Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
The theme park industry is facing serious challenges right now. Disney recently announced layoffs of 28,000 employees, which is a significant percentage of its workforce. Dan Cockerell was a leader at Disney in past difficult times including 9/11, and he has an interesting perspective. I was curious to learn Dan’s thoughts on how companies like Disney can respond to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. During his 26 years at Disney, Dan has navigated through quite a lot and learned from those experiences.
Dan is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. He recently published a book, How’s the Culture in Your Kingdom: Lessons from a Disney Leadership Journey, with stories from his diverse career. Dan has taken his work experience and developed lessons for leadership and beyond in the book. On the podcast, he describes his reasons for writing the book and the process for of developing and publishing it.
Dan originally appeared on Episode 59 of The Tomorrow Society Podcast, and we talked about his background. This time, he provides more great stories, including some of the stranger moments. I loved the chance to learn more about what it’s like to work behind the scenes at Walt Disney World. Dan also hosts the Come Rain or Shine podcast with Jody Mayberry, and he talks about how that show has evolved. It was great to catch up with Dan and hear about his latest projects.
Show Notes: Dan Cockerell
Learn more about Dan Cockerell and his work at his official website.
Purchase a copy of Dan’s book How’s the Culture in Your Kingdom.
Listen to Dan’s podcast Come Rain or Shine on Apple Podcasts.
Support Disney cast members through Cast Member Pantry, UNITE HERE 737, Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County, and Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida.
Support The Tomorrow Society Podcast through a one-time contribution and buy me a Dole Whip!
Transcript
Dan Cockerell: At the end of the day, it comes down to take care of your employees, listen to your customers about what their perceptions are, and be smart about how you’re running your business. Because if you’re not running it in a smart way, you may not have a business to run when all is said and done.
Dan Heaton: That is Dan Cockerell, former Vice President of Epcot, the Magic Kingdom, and Disney’s Hollywood Studios. He’s here to talk about his new book, How’s the Culture in Your Kingdom. You’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.
(music)
Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 118 of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. Before I get started on this week’s show, I wanted to talk about an announcement that came out after I recorded last week’s podcast, and that is that Disney laid off a very large percentage of its workforce, 28,000 employees, many at the parks, and I know that a lot of you were impacted by this. I can judge even by just being on social media, just seeing the really sad and heartfelt messages about people that loved working for Disney.
And as somebody who at one point in my life really wanted to work for Disney, I can totally understand those feelings where it’s not just about losing a job, and that’s part of it, of course, the economic side of it, but also this company that you’ve invested so much in made tough decisions, and it’s a case where, I mean, with Disneyland not open and with just such limitations on hotels and parks, but still that doesn’t make it any easier at all.
So what I’ve been thinking about lately is trying to think of ways that I can help. I know that Carlye Wisel, who was my guest last week, put together a really good list of places that you can donate to that will help cast members including Cast Member Pantry, Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County, and Central Florida, two different places and Unite Here 737. There’s a lot of resources.
I’m going to put links to all of these in the blog post connected to the show and the show notes. All these places are easy to find and I would definitely suggest that you try to help out. I’m going to do the same. Any great company is only as good as the people that work there, and I think that’s definitely the case here where so many passionate people worked for Disney and hopefully we’ll do so again.
But right now we’re really struggling in this super difficult time, and I think that does connect to my guest today, who is Dan Cockerell. This was recorded before that announcement, but Dan does answer a question near the end where I asked him about the challenges with the pandemic and also related to what he experienced when he was at Disney after 9/11. So I thought that response was very interesting about what companies can do, but also the different challenges they have with trying to serve employees and also being a public company and everything else there.
Dan has a new book, How’s The Culture in Your Kingdom, which I found really interesting. It’s a lot of tips about ways that you can either become a better leader or just improve life, how you work everything there. He incorporates a lot of stories from his time at Disney that I found interesting and some are very entertaining, and he talks through some of those, including some of the more unpredictable, crazier moments that he experienced from his time at Disney.
So I hope you enjoy that show. I originally talked to Dan a few years ago after he left Disney about his background, and this sort of continues to the next steps about what he’s doing now and then him writing the book. And I really appreciate the time that Dan took to talk with me, and I think it was a really fun conversation. So let’s get right to it. Here is Dan Cockerell.
(music)
Dan Heaton: My guest today started his career parking cars at Epcot in 1991 and moved into leadership roles, including the Vice President of Epcot, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and the Magic Kingdom during his 26-year career. He is now a consultant and public speaker and recently published his first book How’s the Culture in Your Kingdom: Lessons from a Disney Leadership Journey. It is Dan Cockerell. Dan, thanks so much for coming back on the podcast.
Dan Cockerell: Well, thanks for the enthusiastic introduction, Dan. It was great.
Dan Heaton: Oh, no problem. Yeah, that’s like a very brief summary. You’ve done a lot more, so I hope I didn’t give too much short shrift to anything you’ve done, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg for sure. So it’s really exciting to talk with you. Let’s just dive right into the book. So I’d love to know just up front, how did you get interested in ultimately writing a book?
