All evening we crawled around the ground shrubbery surrounding Spaceship Earth (SSE). Occasionally we would startle a guest who didn’t expect to see Disney cast members on the ground in the bushes. One small boy did, however, have a grand time playing hide and seek with us. For us, it wasn’t so much fun.

The year was 1987 and I was the lead at SSE. In those days, a lead was like an hourly crew chief, responsible for daily attraction operation. My supervisor and I were identifying and documenting the inoperable lights that should have been illuminating SSE showcased in the snap above. It may seem obsessive, but that level of attention to detail is the difference between Disney and most organizations.

This tradition of obsession to detail is both wide and deep at Disney, going all the way back to Walt Disney himself “Look, the thing that’s going to make Disneyland unique and different is the detail. If we lose the detail, we lose it all,” continued by successor Michael Eisner, “A brand is a living entity-and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures” and his successor Bob Iger explained, “… it’s about creating an environment in which you refuse to accept mediocrity.”

It was even articulated by Karl Holtz, Disney Cruise Line executive, as “Day One.” The idea was that on any given day, the ships would look as good as they did on the day they came into service.

This level of maintenance is hard to maintain and can’t just be the work of a maintenance department. It requires everyone working together. In the SSE example above, Maintenance had so much to do that they relied on us to report daily maintenance and repair issues we identified.

The lessons I take from this are:

• Big organizational goals need to be clearly articulated
• Everyone has to take ownership of the area they work in
• Partnership is critical to success
• No detail is too small for attention

So, there we were, lurking in the dark, crawling around bushes, startling guests. It may have been a little spooky, but the results were truly illuminating.