Those Darn Managers

[hobie16]

From MiceAge

Why?

The biggest story for Disneyland aficionados this summer is clearly Matt Ouimet's sudden resignation and his replacement Ed Grier coming over from Tokyo. Regular readers will of course remember eight months ago when rumors were rampant that Matt Ouimet was about to move back to Florida to take the Walt Disney World presidency vacated by Al Weiss. That spot ultimately didn't pan out for Ouimet, and after wrangling with big boss Jay Rasulo for much of the winter and spring, Ouimet's job hunt began. Ouimet's job at Starwood is a big jump up the corporate totem pole for him, and not only does he get to make up a new job from scratch, he's also reportedly enjoying an extremely healthy bump in salary and perks with the move.

Rumors have been swirling through Team Disney Anaheim (TDA) as to why Ouimet left Disney, and after sifting through them all it appears that they fall into a few main categories. First, the new global structure Jay Rasulo set up for Disney Parks & Resorts in 2005 has emasculated the local presidents in Anaheim, Orlando, Hong Kong and Paris. Secondly, Matt grew increasingly frustrated with the decisions coming down from Jay Rasulo about the direction this new Parks & Resorts mega-department was heading in.

There was also frustration from Matt with his inability to get the customer service level up in Anaheim, and the fact that the frighteningly high turnover rate of the hourly Cast Members continues to be made worse by a Human Resources department that seems to be hopelessly out of touch with the work environment those hourly CM's put up with. Or, more importantly, the work environment the CM's don't put up with as they leave Disneyland usually within a couple months of hiring in.

Lastly, there are the nagging rumors about Orange County's infamous look-at-me lifestyle not being appreciated by Matt, his wife, or his teenage children. They'll be keeping their mid-range home in pricey Coto de Caza as an investment property, but since Mrs. Ouimet never clicked with the Botox-ed desperate housewives in the neighborhood and the Ouimet kids don't surf or party like the locals, they won't mind one bit the move back to their less trendy, new East Coast neighborhood.

As for the first two rumors behind Ouimet's departure, those are issues that Matt may have wisely escaped but that us Disneyland fans will be living with for at least the next few years, or until someone higher up the food chain takes the wind out of Rasulo's sails. The new corporate structure Rasulo has created was sold to the Burbank bosses, namely Bob Iger, as a way to streamline the operation and bring consistency to the Disney theme park brand while allowing for a minimal amount of regional flavor to exist at each property. But what it increasingly appears to be doing is to create a confusing web of Executive Vice Presidents and Senior Vice Presidents who then hijack a Vice President or two away from the local Presidents running each property.

Confused? So are a lot of people at Disney theme park properties around the world. When it comes to departments like Marketing, Security, Human Resources or Safety, there are Senior Vice Presidents reporting directly to Jay Rasulo who effectively outrank the President of a local property in Anaheim or Paris or Orlando. In department after department, power has effectively been drained from each local property, and moved over to Rasulo's corporate office. What president wouldn't be frustrated at having major decisions taken over by another group of lower ranking executives who effectively do an end run around you?

The decisions and mandates pouring out of Rasulo's new power base are of more immediate concern, particularly the decision to cram the Year of a Million Dreams campaign, under the broader and even less meaningful global tagline Where Dreams Come True. That Rasulo project was about the last straw for Ouimet. We'll get to some of the less than impressive details of the Disneyland offerings for Year of a Million Dreams in a bit, but Matt (and quite a few other TDA execs) was rumored to be horrified at the slapdash and ridiculously expensive way Jay Rasulo and Michael Mendenhall threw the Million Dreams campaign together at literally the last second. The end result was that Ouimet after a huge success with the 50th anniversary put himself on the market, snagged a terrific new job too good to pass up, and Disneyland just lost a man widely considered to be the best executive leader it had seen in decades.

It was quite telling that when the news was released last week that Ouimet would be leaving not only Disneyland, but the Company, the reaction amongst both the hourly Cast Members out in the park and the salaried management in Anaheim offices was universal sadness and dismay. Compared to the last time Disneyland saw a sudden executive shake-up, and there was actual glee and excitement from the salaried ranks, the news of Matt's departure hit everyone really hard. Matt Ouimet will be very missed, and his replacement has some very, very big shoes to fill.

Who?

And what about his replacement, Ed Grier? When the name was announced, there was a collective "Who?" heard not only by the Hortons of the world but all over Anaheim too. Grier is a native Southerner, a long time Walt Disney World employee unknown to Californians, and for the past two years he's been hiding out in the mysterious wilderness of Tokyo. For the first few days, the biggest topic of conversation in the halls of Team Disney Anaheim (TDA) and out in the Parks, spoken in hushed tones and overly polite terms of course, was that Mr. Grier was African-American. It's no secret that in a region of the country where whites now make up a minority of the population, once you get above the lower management level at Disneyland the faces are still almost exclusively white and predominantly male. But once the fact that Ed Grier is black was duly noted, the topic of conversation turned to "What kind of a guy is he?" and "Why was he chosen?"