Dan Cockerell: When you start your own business, you’re looking for ways to differentiate yourself, and someone told me, they said, Dan, don’t forget the word author and authority are very closely associated. So there is something to that when you write a book, you become an authority on a topic, although I didn’t feel like more of an authority after I wrote a book than before, but it helps a lot and it kind of tells your story I think, and gives you some good exposure.
It was a good exercise for me because I wanted to, when I left Disney, I had to figure out what I knew I’d been working there 26 years, but once I got out, I’m like, all right, what do people want to know about? What is it they want to know for me that’s going to help them? So I started to write down just in a journal, what do I know?
What are the things I know? I know how to communicate; I know I’ve been involved in building strategy. I know how to give feedback. And I just made this laundry list of the skills I had and I started to develop those. That eventually formed into the book from, it starts small and it starts very informal and slowly build a framework around that. As my publisher reminded me and said, Dan, I know you know this, but I’d like to remind all my authors, you are not the first person to write a book on leadership and management, so it better be interesting.
And I agree, there are no new leadership concepts because human nature is what human nature is, and we’ve all evolved over thousands of years a certain way. So I think the principles are the same. I think it’s just getting people to understand it, people understand through various methods, and I think storytelling is very powerful. So I made a point to make sure I included lots of stories in the book so people could hang on to the stories and remember those and associate them with the right leadership and management behaviors so they could repeat those.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. So I’m curious on that note too, because like I mentioned, you’ve worked at Disney for a while in a lot of different interesting roles. Once you kind of had your basic ideas down, was it a challenge to decide which stories and just what to put into the book ultimately that was published?
Dan Cockerell: It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, I’ll tell you. And luckily my beautiful loving wife wrote about half of it. I kind of feel bad. I say on the second version, we’re going to put her name on the cover because I got burnt out after a while. I’m like, I can’t do this. This is too hard. And she said, all right, I’ll take the baton for a while. She wrote a bunch of stuff, and it’s funny, she would say, all right, Dan, we’re doing the chapter on getting enough sleep. You have a story about that. And I’m like, I don’t remember. She goes, well, look, you’ve been coming home for 26 years with six stories every night and you can’t remember one story.
Now I’m not like a pull the string and get a story person, so give me what you want the story to be. Give me 24 hours and I’ll remember it. Yeah. We were looking for, okay, what are the leadership principles and then let me find experience. I had, luckily the good thing about working in a company for 26 years in 19 different jobs is you’ve experienced just about everything is possible regarding leadership and management on successes and mistakes. I had plenty of both during that time, and so the stories came pretty readily once we got rolling.
Dan Heaton: Totally. Yeah. I’m sure there was plenty to cover, but yeah, I mean when you’re in the thick of it, I’m sure it’s like you’re just trying to do every day and deal with every kind of crazy thing that happens and aren’t thinking at the time, let me write that down for a book that I’m going to do 10 years from now or something like that. So on a related note, I’m curious, your dad, Lee Cockerell, has written multiple books about customer service and leadership. So did Lee give you any good advice while you were writing this book about how to kind of put it together?
Dan Cockerell: Well, he had the same advice I got from a couple other people and he said, you know how you write a book? You sit down and you write the book. He is a very disciplined man and the books he’s written, I think he dedicates a month and he writes ’em in a month and he just spends two or three hours every day and just hammers away at it. And it’s funny, the first year they said, the publisher said, you need about 55,000 words for us to be able to edit. That’s about a 220-page book. And the first year I wrote 10,000 words and that’s where I really got stalled. I’m like, oh man, I’m just failing here. And then we went to France for six weeks.
My wife’s from France and we went to visit her family and I wrote the rest of the book in six weeks, and it was getting up every morning at six in the morning and either hanging out in the kitchen or going to a local cafe and sitting there on my laptop and just hammering out whatever I was going to write that day. Some days I’d come up with the title of the next chapter, and some days I’d be there and write 2,000 words. It just depended.
But what I found that really helped was if you’re really focusing on it daily, that 23 hours between sessions, your mind is processing and it’s incredible how when you come back, the next time you sit down how much you’ve thought about that and it gets easier and easier. It accelerates. It’s just a matter of having discipline to do it every day, and that was probably the hardest part.
Dan Heaton: One thing I find interesting about the book too is like you mentioned, I mean it’s compact. I mean that in a good way. You really hit on a lot of points, but it’s not a 500-page management book or something. When you were kind of figuring out the structure, how did you end up deciding on, okay, this is how many chapters I want, or even, I don’t need to know all the specifics, but just what were the big things? Because really I think with books generally that can be a lot more successful.
Dan Cockerell: It really kind of narrow the scope a bit. Yeah, there’s a few things that played into it. Now the first thing was the publisher said, who are you writing this book to? And of course I said, well, I’m writing to everyone, I want everyone to buy the book. They said, yes, we understand that, but who is it for who you need to have someone who you’re thinking about? And I was just thinking about a 20- or 30-year-old manager who maybe just got their first leadership role or maybe they’ve had a leadership role and they’re getting into a bigger leadership role. Where I see it really that’s a difficult transition to make is going from performing on your own to leading a team of people. Because once you lead a team of people, it’s really not about you anymore. Good leaders know that.
They know that it’s not about their performance anymore. It’s about them enabling the performance of their team that defines their success. And that’s counterintuitive. We all have egos. When you get promoted, you’re supposed to become more important. And the way I look at it is when you get promoted, you become less important. Your team is more important and it’s a different way to think about it.
So that was the first thing I wanted someone who moved into a leadership role and was wondering how they’re supposed to spend their time now that they have a team to do things for them and delegate to, and where do they spend their time? Are they supposed to do the things they did before or are they supposed to do nothing or are they supposed to get involved and how much should they get involved and is getting too involved micromanaging, and I wanted to share my personal experiences and once again, the failures and the successes of what I learned along the way.
What I’ve learned is you can’t just write a book and hope someone reads it and now they’ve got 26 years of experience, but hopefully they’ll have some takeaways and they’ll say, I remember that story Dan talked about when he made that decision. This is how it ended up. Maybe I’m going to prepare a little more this time so I don’t make the same mistake. So that’s how I thought about it. When I wrote down all the stuff I thought about in my life, I was like, you know what? The times I’ve been happiest in my life, I’ve felt good about myself. I’ve had a good relationship with my family, my kids, my wife, my parents, and at work I’ve been able to do a good job getting work done. So I really wanted to define those things because people talk about compartmentalizing their lives.
I got work and I have home and they’re different and I don’t want them to overlap, and I’m not going to tell you what’s the right thing to do or isn’t, but I’m a big fan of integration. Everything should be integrated. Your personal life, your work life, that’s where you need to be paying attention to things seven days a week, I think on all those fronts, you can still have balance when you do that, but you can think about it differently. So when I wrote the book, I just said, okay, I know the times that I was the best were the times I was healthy, I was getting enough sleep, I was exercising, I was focusing on, I was organized and getting things done. So that was the beginning of the book because if you don’t do that right, it’s really hard to do else.
And then leading a team, I took all the concepts I learned at Disney over time of setting expectations, making sure you have clarity about what people are supposed to do and what success looks like and building relationships with them and how to do that. As you saw in the book, Dan, I put at the end of every chapter, fast track the results. So I really wanted to highlight the fact that leadership is not about what you believe, it’s about what you do, and you have to prove what you believe in by doing things.
I believe we should be generous. Then do you do things that are generous in nature? When someone calls you needs help, do you help them or not? You can believe you should be generous, but when you have the opportunity to be generous and you’re then you’re not generous or I believe you should develop people. Okay, how many people have you developed the past year? How many people have you mentored? Have you gotten involved in sitting down with people and giving them advice on how to make career decisions?
You may believe it’s important, but if you’re not finding the time to actually do it, it’s really not a value you have. And so a lot of this is about self-awareness and holding yourself accountable. You can’t be everything to everyone and you can’t be great at everything, but pick your spots, pick the things you want to be good at and execute upon ’em and actually spend time. I want to be physically fit. Alright, well then go exercise. If you don’t exercise, it’s not going to happen. So I had all these pieces and parts and I gave it to a professor who I’m friends with, Keenan, and I gave it to him.
I said, Keenan, I don’t know what I have here. I have a bunch of stuff. He looked through it and he gave it to me the next day. He said, you have leading self leading team, leading organization. I was like, Keenan, I love you. I’m going to build a little shrunk to you because you took out of this chaos and that’s how the book formed. So he figured it out for me and it just sort of, I think exemplified what I believe is one person. You can’t figure everything out on your own.
If you think you’re going to go write a book and be able to do it all on your own, forget it. And a lot of times sharing the ride with other people, they’re going to give you comments and insights and points of view that you don’t even know about. That comes to your personal life. It comes to work. At work, I had to rely on lots of people to give advice on decisions I should be making because that job was too big and too complex for me to have enough experience or knowledge. And so I had to get rid of my ego and decide I was not there to be the know-it-all. I was there to facilitate decisions and make sure I brought in experts. And that’s once again, I think great leaders are able to do that.
Dan Heaton: Totally. Yeah. And I think you bring up a good point, especially in today’s world with the mental and physical fitness and how important that is to just be able to do good work. And it really comes out in the book. I’m curious too, you mentioned that being a leader and not wanting, having to have your team rely on your team and everything, because I could think of it too, like you mentioned in the book there’s examples where you just want to jump in and be the hero and kind of take charge. How do you kind of pull yourself back or what to that 30-year-old manager, how do you tell them, let’s say they were a star performer who was a great player on the team and now has to be the leader. How do you stop yourself from doing that?
Dan Cockerell: Yeah, well, it takes discipline and there’s times where you don’t do it well. I got times where I was nervous or maybe I didn’t have confidence in the team, I would get involved. And sometimes that was a good thing and sometimes that wasn’t a good thing depending on what the situation was. But I think first of all, you have to start with a logical look at how things work.
