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.