Change Agent - Issue 32

After the death of Walt Disney the man, something happened to Walt Disney the company. You see, Walt Disney was a three-time rifter. He was one of the few people who have successfully managed to find a rift in the continuum of life, to bet everything on it, and to make a profit by doing so. And he did it three times.

What's a rift? It's a big tear in the fabric of the rules that we live by. It's a fundamental change in the game, one that creates a bunch of new losers -- and a handful of new winners.

Most people who build important businesses build them on a rift, usually one that they find by accident, and usually only once. Sometimes, after they've succeeded once, they fool themselves into thinking that they're so gifted that everywhere they look, they can see a rift. But Disney was different: He really was rift gifted. After all, he did it three times.

First, he noticed early on that movies would change the world of entertainment. Realizing that there would soon be a huge demand for family entertainment, he pioneered the development of the animated movie, perfecting the form with "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937). The film was the beginning of a huge organization that would grow to dominate this new marketplace.

Unlike most folks who are lucky enough to catch a rift at the right moment, Disney didn't just declare himself a genius, collect his stock options, and relax. Nope. He looked for another rift -- another change in the rules that he could turn into an opportunity.

That second rift came in the form of the automobile. Disney realized that the car was going to change the way that the American family got its entertainment. He believed that a strategically located, extravagantly designed theme park could reinvent family travel. And he was right. So, beginning with California's Disneyland in 1955, he built another huge organization around this rift -- and it has dominated the theme-park industry ever since.

Once Disney was into this rift thing, he saw a third opportunity: television. Although many people regarded television simply as in-home movies, or as radio with a screen, Disney saw in it an entirely different medium. So, with properties like the Mickey Mouse Club, he set out to build a third organization, one that would produce a never-ending stream of content for this market.

A three-time winner: Someone who saw rifts and who mobilized an entire organization to take advantage of them. Someone who combined clarity of vision with tenacity of purpose. Unfortunately, since Disney's demise, his company hasn't really displayed that same rift-hungry attitude. The motto of most rifters ought to be WWWD: What Would Walt Do? I often wonder what Walt would have done with the Internet. Or with cable TV. Or with home shopping, home video, and DVD.

Another of my favorite rifters is Steve Jobs. Jobs is already much celebrated, but several of his successful rift moments are still worth a look. Here are three.

First, he realized that personal computers could serve as a tool in the home as well as in business, and he was smart enough to find the right people to build the Apple I and II. At the time, there were no headlines about how brilliant Jobs was, but he paved the way for every single desktop computer in existence today.

Jobs's second rift was actually more difficult to seize, because it wasn't an obvious rift. Realizing that the graphical user interface that was developed for the Xerox Star could permanently change the way that computers worked, Jobs took a huge risk and came up with the Mac. Most entrepreneurs and virtually every large company would have laughed at the sheer hubris of it: to get lucky once and then to risk it all on a rift as narrow as this! Of course, we know what happened with the graphical user interface.

Jobs's third rift was, in fact, reminiscent of one that Disney would have jumped on. Jobs saw that computers would forever change the way that animated movies are made. And Pixar, the production company behind "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life," was his bet on that rift. Having just taken my family to see "Toy Story 2," I can tell you that Jobs is on his way to a payoff of Disney-like proportions.

The surprising thing is that just about anyone could have seized any of those rifts and built hugely successful companies out of them. Jobs didn't know anyone in Hollywood -- and he didn't need to. His success wasn't about connections or reputation or access to capital. In fact, being part of the company that sold the Apple II actually hindered his ability to launch the Mac, because his shareholders and employees fought the idea for years. No, Jobs succeeded because, like all rifters, when he saw an opportunity, he was single-minded in his focus and in his desire to take advantage of it.