What I realized at the Magic Kingdom, we do a survey every couple years and the management survey would come out and basically your team got to rate you as a leader and tell you if they’d worked for you again and anonymously. And a lot of leaders wanted to see that and see what their direct reports thought about them. And I used to look at it too. I’m like, yeah, let’s see what my managers think about me.
What I concluded later was what I’m interested in that, but really what I’m responsible for is what the 12,000 employees at Magic Kingdom think about their leaders. Because if my leadership and the way I’m doing my job and where I’m focusing is not impacting the frontline employees’ ability to deliver a magical experience to guests and they don’t have the tools or the training that I’m not doing my job. And so it didn’t really matter how good I was doing my job, if that wasn’t translating all the way to where the moment of truth happened between the guest and the cast member, then I was failing.
You have to look at that from a logical perspective and get it kind of remember that. And then when you get in those tough situations, you have to fall back and go look, trust the system, trust that your people know what they’re doing and trust that you’ve given them enough feedback to, they’ll make the right decisions along the way because it’s physically and mentally impossible to get involved in every decision.
If you try to do that, you start to sort of emit this feeling. You don’t trust your people, you don’t think they can do their job. They start to doubt themselves, and it’s just sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy that things go south. So I think you need to get out there and challenge your people constantly, but also challenge ’em, but let ’em know you care about ’em and that you really support them and you want them to grow and you want them to make decisions. When they make a mistake, you’re going to have a conversation with them, but it’s not going to be the end of the world.
And you’re going to say, look, you make a lot of great decisions. This is one bad decision. Learn from it, move on and let’s move on. And I think a lot of times we don’t give people the benefit of the doubt, and we focus a lot on the one decision out of 99, they make that wasn’t the right one, and we forget to congratulate them on all the great stuff they’re doing constantly that builds their confidence and builds their ability to get better.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, that’s a great point, especially just given when you’re working at an organization like Disney, that’s just so complicated. Well, I want to make sure I asked you about some of the stories that you ended up putting in the book from your time at Disney just given the focus of the podcast. But I know you mentioned up front just that you didn’t remember as many as you might’ve thought. But ultimately when you had time to kind of think it over and come up with them, what kind of led to the ones you ended up picking? Was that a challenge and what made you choose the examples you had?
Dan Cockerell: Well, I think the main point was I wanted the stories to associate with the concept of that chapter so it aligned nicely. So for example, if I’m talking about collaboration, I wanted to make sure it was something, a situation where I really had to rely on lots of different people and when I could also match it, I wanted to be entertaining and interesting because those were the moments that people, like I said, they’ll remember those stories. The one that, it’s a pretty simple example, but the one about Starbucks, the Main Street Bakery, and the fact that I’m a coffee guy and I’d see those poor moms or dads just want to stop and get their black coffee and the family’s like, no, we got to get to Space Mountain. And I’m like, there must be a way.
There must be a way that we can get these people their coffee who don’t want the fancy frappuccino half calf with whipped cream. And so we came up with the idea for an express lane for simple coffee orders. So I wanted to, once again, I just wanted to show, get the stories that were going to be the most practical and candidly the most memorable I guess. So people could, because like I said, people don’t remember concepts necessarily, but they do remember stories and that was important and hopefully working in the Disney twist to them.
Dan Heaton: Definitely. And as someone who has had my share of coffee in the parks, anything like that is always a plus. So I appreciate that story for sure. I wanted to ask you too about, you referenced something that theme park fans have heard about for years, which is the Monsters, Inc. doors coaster at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and you referenced it under the context of the needs assessments and whether it really fit in the park. But I’d love to hear a little bit from you about that story and one reason why it may not have ultimately happened.
Dan Cockerell: For years and years. I always hear people talk about strategy. What’s the strategy? Are you a good strategic thinker? But what I’ve found personally is out of context, that word doesn’t mean anything to me. That can mean lots of different things. So in the book, I wanted to put an example of here’s how a strategy can work well. So the idea with the needs assessment in the parks, every year we would have lots of different departments, whether it be marketing, finance, operations, food and beverage. Everyone who had a point of view on each of the parks would kind of put their assessment.
If it was up to me and I was running this business tomorrow, here’s where I would invest my money. And we’d put that together and it would become of the operating guide for the park. So instead of, as I talk about the “Wild West” days back in the eighties and nineties, back then, if a vice president was really big on a certain project could sell it, we would build it, but it didn’t necessarily, there wasn’t a lot of strategy.
There wasn’t a lot of holistic thinking about why are we building this? Because really when you build stuff like that, you’re not building it for the people who are building it. You’re building it for your consumers. And so the needs assessment got everyone on the same page. It was very helpful because when the door coaster idea came, and John Lasseter, who was our chief creative officer of the company at the time, he was a super creative guy as everyone knows, running Pixar.
