“Saw the dentist today. Time to relax.” Photo: Offbeat Training LLC

I was delivering a keynote to a dental organization and, not being a dental professional myself, wanted to find a way to connect with the audience. I showcased a video of a silverback gorilla getting his teeth cleaned. The group loved it.

For a former Disney training professional, a dental association presentation might seem like a stretch, but a wide variety of professions and professionals can learn from the Mouse. Poultry producers, the National Guard, the nuclear power industry, grocery, utilities, public libraries, medical providers, asset recovery managers, the US GAO, financial institutions and more have all been clients. You wouldn’t think these groups have anything in common, but they do. They all wanted to improve their leadership, customer service, innovation, training, and/or processes.

With over 44 square miles of property, 70,000+ cast members, and 3,000+ job classifications—including everything from security guards to horse wranglers to doctors—Walt Disney World has experienced almost any situation you can imagine. Crisis management? Ineffective leaders? Sinking levels of customer service? Ineffective training? Low employee morale and motivation? Bad processes? Disney has confronted and triumphed over all these issues (just like how it right now is grappling with being more inclusive while maintaining it's traditional audience).

Disney is not perfect. The Mouse, as discussed in Snaps Epcot’s Graveyard, The Path To Nowhere, and Disney Fails a Lot, makes mistakes. What makes Disney different, and an entity we can learn from, is that they don’t give up. Nothing ever remains a failure. It is either fixed or shuttered. It’s a tradition that goes all the way back to Walt. He once explained, “Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.”

Perhaps Disney’s largest failure fix example is Disney California Adventure. The Mouse spend a meager $600 to build it. That penny pinching approach showed when it failed to meet guest expectations. Former Disney parks leader Paul Pressler offered this excuse, “We tried to do some new things and push the envelope. It turned out our guests want what we traditionally have given them.” A few years later, Disney CEO Bob Iger was more direct. “Any time you do something mediocre with your brand, that's a withdrawal. California Adventure was a brand withdrawal.” Iger, to correct Pressler’s mistake, spend an additional 1.1 billion dollars and transformed Disney California Adventure into a guest satisfying park.

That commitment to finding and solving problems is the reason why we can learn from the Mouse … and why I will continue to write these articles and share information with you and others for as long as I can, and maybe, even, perhaps, find myself sharing teeth cleaning information again.

Thank you for being a loyal reader.

A special note - our MIC Key Snap videos are now on Rumble. You can visit them at this link.