Old Blog Posts: The Game

Chapter 3 focuses on Walt’s early career and successes. I think it’s really telling that Walt strove to portray himself as innately successful, and I like how this chapter focuses on that.

                My Mother has always taught me about what she calls “playing the game”. It pertains to the idea of putting effort into getting to know the right people and casting the right light upon yourself in order to earn favor with people who will make you successful, as mentioned in Dale Carnegie’s work. Rather than acting disingenuous, it is the act of highlighting one’s best qualities so that they are obvious to those around you who may be able to help you promote yourself. I think it speaks to Walt’s character in a big way to see him utilize this same technique without having explicitly been taught it himself. What’s odd, though, is that these traits for success seem more applicable to Elias Disney’s working society as things had begun to change around the time that Walt began working professionally. My hypothesis, then would simply be that Walt appeared that much more dedicated and ambitious.

                However, we also see that Walt exhibited ambitious tendencies that didn’t always “win over” his colleagues, such as the act of abruptly changing the name if his studio to the Walt Disney Studio when Roy Disney was still his partner. Eventually Disney’s animators left him because of his abrasive business tactics. If nothing else, I think that that’s explicit proof that he either never took cues from Dale Carnegie’s work or that he didn’t learn them himself until much later, because if he had been a legitimate study of the “playing the game” philosophy he might have behaved differently. Alternatively, it’s possible that Walt’s way of “playing the game” was to play it but remind people of who he really was as he made his way in the world. As someone who has the working world in the forefront of their mind, it leaves me with a lot to think about.

                Continuing with this line of thought, I think anyone could learn from the idea of making one’s failures a part of their overall image. Watts talks about how Walt always looked at “a good, hard failure when you’re young” as a good thing because it made a person learn and made them better. Walt not only promoted his drive and talent, but the mistakes he made and how they made him an even better person. I think this is an ideal that is often preached but never practiced, and I wish the world practiced more of it. I think that culturally we focus too much on what people have done in the past and present and not enough on what they could do in the future.

                The cutthroat nature of the business world at the time is also touched on in this chapter, and I find myself wondering how things might have changed today. I would suspect that in the film and television world things will always be very aggressive, but now that we have much easier ways to track things like fraud, I wonder if the practice has become any more or less honorable. The Watts book describes it as a world where even animators working together in a company were pitted against each other, because ultimately “everyone wanted to be a producer” (44). From what I’ve seen I can’t imagine that happening now, but I’ve been exposed to different sects of the media industry and therefore might see things differently.

               

                I think that the way Watts touches on Walt’s relationship with Ub Iwerks in this chapter is particularly telling. It’s almost like he is a foil to the rest of Walt’s personality-Watts goes into great detail about the many efforts Walt made to showcase Iwerks’s contribution to the Disney studio, going so far as to give him a higher salary than his own or that of Roy Disney’s. I think it says a lot about Walt that he was not only wildly ambitious, but also (eventually) capable of recognizing hard work and ambition in others, and encouraging and cultivating it. It most any general TV special or book about Walt Disney it would be easy to hear about how visionary and hard-working he was, but I’m pleasantly surprised to see someone explore how hard he worked to bring out those traits in those he worked with. What makes it difficult to understand this behavior from Walt-what makes it hard to understand how he “plays the game”-is the fact that he was also quick to put down and dismiss his fellow colleagues as being lesser than himself. He would “simultaneously motivate and browbeat artists” because they weren’t performing a task exactly as he would, but at the same time that’s part of what propelled the Disney company to the heights of success. I could easily spend another semester studying Walt Disney’s managerial style alone.