And he had this idea for this door coaster. When he went to his people, they’re all like, well, heck yeah, let’s build this thing. And it’s hard to say no to the chief creative officer, but I didn’t have to say no to him. I just had to present the needs assessment that we had all agreed upon the year before. And I said, I just want to remind everybody, we don’t need a coaster at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
We need more family attractions. Right now we only have Toy Story Mania and the Great Movie Ride, which are attractions. And a lot of kids aren’t really that excited about John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart, and we have shows, and then all the other attractions we have are height 44, 48 inches and families can’t ride together. So I just want to remind everyone that’s what we all agreed we’re going to build. If we’re going to build anything, we need more family attractions. We don’t need more thrill attractions.
And for that team, it was interesting, think it was the first time they ever heard that because they were so excited about the door coaster, but at the end of the day, they agreed, they said, you’re right. If we build this thing, it’s not going to help the park out anymore. We’re not going to get more families to visit, which we’re trying to get happen. So that’s the value of having a strategy, make sure you don’t get, you’re always going to have people’s personal opinions, but you want a good objective way to think about how you’re adding value to your business. And that’s what the needs assessment did.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, because I could think of it just as a fan and I’m like, oh, that would be amazing, but I’m not the same. Just me. Or even someone that loves coasters or whatever, is not every person that goes in the park and can’t just, I mean, we’ve seen that with some, not to pick on in particular, but some regional amusement parks that might just build coasters, which is great, but then you’re missing some of the other elements. So I just love someone in general just with the needs assessment idea.
It’s like the evidence makes sense, but when you’re working at such a large company like Disney and you have so many different competing interests or people that want to get a new restaurant or get a new ad capacity or whatever, how do you balance that out? Because how do you end up, I could see a situation where nothing gets built because everything basically doesn’t totally fit what you need.
Dan Cockerell: Yeah, it is not a linear process. I’ll tell you that. Someone described the process of this as funnels. You take all the data you have and you pour into a funnel, and then over a year you have meetings about it and you talk about what the park needs, and you put together financial, there’s a return on investment that you have to reach because the company only has a limited amount of capital to spend, and they’re expected to get a certain return on investment of every investment they make. But the problem is sometimes those return on investments, it’s not a pure calculation.
I could tell you if I built a restaurant, how many people are going to come to that restaurant and what the profitability would be. But when I build an attraction, you’re not necessarily going to raise the price. And so then you start to have to do some guesstimating who was not going to come to the park that would’ve been coming otherwise, because we call that cannibalization.
If I build something and no new people come, then I really, I’ve improved the experience, but I haven’t gotten any more tickets sold. So how does that work? And it goes into another funnel and another funnel, and eventually something pops out the other side that says, all right, this year we’re going to go for a restaurant, we’re going to go for a merchandise location, or we’re going to go for an attraction.
And you tell a story, and that story is told over and over again until everyone starts to believe in what the best investment’s going to be. Then we make that investment, and then a year later we do what we call the post-mortem assessment, and we look at what we originally assumed and then we see if that came to life, okay, you said this restaurant was going to be 85% full and your average check was going to be $22.
Did you actually deliver that? And then we go back and see if we did, if we didn’t, why didn’t we deliver it and how do we use that information to make the next investment? On one hand, it’s very complicated. On the other hand, it’s a very simple process, but your point, there’s a lot of hands, there’s a lot of chefs in the kitchen. And so over time, there’s sort of a dance that happens to get everyone, because even when the needs assessment says clearly what you want, you can’t even build everything there. And so that’s where the local vice president starts to kind of tell the story about the park and how it’s going to get better over time with whatever investment they’re making.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, in the book you cite what I think is a great example of Pandora at the Animal Kingdom where that park, which I think is a beautiful park, but that land has really changed what that park is in a lot of ways, in a good way. I think that to me is an example of where the needs really were met and probably totally exceeded by what ended up happening, at least. I don’t know about the money, but at least from the guest experience and from what there is to do there.
Dan Cockerell: Yeah, needs assessment. If you looked at Animal Kingdom, the needs assessment said, we need to turn this into a full-day park. It was considered maybe a half day, a three quarters day park. It needed something else. And Pandora was the concept. Every one of these projects has lots of different concepts, but that was the one that was deemed, I think there’s four more Avatar movies coming out that will be coming out over the next few years. So at the time there was only one movie, but in the future, people are going to be really happy with that land. It’s going to come into relevancy again as each of the films are released. So there’s another strategy. How did these lands fit with all the other stuff we’re doing within the company?
Dan Heaton: Well, another thing I would ask too, you referenced in the book just how unpredictable your job was. Like you mentioned earlier in this interview where you would come home and have six stories that were just insane things happening. So I’m just curious, nothing scandalous or anything, but what are some just crazy type of examples of what things you might deal with that you never would’ve expected when you woke up in the morning?
Dan Cockerell: Yeah, sure. Gosh, that could be a whole another podcast. When I was working at Disneyland Paris, I was a frontline manager in guest relations. One of the things we did was VIP tours and I got a call one morning early, I was closing that night, but I got a call early and they told me that a VIP was coming and could I come in? And so my wife and I actually, I’m not sure if we were married at the time, but it was the two of us and her friend Alessandra, who’s Italian, and the three of us shared this house.
