Modernizing Mickey: Disney's Risky Makeover of The Mouse
(A personal note: After more than 1,000 blog posts on BNET, this is my swan song. Thanks to all of you dear readers who taught me much more than I gave to you!)
When Mickey Mouse debuted in "Steamboat Willie" 1928, the character was puckish, irreverent -- he was even mean to animals! But when Mickey became wildly popular, Walt Disney toned him down. He became less controversial, more white bread.
And, well, boring.
Just ask current Disney CEO Bob Iger. "Over time, Mickey became more of an entertainer, a host, a corporate symbol -- and less interesting," Iger tells Harvard Business Review Editor-in-Chief Adi Ignatius in a recent interview. "We've concluded that we need to return Mickey to what he originally was."
Whoa there, Bob. Makeover the Mouse? This isn't just slapping a new dress and hair style on the torch lady who introduces films for Columbia Pictures. Mickey is a corporate icon whose visage brings in $5 billion in annual merchandise sales.
Iger hints in the interview that the biggest opposition to Mickey 3.0, who made his debut recently in the video game Epic Mickey, has come not from customers, but from staffers.
"Some people say, 'Can't touch that.' Well, Walt did. Walt innovated constantly. There are people who believe you should only do things 'the way Walt did.' That's kind of silly. Walt died in 1966. If we completely stuck to his script, we would probably look more like the 1960s than like this decade."
This tug-of-war against old versus new is repeated often in the hallways of the world's longest-lived brands. IBM, National Geographic, and Coca-Cola all recognized a changing world and remade themselves in it. Some big brands were not so prescient. Just ask former Kodak CEO George Fisher, who foresaw how his company could lead the digital photography revolution but failed to ween the troops quickly enough off of its film fix.
How does a CEO push a long-tenured organization in a new direction? I think it's the toughest job in business management. First, the leader must engage the company is a collective conversation about the future, emerging with a clear vision to get there. Then it's grassroots politics, selling the new direction to key stakeholders, including employees, partners, and customers. Finally, the executive team has to make the tough calls about which employees are a right fit for the new company, and which have to be shown the door.
If it all sounds a bit ruthless, well it is. There is no room for sentiment. Here is how Iger sums it up: "You can't allow tradition to get in the way of innovation. There's a need to respect the past, but it's a mistake to revere your past."
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