This was the stuff on which an empire was built.

The empire wasn’t predicated on the making of money. Young Walt quite literally did not make a dime. There was a transaction. Money changed hands. But the lasting value, what remained after the dime had been added and subtracted, was elsewhere.

The value was in the creation of a memorable experience, resulting in a story that was still wonderful in Clem Flickinger’s telling almost 90 years later.

The value was in working with animals, and making them characters in your narrative.

The value was in getting your friend and neighbor to play along.

The value was in using the material you had available to you. Cat+ Basement+Stool=Circus!

The value was in gaining the entrepreneurial resolve to hang onto the next dime that came your way.

The value was in getting your family involved.

[Walt was the male runt of the Disney litter, nine years younger than the next oldest boy, Roy, and 12 or 14 years younger than the oldest boys, Herb and Ray. On a family farm like theirs, a six-year-old was practically a non-entity. No doubt Walt's circus got him some attention at the supper table that night, even if it was getting his no-nonsense dad, Elias, riled up again, like earlier that summer when Walt had talked his little sister, Ruthie, into helping him paint a city skyline on the side of the Disney farmhouse with roofing tar, which had earned Walt a righteous spanking.]

There was value in breaking a routine that got you no attention.

Around the same time I met Clem, I listened to a set of rare tapes in the Disney Studio archives, recorded in the mid 1950s, of Walt giving an oral history of the studio. A ghost-writer recorded him as research for book to be called My Dad Walt Disney, which would be serialized in LOOK Magazine under the byline of Walt’s 12-year-old daughter, Diane. In those recordings, Walt had a charming way of tracking his studio’s financial fortunes. As he listed the films the studio had made, he’d say [for example], “Well now, let’s see, Dumbo cost us one [million], and it made one and a half. Bambi cost us one and a half and it made two, so we made a half. Make Mine Music cost us one, but it only made a half, so we lost money on that one.”

Sitting atop an empire worth millions, and soon, with the launch of Disneyland in 1955, about to be worth a lot more, there was still a lot of value in a single digit.

Irving Ludwig, the distribution mastermind from New York, who had triggered the 1960s boxoffice revival of Fantasia (which had been a flop when first released in 1940), and had later moved to Burbank to run Disney’s distribution arm, Buena Vista, once told me that his boss, Roy Disney, paid generous rebates worth millions of dollars to the exhibitors who profited from the Fantasia revival, because, as Roy explained it, “they stuck with us when the studio wasn’t doing as well as it is today.” The value of loyalty, and the relationship with their business partners was worth more to the Disneys than a financial windfall that was, contractually, theirs to collect.

It’s not that the money doesn’t matter. It does. But it’s just a footnote to the creation of lasting value. When you understand what builds and sustains the business, it can be okay, or even good for the business, to ‘give back the dime.’

I call this difference between the value of the transaction and the value of the experience the Flickinger Factor. It is the Flickinger Factor, and not the money, that is ultimate measure of your achievement. Your narrative. Your brand. Your legacy in the world.

So what are you doing today that might be making people smile 90 years from now?

Yes, we are here, and I see a place we can grab over there.  Yes!  A new crack reveals itself, and we grab it.  We see another hold and we make the move.  Yes, and now we’re experiencing the mountain from a new perspective.  Multiple new holds appear, and one hold at a time, with each move accompanied by a thousand little calculations that are faster than conscious thought, we move up the face of the mountain.

Beginning improvisation students tend to use the phrase ‘Yes and’ literally.  Skilled players discover infinite ways to ‘Yes and’ without necessarily using the words themselves.  This keeps technique in the background where it belongs.  A scene in which every player begins every contribution with the words ‘Yes and’ will get sing-songy in a hurry, and that’s not what we want.  We want nuance.  Refinement.  We want technique to be second nature so that it becomes invisible to our audience, and we can pay attention fully to the realities of the environment and our fellow players.  That’s gamechanging leadership.

Gamechanging is the art of doing what’s best for the scene.  That means knowing a lot of different ways to yes-and.  GameChangers yes-and artfully, with technique taking a backseat to the scene’s objective.

They can do it with a smile and a supporting comment.  Or

A reaction and a correction. Or

With constructive criticism. Or

By giving gifts to their scene partners and making them look good.  Or

By seeing and adding to the environment. Or

By joining in the shop talk of the scene. Or

By keeping the scene focused on its objective. Or

By supporting the scene from offstage. Or

By making declarative statements instead of interrogating scene partners. Or

By energizing and heightening the emotional level of the scene.  Or

By emphasizing convergence on a solution when a divergence of ideas gets unwieldy. Or

By doing what our friend Kristen Parrinello calls ‘invisible work’ (@invisiblework is her Twitter handle), the little moves that are so subtle as to be invisible to the audience.

Walt Disney used to call yes-anding (and Pixar Animation has taken to calling it) ‘plussing.’  Add something to the scene, and if you don’t have anything to add, get off the stage.

Not that you shouldn’t practice yes-anding by literally using those two words.  You should.  Use them as a kind of warm-up or rehearsal, like you’d practice the basic forms in ballet or the scales in music.  When the game is on, and you’re in the heat of a big scene, ‘Yes and’ may not literally pop up in your dialogue, but the technique will be there, invisible and inaudible, doing its work, ratcheting you and your team to the summit of whatever mountain you choose to climb.

Umm.  No.  It has not.  Here’s why:  There’s a mistake in the ad copy.  The first rule of improv is not saying ‘Yes’…it’s saying ‘Yes and.‘  ‘Yes’ is only half a conversation, an agreement without an addition.  The word ‘and’ holds the power, because it merges the realities of two players into a new reality that can be shared by both.

When two players ‘Yes and’ one another, they’re not expressing different versions of reality, competing viewpoints, or two different versions of the truth…they’re co-creating a new reality.  This is why ‘Yes and’ is such a powerful statement and ‘Yes’ gives away power without generating any of its own.

While we support any move in the direction of improvisation as a professional practice–as this Jet Blue ad seems to want to do–it’s maddening when some ad copywriter misstates the practice like this does.

‘Yes’ without ‘and’ ???

To an improviser, it’s like Macaroni without Cheese.

Like Woody without Buzz.

Like Yin without Yang.

And, unfortunately for the people who spent the money for this ad, it’s like a Jet without Blue.

Walt Disney used to call it ‘plussing.’  Don’t just agree with me.  Tell me something I don’t know.  Add useful information.  Give gifts.  Move the scene forward.

John S., are you listening?

And then this article by Errol Morris in the New York Times came across the network this morning, the hook being a quote from Walt Disney (”I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing — that It Was All Started By A Mouse.“) as its headline. I’d already seen the link a couple of times when Howard Green from Disney Studios called to invite me to a tribute for Walt’s recently-departed nephew, Roy Disney, on Sunday at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood.   Suddenly the universe was in my ear bigtime, whispering that I had to click on the link to the Morris article. Something was there to be discovered….

The article itself is a photo essay and dialogue with photojournalist Ben Curtis about the forensics of war photography, the context of image vs. imagemaker, the technological challenges and dangers that come with altering photos to create propaganda or enhance a certain point of view. The kind of stuff in which Morris specializes. After I got the context, I began skimming. But I kept coming back to a photo by Curtis that led off the article:

In seeing the photo, I found what had been missing over the holidays. I might have decided to be resolute, I was still waffling on a theme, what, exactly I’d be resolute about. This photo resolved that. I wrote the following Comment on the Morris piece:

Errol

As our old friend Onosko, who worked at the House of Mouse for many years, might have said, you’re making it more complicated than it is. Focusing on the cosmetic level of communication–the toy itself, the shards of glass, the smoke, the interaction between imagemaker and image–is a fascinating narrative, and yields neverending complexity, but this complexity obscures meaning instead of bringing it to light. How Mickey got there is not nearly as important as the meta and emotional levels of the communication: War’s awfulest tragedies are its children.

Until we begin thinking of children first–begin with the Mice!, that what Walt would’ve done–War will be an adult theme park where children get crippled, grow old and perish before their time.

And so, finally, thanks to Howard and Errol and Ben, I have it — my New Year’s theme — the thing I can be Resolute about:  Be Nice to the Mice.

Hit it, Kid!

Exhibit A: In 1920, Father Julius Nieuwland creates the polymers that make synthetic rubber possible when he accidentally leaves a pot boiling on a stove.

Exhibit B: In 1928, Walt Disney creates Mickey Mouse when his partner in the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon series double-crosses him. Mickey gets his name because Walt’s wife, Lily, hates the name ‘Mortimer’ that Walt had given him.

Exhibit C: In 1975, Post-It Notes originate when one of its inventors, Art Fry, needs a bookmark for a church hymnal.

Exhibit D: In 1998, Dr. Taryn Rose begins designing shoes because her feet hurt when she wears other designers’ shoes.

The point here is that none of these 20th-century success stories, nor tens of thousands of others just like them, had a script, they were spontaneous, productive responses to the situations that life presented. Father Nieuwland made an apparent mistake and recognized that it moved the scene forward. To an improviser, mistakes are pure opportunity. As the flamenco guitarist Kai Narezo (who’s married to one of my teachers at I. O. West, Shulie Cowen,) says, “The good news about bad notes is that there’s always a good one right next to them.”

Walt Disney wasn’t aiming to create an iconic character that would launch an entertainment empire. He was a resilient businessman who’d gotten his franchise brand yanked by an unscrupulous distributor. His company needed a new product in the pipeline just to keep the doors open. He did what was needed in that particular situation. An improviser plays the scene, not the story.

To an improviser, turning the little things into big ones (and big ones into little ones) is part of the art. The Post-It dude simply wanted a better bookmark for his hymnal. Dude remembered a strange kind of adhesive that a buddy of his at 3M had invented. Dude stuck a bit of it on the back of some slips of paper. Yahtzee!

Taryn Rose’s family was aghast when she told them she was leaving medicine to go into fashion design. It was not a rational move, but it was a good one. An improviser doesn’t judge a scene while it’s in progress. She acts on instinct informed by knowledge, not governed by it. Knowledge (what Dr. Rose knew about the practice of medicine) will always be there, but the moment of opportunity (what Dr. Rose felt was possible) is fleeting and must be promptly and spontaneously acted upon. If you overthink it, the moment is gone.

When their scenes took an unexpected, unscripted turn, these players were prepared, and turned the ‘bad notes’ of: a) accident, b) setback, c) triviality and d) discomfort into the sweet music of success. This is the alchemy that’s possible with improvisation.

Today — with the vast opportunities and the commensurate challenges presented by the Networked World — the ability to improvise will be even more important to business success than it has been in the past. Moments of opportunity will come and go in much greater abundance, but they’ll be way more fleeting, too, and it’ll take more openness, trust and spontaneity on the part of players and especially organizations to take advantage of them.