So I always used to have fun. I said, who is it? Who’s coming? I’m like, sorry, it’s confidential. I can’t tell anybody. And they just were so mad at me. So I showed up in the park and I drove, and it was the president at the time of Walt Disney World, and Michael Douglas was visiting and he wanted to see Frontierland because Frontierland at Disneyland Paris is really cool.
And so we took him back there before the park opened and he saw the land and we got back to the hotel, and I got home that night. I was telling Valerie and Alessandra the story, I said, all right, I can tell you now. They’re like, we already heard it was Michael Douglas. I said, well, you didn’t hear the whole story. They said, well, what’s the whole story? I said, well, he didn’t say anything to me.
We did the tour. I drove him back and he got out of the car and he walked past the window and he got about six feet from the car and he turned around and he came back and I lowered the window and he said, Hey, I’m Michael Douglas. I said, hi, I’m Dan Cockerell. And he said, have you ever thought about being in the movie business? And I said, no.
They said, no way. That didn’t happen. I said, everything I said happened except the last part. I never talked to him. So that, anyway, that was a fun day. Resorts was a crazy world back when, I think you remember after 9/11, we had all that stuff with the anthrax scares. So people were really nervous about powdered. We got rid of all the powdered sugar in the parks because people, someone was mailing anthrax to congresspeople.
So at the All-Star Hotel, I was a general manager there, we got a report that a guest had checked into a room and in the drawer in one of the chest of drawers was a baggie of white powder. And so they left the room and then of course there’s a lacrosse team upstairs and they see these guys in moon suits showing up. So they call their parents. Now the parents call Channel Nine because who else are you going to call?
Also, there’s a helicopter at the hotel, and this all happened in the space of like 45 minutes. And the local sheriff’s department didn’t have the right testing material, but someone knew the FBI who was having a convention in Tampa. So they drove over in these unmarked SUVs and they had cooler moon suits, and they went into the room and they came back out and they came back 15 minutes later and said, we tested it’s Tide detergent.
I said, you mean it’s detergent? They said, no, it’s Tide. We have a computer that can identify 500,000 different materials. It’s Tied. We were within 30 minutes of evacuating the hotel, a major news, national news story, and we missed that just by 30 minutes. We got lucky ; we had another group of cheerleaders that were staying at the hotel, and I got a call one morning from my boss that a helicopter just landed in the parking lot at the All-Star, and he was a very dry sense of humor.
He says, can you check that out and let me know? I’m like, yes, I can. So it turns out one of the cheerleaders were staying in the room, four of them were in there. One of the cheerleaders woke up in the morning and looked on the floor and there was a guy sleeping there. The door was locked, and they didn’t know how it got in. She called 911, the police showed up, the SWAT team showed up, and it turns out she had twisted her ankle and competition and they gave her a little bit of a heavy painkiller, and she was hallucinating. It was a duffel bag.
So once again, things ramp up pretty fast at Disney and you have to figure out what’s really going on. And one of my favorite ones I didn’t handle, but we got the report that a lady showed up with a stroller at the Animal Kingdom. I dunno if I put that in the book. And there was sort of a blanket over the stroller and the cast member, I dunno if the blanket fell off or they heard something, opened it, and in the stroller were three monkeys dressed up like clowns. The lady claimed they were her comfort animals. And we said, I’m sorry, the monkeys can’t come in. So she left. But yeah, I mean every day, this is probably every day the park’s open, you can come up with a story that’s just crazier than the next,
Dan Heaton: Well, yeah, with that many people staying at the resorts or going to the parks even just a few every day. My goodness. Those are all great. Thank you, Dan, for those. I’m going to schedule another podcast just for us to talk through crazy stories. It’s on the calendar. Alright, well I want to ask one more thing, which is you reference in terms of your stories at Disney, you reference My Magic Plus and of course MagicBands, which now have become such a part of just Walt Disney World, but at the time were very new.
I’m curious just as that, as an example, I mean you talk about how you balance the needs of guests, the cast, and making something work because with any that or Magical Express or whatnot, is there a way to do that where you can actually have everyone have a good experience? And if so, how do you do that with something like the MagicBands?
Dan Cockerell: Yeah, there’s something we talk about at Disney, the three-legged stool. And to run a great business, you have to make sure that your employees have a great experience. You have to make sure that your customers, your guests have a great experience and you have to make sure you’re making money. And at Disney, we have to do all three. I put some of this in the book was when you’re managing change like that, what we’ve learned over time is first of all, be very clear with people why you’re doing it.
Because if you don’t explain the why, people just, they don’t connect all the dots. And they may say, well, why would you mess with Walt Disney what he was doing? Why would you change it? We had to be very clear and communicate to everyone. We are not changing Walt Disney’s vision. In fact, we’re just using technology to make it better.
But safety, courtesy, show, and efficiency are still our standards. We are still here to make sure people have the best vacation possible. We are still here to make emotional connections with them, and we just want to provide more tools to make you better at your jobs and make sure the guest has a better vacation. So that’s a big one. Another thing we’ve learned is get people involved, as many people involved as soon as possible in these projects.