There aren't a lot of people that know much about Grier in Anaheim, but he has a more widely recognized name in Orlando and Burbank, and this is what we've been able to piece together so far. Grier is widely acknowledged to be a very nice guy and quite personable, although you can certainly argue that when you get to that level on the totem pole everyone can put on a good game face for the troops. When he worked in Walt Disney World (WDW) he was thought of as more of a numbers guy, but was usually able to equate the spreadsheets and figures he's most comfortable with into actual people and products out in the parks. His short stint, just under two years, in Tokyo was set in motion by Rasulo to try and get the Oriental Land Company (OLC) to begin thinking longer term about their Tokyo complex. And it appears that Grier succeeded at that assignment.

Tokyo Disney Resort is most similarly sized to the Anaheim property, with two parks, two Disney hotels, and an entertainment mall situated between the parks. During Grier's tenure there, he got OLC to approve the construction of a lavish new Disneyland Hotel located near the parks main entrance, fast tracked several new E Ticket attractions currently in the pipeline for both DisneySea and Tokyo Disneyland, and began initial planning on a third massive theme park to be built on landfill adjacent to the DisneySea park. Prior to Grier's arrival in Tokyo, the OLC owners were happy to continue their business model for the property that was still stuck in the early 1980's, with Tokyo Disneyland ringed by a half dozen huge hotels operated by outside companies like Hilton and Sheraton. Meanwhile, Tokyo's Disney-branded hotel market was terribly underserved by just two modestly-sized hotels built on the other side of the property.

In addition to his hotel push with OLC, Grier worked on getting them to acknowledge that Tokyo Disneyland was aging ungracefully in spots, particularly the Tomorrowland and Fantasyland sections, and that a multi-year plan to upgrade existing attractions, while simultaneously building new ones, was needed to assure growth through the beginning of the next decade. The Japanese executives from the OLC were in Anaheim just this last week to inspect some of the concepts already added to Anaheim that Grier wanted for Tokyo; the revamped Pirates and Space Mountain were on the tour, plus the famous interactive and two-story dark rides at Disneyland that are inspiration for the expensive new Monsters Inc. dark ride going in Tokyo's Tomorrowland.

The OLC execs were also scheduled to tour the Soarin' facility and the Hyperion Theater over at DCA, two more concepts being thrown around for Tokyo expansion. While Grier was originally scheduled to join them on the tour, he begged out at the last moment as there was plenty to do with Ouimet's last few moments on property being used to quickly download Grier on where Anaheim stood on upcoming initiatives.

Grier has plenty of work ahead of him in Anaheim, much of it not unlike the feats accomplished in Tokyo. The Disney owned hotels in Anaheim have been maxed out at capacity for several years, and the workhorse Disneyland Hotel has rooms and buildings that range in age from 45 to 25 years old. There's a bit of a power struggle going on with the property now covered by surface parking lots in Anaheim, with new Disney hotels, Disney Vacation Club units and/or Downtown Disney expansion all fighting for space, funds and resources in future fiscal years. DCA is also one of the most troubled parks in Disney's history, although the very shaky start for Hong Kong Disneyland is now getting almost as much attention from Burbank. But there's a multi-year rescue plan being formulated for DCA, and the original piecemeal Placemaking projects are being beefed up and forced into a more cohesive package for the end of the decade. So for Rasulo, Grier with his successful work in Tokyo on similar projects and problems, was the easy choice to replace Ouimet at this stage in the game.

Just in the last few days the scuttlebutt in TDA has been focused on who, if anyone, Grier will replace on the executive team. You'll remember the literal bloodbath that swept through TDA within 30 days of Cynthia Harriss' departure. But its unknown who Grier would bring to TDA, and who Ouimet might want to lure away to Starwood. It's been noted that Senior Vice President Greg Emmer has secured a sterling reputation when it comes to the Operations side of the house. The ridiculously high turnover rate, now exceeding 80% per year in some departments, could mean a rethink of the Human Resources strategy. Previously the focus has been on cheap fixes like cramming the corny "Disney Difference" campaign down everyone's throat, and if an 80% turnover rate is the end result of that campaign then it couldn't have been that good of an idea in the first place. The top guy in charge of the Anaheim hotels, Senior VP Tony Bruno, is also seen as having some job security after the successful expansion and re-branding of existing properties Disneyland went through a few years ago. There is another department that could be area for major changes though, especially after the embarrassing Lindsay Lohan mess they created.

As of this morning, Matt Ouimet is gone and Ed Grier still has yet to make a formal appearance in Anaheim or even send out an e-mail to the troops. But there are already rumors that there may be a TDA shakeup ahead this fall.

[darph nader]

I would to be a fly on the wall in 'some' peoples offices. "Lets see how I/WE can screw everybody we can, give ourselves a nice FAT bonus, and keep the 'sheep' happy.

This b.s.,no,BULLSHIT,reminds me of the movie Wall Street, "Greed is good".
Granted i'm just a lowly grunt,but to me Execs,Politicians,and mushroom farmers are all the same, "Keep them in dark,and feed them shit". :mad:

[hobie16]

This b.s.,no,BULLSHIT,reminds me of the movie Wall Street, "Greed is good". Granted i'm just a lowly grunt,but to me Execs,Politicians,and mushroom farmers are all the same, "Keep them in dark,and feed them shit". :mad:

I always liked, "Working here is like peeing your pants in a dark blue suit. It gives you a warm feeling but no one notices."

[felinefan]

Hmmmm.... sounds alot like Knott's.

[darph nader]

I always liked, "Working here is like peeing your pants in a dark blue suit. It gives you a warm feeling but no one notices."

All I can say is :bugeyes: