and disruption, between predictability and opportunity, is at the heart of entrepreneurship and branding.

‘Essence’ defines the core of a brand.  If brand is a tree, essence flows through its trunk.  Essence, especially at the beginning of a brand’s life, is often rooted to the sensibilities of one person or a small group.  For example, Steve Job’s appreciation of good design is at the heart of the Apple brand, Jimmy Buffet’s lifestyle is the essence of Margaritaville, and Tamara Mellon’s taste in shoes is the foundation for the Jimmy Choo brand.  Essence can also be an institutional philosophy like you’d find at a Japanese auto company, or a fast-paced technology brand like Cisco.  Either way, this is where a brand’s fire burns brightest, where vision is most needed, where a brand’s themes are distilled and defined.  It is where the secret formula for Coca Cola, Martha Stewart’s personal style, Oprah’s reading list, and the ‘Honest’ in Honest Tea reside.

FlexEssence5‘Flexible’ is what the improvisational brand has to be at the edges of its network.  Continuing the tree analogy, flexibility is what you find in the tree’s outermost branches and leaves.  For a business operating in the Networked World, the edge is where the action is.  It is where creative disruption happens.  Where innovation is most likely to find its inspiration.  Most importantly, it is where a brand carries on conversations with its customers.  This is where you find skunk works, social networks, and tweets.  It is where buzz begins.

A brand needs both Essence and Flexibility to make a real impact in the marketplace, but it is interesting to note that a brand can be successful with a strong Essence and very little Flexibility, while the reverse is not true.  We have a word for brands with little or no Essence and a lot of Flexibility.  We call them doomed.   During the dotcom era, I once heard a pitch from a group of university scientists who’d lost their funding for a robotic crop picker and had somehow morphed their idea into a a proposal for a 3D web browser.  We in the audience failed to see the connection between the two ideas.  Those scientists never should have mentioned the robotic crop picker.  It may have demonstrated their Flexibility, but it revealed the absence of Essence.  They were showing us a pile of leaves and calling it a tree.

The priority is crystal clear.  Essence has to be the the first consideration.  If you got no Essence, you got nothing.

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Best Answer #1

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

I sometimes answer business-related questions on LinkedIn that can be addressed with the principles of improvisation. This is one in a series of responses that was deemed ‘Best Answer’ by the questioner…

THE QUESTION: How do you feel about your career?

In June 2000, I felt incredibly “not good” about my job working as account manager for a firm voted as one of the 50 best managed firms in Canada. Even though I was surrounded by wonderful coworkers and supported by the best boss I ever had, I felt intuitively, without being able to explain it, that I was not in my “right” place.

So I committed what could only be called “career suicide” and began an exciting journey to find my true self. Took me 5 years to figure out I truly wanted to become a creative knowledge writer!

What I’ve learned is that one’s inner guidance (which is mostly emotional) cannot fail. Hence, my question above. (more…)

The T. H. Culhane Game

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

John Culhane, a Rockford, Illinois-born journalist, author, and the model for the character of Mr. Snoops in the Disney animated film, The Rescuers, met his wife, Hind Rassam, a native of Baghdad, Iraq, when he reviewed her in a student performance of Antigone. John and Hind fell in love and had two sons, T. H. and Michael.

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It is no surprise that the Culhane boys are born performers, a couple of very animated characters.

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Once, as part of a story John did for the New York Times Magazine, he and the boys enrolled at Ringling Bros. Clown College in Sarasota, Florida, and T. H. and Michael became the youngest clowns ever to perform with Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey big show. (more…)

GameChanger of the Month, May 2008

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

AlanKay1TRON came true,” says one of my geek friends, referencing the early 1980s film about a gamer played by Jeff Bridges who gets zapped into a digital universe inside the memory of a computer network. What my friend means is that today, entire populations are getting zapped into that digital universe. Avatars, auctions, blogs, social networks, and databases storing information about everything from bank accounts to medical records comprise primitive alter-egos that project our personalities and do our bidding — and if we command them to, they’ll do it while we’re walking the dog or drinking a Schlitz at the corner bar. (more…)

The Reality of Life

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

Ollie1Ollie Johnston died Monday at the age of 95. Ollie was the last surviving member of Disney’s ‘Nine Old Men’, the legendary animators who injected life and character into drawings on paper as no one ever had. Words cannot begin to describe the veneration a certain generation of us who began our careers working at Disney had for these men, for Ollie and the rest of them who were still around at the time. All geniuses in their own right.

And when I say geniuses, I’m not talking about animation, although that was certainly part of it. These guys were geniuses at life. Their lives were rich in every respect, filled with adventure, fun, passion, family, and drenched in love. Too often, we think of geniuses as people who excel in one thing, when in fact it is life in its entirety that informs us and guides us to our greatness. (more…)

GameChanger of the Month, February 2008

Saturday, March 1st, 2008

When I began my career in the media business, it was accepted as doctrine that if you had a mainstream news story, the New York Times or one of the big Manhattan-based publications led, and everyone else followed. This began changing with the advent of the Networked World, until it seemed that no one was leading and everyone was following, that the news came from everywhere, all at once. (A classic improv saying goes: “Follow the follower.”) No one understood these new realities better and faster than Matt Drudge.

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After Drudge (’Web A. D.’ ) the constellation that was American newspaper journalism, shook, shifted and re-aligned, with Himself as one of its stars, and other web sites like the Huffington Post, Politico and Gawker joining the Drudge Report as new centers of gravity. (more…)

Trip Optimizer

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

In the Networked World, we celebrate the webpreneur who can humble higher status players by acting more nimbly, creatively, profitably; but we’d be foolish not to respect to the big games played by big players, because they have so much potential to move money and jobs into (or out of) an economy.

Besides which, there’s nothing else in the world like playing with trains. Big trains.

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Naturally I was interested when my cousin, Kevin, an engineer with GE in Florida, told me about a train project he’s working on there as part of the company’s Ecomagination initiative. (more…)