Disney Institute

Our guest today is Simon T. Bailey.

He is a researcher, bestselling author, former Disney Institute sales director, and the creator of Hope Powered Leadership.

Simon, welcome to our podcast.

Thank you so much.

And be happy about it.

And this was old data from when we did work with the Disney Institute.

So it's probably six years old.

But at that time.

Certainly hosting guests in the park for many decades.

And in the early years, that included being part of the Disney Institute where I was handling VIP tours.

VIP in the sense of corporate tours.

Leaders, C-suite executives, CEOs and so forth who wanted to understand best in business practices at Disney.

Real quick,

real quick, real quick, because I want to hopefully get Wade to call in because we have a question about the Institute or anybody else can call in.

But I want to ask you about Riley because Riley's not going to be at Run Disney this season.

I know.

Bye.

All right, 475-847-173.

Maybe Wade could call in to answer that question about the Disney Institute for one of our other callers was asking in the chat.

You want to call in about Run Disney? You can do that.

So stay tuned for that.

We also get a question about the Disney Institute.

So Pam talks about that and how you might be able to sway your employer into making this possible to get down to Walt Disney World for some professional development.

We also talk Candlelight Processional.

So we'll skip that one, but we have one live here in the chat.

So we'll get to this one from Natalie.

Hey, Mike and Pam, jumping on here really quick to see if either of you can share information about the Disney Institute.

What is it? Who's it for? Could it be a good professional development opportunity for someone in education? So Pam, do you know anything about how that happens? Cause I know our good friend Wade up in Nebraska, he called in a couple months ago and talked about that.

[laughs] Oh, so good.

No, it, it's [laughs] but you know, I, I, uh, I've actually looked at like, "Oh boy, if I buy this pass, then do I do..." You know, I can do like a Disney Institute course.

I did one last year with my team.

They get so much each year to spend.

We added a new feature this time where just at random spots, I would pick someone and say, "Okay, ask Lee a question not based on your problem that you're here for." That was wonderful.

We had two guest speakers, Jeff Knoll from the Disney Institute, Bob Weis from...

Well, he president of Walt Disney Imagineering.

And something I noticed this time, Lee, you may have noticed this too, perhaps more than any other time, people that brought up their challenge after seeing the speakers would reference something they learned from Jeff or from Bob.

Whose responsibility is it, the brand ultimately, like the experience? Is it senior level, lower level, everybody? Like how does that work, and what's your point of view?

So I just went through the Disney customer experience training at the Disney Institute, is what they call it.

And one thing that really stood out to me is they asked the room how many people they thought were on their cleaning staff, and people were throwing out, you know, thousand people, two thousand people, and the answer was every single teammate.

So every single level, uh, everybody's responsible for keeping their parks clean.

And, and so Imagineering i- is an expensive thing, and so they didn't have Imagineering work on the original version of Disney California, uh, A- Adventure.

Um, uh, uh, they had the Disney Development, uh, uh, Company, uh, work on that, who, who had built other things, you know, like the Disney Institute out here and all of that.

Mm.

And, uh, so that's one of the reasons it didn't quite work, and then also the fact that, you know, people live in California.

Mm-hmm

... uh, that I sailed on.

Uh, in fact, I sailed on it in 1998 because, um, I was an animation instructor at the Disney Institute, and so they pulled some of us out, uh, periodically to go on the ship, uh, you know, to, uh, to do classes about-

Mm-hmm