ARTISTIC MANAGEMENT

In the late 1930s, when Walt Disney was intensively working on his concert masterpiece, Fantasia, story artist Tom Codrick showed Walt his drawings for a segment. In that scene, Mickey stood on a high rock as ocean waves crashed around him. His arms were outstretched as if were conducting an orchestra, and the waves dancing to his "tune".

"Yes, lovely pictures", said Walt. "You have made Mickey conduct the waves. The waves are dancing to his tune. But why just have him conduct an ocean? That's really dull. Mickey has all these magical powers use his powers really big?".

Codrick gulped. "What if we have him conduct the whole universe? Why not have the whole universe dance to his tune"?

"The whole universe? Yes ..." Walt said. "What if we have him up there conducting while the stars and comets are whooshing all around him?".

Walt would always ask, "What if?" and he would expand a good idea into a spectacular idea.

Bob Gurr, who designed many of the popular attractions at Disneyland, says, "Walt had a unique way of drawing out your creativity and poking holes in your assumptions. He wouldn't push you - he would pull you, he would lead you through new ideas. He would get you to ask, "What if?''.

Many times, while checking on the progress on a drawing, he would say: "Hey Bobby, this is great. But what if - ?" and in this question he would give me an insight into a totally new approach and I would come back with a new surge of creative juices all around me".

It has the magic of "pulling out the creative juices" of your team members. It does the task of "opening up" the thinking machinery of an individual and directs the person's mind automatically to new possibilities.

Providing answers to an individual is bad. The worse it can achieve is to "force fit" an inappropriate solution to a situation. It does nothing to utilize the thinking cap of others.

Pushing your way through an individual is ugly. We won't even talk about it here.

Through the power of "right questions", you can get a whole bunch of people actively churning out their own answers to any problem or situation.

As Bob said, "Walt kept pulling me to be more creative, and soon I would be operating at two hundred percent of my natural ability".

Thank God, Walt never told his employees - "be creative", "be proactive", "think out of the box", "give your best", blah blah ...

If he did, we wouldn't have had those beautiful cartoons and those amazing Disneylands adorning the globe.

Do you have a "Winning Style"??

A high school baseball player, having a very poor batting average, found a coach who changed his career within an hour.

The coach had in-depth explorations of the kid, on what goes through his mind when he bats, etc. etc. In the session, the kid discovered that he had the greatest success when he imagined a tiny flyspeck on the baseball and aimed his bat at that flyspeck rather than at the ball itself. The fast-moving ball would often scare him off, but this flyspeck gave him the extra focus he needed to connect with the ball.

It looked like a trivial insight, but its effect on the kid was astonishing. It improved his batting average 3 times and earned him the Most Valuable Player of the school baseball league that year.

The more surprising discovery was yet to come.

After a year when the boy met the coach, the coach figured out that the boy had totally forgotten about the flyspeck and was no longer consciously visualizing it when striking the ball.

In fact, he was as surprised about his sudden success as anybody else.

A good coach is one who helps an individual discover his "flyspecks" easily. Every individual has an in-built style, which when discovered and surfaced will make him a winner.

What is your team-member's "winning style"?

"I am not interested in what a person is. I am not interested in what a person cannot do. I am only interested in what a person can be."