Marty Sklar on Walt Disney and His Wonderful World

Marty Sklar passed away a year ago today. He was a legend in the Walt Disney Company (literally) and among Disney aficionados worldwide. Marty joined the company as a summer intern in the public relations office in 1955, a month before Disneyland opened. After graduating from UCLA in 1956, he returned to Disney as a full-time employee and stayed until his retirement in 2009. He spent most of his career in Walt Disney Imagineering, the company’s design and development subsidiary, and served as its president from 1987–1996. 

In his 2013 memoir, Dream It! Do It!: My Half-Century Creating Disney’s Magic Kingdoms, Marty revealed himself as Walt Disney’s go-to ghostwriter for much of the last decade of Walt's life. In it, he provided a firsthand description of Walt’s leadership style during that momentous period in the company’s history, namely, the first decade of Disney's parks and resorts business. It's a terrific book filled with nuggets of insight for businesspeople.

When Marty joined the company, Walt was a veteran leader who had made a very big bet: He was launching a new, unproven business that most everyone predicted would be a flop, including his own brother Roy, who held the purse strings at Disney. When Walt pitched him the idea for Disneyland, Roy refused to back it. Walt forced his brother's hand by forming a new company and financing the planning on his own. Eventually, Roy relented. It was a smart decision: In 2017, Disney’s parks and resorts business generated US$18.42 billion in revenue.

Marty portrays Walt’s leadership style as demanding and sometimes rough. Walt routinely kicked back work he found unacceptable without offering any guidance on how to improve it and he only gave praise begrudgingly. When one of the Disney Studio’s TV producers asked Walt for an E for effort, he replied, “I’ll give you an S for shit.”

Yet Marty claims Walt was a “master motivator.” He resolves this apparent contradiction by explaining that Walt believed the “praise was in the product” (in other words, that the customer’s satisfaction was more than enough recognition), that he rewarded a job well done with a more challenging job, and that he truly cared about his employees, as demonstrated by his concern for their personal lives. Given the high regard with which Walt was held by many of the people who worked for him, it appears that these qualities did the trick.

Another notable aspect of this memoir-cum-business book is Marty's discussion of how language was used to differentiate Disneyland in the marketplace. Back in 1957, Marty was the wordsmith who renamed Disneyland’s rides “attractions” and described them as “adventures” or “experiences” as a means of distinguishing and distancing the theme park from its less reputable and sometimes, outright seedy competitors—the carnival and the amusement park.

I know from writing Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service for Disney Institute that this idea spilled over into the performance language that is still used in the parks today: Employees are cast members, customers are guests, a uniform is a costume, and any place customers are present is onstage. This has proven to be a highly effective means of communicating and maintaining the high service standards for which Disney is justly famous. The power of well-chosen words, right?

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