Because what I see a lot of companies do, the management team, the executive team sits in a boardroom for a year, comes up with this great plan, they come out on one day and they say, ta-da, here’s what we’re doing. Everyone doesn’t know why they’re doing it. They’ve never heard of it. They try to roll it out. They’re unsuccessful because people don’t have skin in the game.
They haven’t been involved in the conversation, they haven’t helped design it. They haven’t been able to give input. And so when you don’t have ownership of something, it’s easy to not support it. But if you get people involved upfront and you tell ’em you want their opinion and you want to hear their point of view and talk about how things are going to change and get them involved, people are much more likely to sustain it and help out when it’s not going right because they believe in it because people like to be involved in things.
That was a huge thing we learned over time. So we were very focused on getting feedback from our cast members constantly, does this work? Does this work well? Does this not work? What is the guest saying? And we made lots of changes along the way because the cast members said, look, this is too complicated.
You have to simplify this. This doesn’t work in the field. Also, the guests, do you like this? Is this better or not? There’s some things we put in place sometimes we think is going to make the guests experience better and it actually is worse. And the only person who can tell us that is the guests, the ones who are judging their experience. It’s not up to us to explain why they’re wrong. We just got to listen to them and make it right. And then lastly, as you said, it’s got to work.
These big technology projects are known for not working and not working properly and failing because they’re so complicated. And so during the whole project, we always thought to ourselves, if this system goes down, how are we going to keep operating? We can’t be captives of a technology system. And so we came up with manual processes, we came up with overrides, we came up with a system I like to call that was called Auto Green.
So if the system wasn’t working, any RFID against a touchpoint would be green. No matter what you had, you could put anything against it and guess wouldn’t know that, but it got us through two or three hours of downtime. And sometimes you just fake it and it’s like no one even knew you were down. So you have to think more broadly. I think we like to make things complicated. Making things simple is hard because things have to be designed elegantly to be able to keep them simple. It’s easy to make things complicated, and we try to keep it as simple as we could with a pretty high volume, robust technology system, but we wanted it to look like it was seamless and that was the goal.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, totally. And you think about just for me personally, I wouldn’t even consider the fact that with Auto Green, that I would just follow the numbers, the times I’m supposed to show up and do it. And that’s probably how most people are. Nobody’s just going to go randomly testing it out to see if it’s that way.
Dan Cockerell: Exactly.
Dan Heaton: So it’s kind of brilliantly simple, I will say. All right. Well, I want to ask about a flip side of this, which is how things are currently. I mean, you think you mentioned too, I know we talked the last time and in your book the challenge is following 9/11 and then the book you referenced in 2009 for the travel industry in theme parks. Well, right now we are in the middle of a pandemic with Covid, and I know you don’t work at Disney, but I’m curious just from your past experiences with 9/11 and others, I mean, what did you learn there that you think might be valuable for Disney or other companies when they’re dealing with something unforeseen like a pandemic?
Dan Cockerell: I think it’s interesting. I would say that all the leadership principles that work during when there’s not a pandemic are the same principles during a pandemic. You just have to even be better at them supporting your employees. That’s always important during a pandemic, when people are furloughed, that’s 10 times more important because people are, they’re on unemployment, but they’re furloughed. They’re trying to figure out if they’re going to have a job.
Again, there’s a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety. And so during those times, and I found this during 9/11, you got to communicate with your people regularly and keep in touch with them and talk to them. And it doesn’t mean you have all the answers, but it means that you’re willing to go ahead and engage with them and find out how they’re doing and make sure they know you’re thinking about them, the guests, people’s perceptions.
There’s all kinds of whatever county or state you go in the United States, there’s a different point of view on the pandemic. Some states are like, no masks. Don’t worry about it. Others are like, if don’t have your mask on, you’ll be fine. Everyone’s different. And so I think what Disney has always done well and has to continue to do is what are our guests perceptions of their safety and what are their perceptions of the value of coming down there?
I guarantee you, there’s lots of research going on right now to find out what people’s opinions are, and I’m sure they’re finding, there’s a lot of guests that are saying, until there’s a vaccine, and I’m a hundred percent sure I’m not going to get this, I’m not coming. And then of course, there’s another population we’re seeing, the younger people are like, I don’t want to get it, but I’m seeing in the news that if I get it, I’ve a pretty good chance of being fine.
So they’re a little more open to it. And then obviously you have the financial decisions because after all is said and done, Disney’s a financially held company and they have to deliver. I think people need to have long-term confidence that they’re going to do well. Bob Iger, he’s always been a big risk taker, and while he was spinning up Disney Plus, I don’t think he was thinking of it, it’s going to help us get through a pandemic, but it’s been a stroke of genius that we had that revenue stream during this downtime.
But clearly there’s a lot of financial pieces the company’s going to have to think about, just like many other companies, when the government, I know they’re doing checks and they’re helping with stimulus packages, but they’re never going to be able to give people enough money to keep everything together forever. So I think there’s going to be some tough, a lot of companies are going to have to make tough economic decisions moving forward, and I’m assuming that’ll be maybe over the next few months, the election’s coming up, the lot’s going to change there.
And then 2021, people’s I think point of view is going to change on what risks they’re willing to take. So there’s a lot of moving parts here, but at the end of the day, it comes down to take care of your employees, listen to your customers about what their perceptions are, and be smart about how you’re running your business. Because if you’re not running it in a smart way, you may not have a business to run when all is said and done.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I think that’s a great answer just to show how many different elements there are right now going on, not just with Disney, but with all companies. Well, I want to close this out. Just ask about a few things that I know you’ve been doing beyond the book. One is you’ve been recording now the Come Rain or Shine podcast with Jody Mayberry for a few years, and you’ve actually passed a hundred episodes, which is really impressive. So I’d just love to know how the show’s evolved and what do you enjoy about doing it?
Dan Cockerell: It’s funny, Jody and I, we seldom have a topic when we get on our Zoom call, we’ll get on and he’ll say, what do you got? I’m like, well, I’m not sure. I had one idea. What do you have? And he says, well, we got an e-mail from the listener and we’ll chat for a couple minutes until we land on a topic. And then we just go, we hit record and I start talking. He’s really good at in the moment asking questions and we have no script. So that’s what I like about it, and I think that’s the feedback we’ve gotten from a lot of people is it’s clearly scripted.
We are just talking from our own knowledge and our hearts about things. More recently, I’ve started to have some guests on the show. For many months, when we first started it, I didn’t have guests, and I’m starting to be really interested to hear people’s stories. So if I find someone that I think has an interesting angle to add or maybe a new book coming out or another point of view, I’ve been adding guests along the way and I get to play the Jody role. And that’s been fun. It’s fun to interview people and lead those conversations.
Dan Heaton: Definitely. And I think it allows you to still input your own ideas, but also to expand the topics. You’ve got different perspectives. So, I think as someone who hosts a show where I interview people, I think it’s a great approach.
Dan Cockerell: Yeah, it’s fun.
Dan Heaton: Okay, great. Well, basically, I just wanted to ask you too, now you’ve published your book, you’re doing your business, which speaking and doing so many other things, I mean, what’s next for you or what are you currently working on right now?
Dan Cockerell: Yeah. Well, on a personal note, we just sold our house. So we are in the process of packing and decluttering and minimizing, getting rid of a lot of stuff. We’re going to sell our house in Orlando. And then early in the new year, we’re going to move to Colorado. We’re going to rent something in the Boulder area, and once we get out there, we’ll decide if we want to buy or rent or what we’re going to do. So we are nomads and at least we’ll be homeless for the next three months.
As I told someone today, I said the 52% of kids in the United States and myself are all living with our parents. So I’m moving back in with my parents and my wife’s going to go visit her mom in France for six weeks. So Tristan and I, my son and I are going to move in with my parents and be there and hopefully be taken care of. And then Valerie and I, we just finished creating an undergrad management course. We’ve been talking to a lot of people about the whole remote teaching thing, and we came up with a turnkey 13-week course with reading quizzes and a midterm exam, a final exam, case studies.
I’ve done a lot of videos for the course, and we’re trying to maybe disrupt education a little bit and give some universities a different way to teach. And the textbook is, How’s the Culture in your Kingdom. And then we’re looking forward to hopefully as things start to loosen up and maybe a vaccine comes start traveling again. Valerie and I have done some work in Croatia. We were in Peru in February working for a training company, and that’s some of the best experiences we have working internationally with these companies and helping ’em think about leadership and customer service.
Dan Heaton: Well, yeah, that sounds excellent. And I know I’ve seen some videos where you’re giving speeches around the world and it seems like it’s a really good fit. So last question, just if people want to pick up a copy of your book or follow anything you’re doing, where should they go online?
Dan Cockerell: So you can go to cockerellconsulting.com. Everything we do is there. My wife built the site and it’s beautiful. My book’s on Amazon or wherever you buy books, and you can find it on Kindle and paperback, and the audio should be coming out hopefully by the end of the September. We’ve recorded it. I did the introduction to the book and the intro to each chapter, and then Jody did all the reading of all the chapters. So the audio version hopefully should be hitting in the next few weeks. And then Come Rain or Shine is on iTunes, and I still send out my article of the week, which is free every Friday morning, and you can sign up there on cockerellconsulting.com.
Dan Heaton: Well, awesome. Well, Dan, I thought the book was great, and this has been really fun to talk with you. So thanks for coming back on the podcast.
Dan Cockerell: Well, thanks for having me, and I’ll see you. Maybe I’ll talk again in six, 12 months from now.
Dan Heaton: If you like this episode and want to hear Dan’s story, there’s more on Episode 59 of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. You can find that and interviews with a lot more people that have worked behind the scenes at tomorrowsociety.com/podcasts with an s at the end. Be safe out there. I will talk to you again very soon.
Leave a Reply