Chapter 6
Share the Spotlight
Our Space City is a distant dream. But all such dreams must begin in the minds of men. Men like the scientists, engineers and automotive designers of Ford Motor Company. I hope you enjoyed our show and your ride on The Magic Skyway in a new Ford product as much as I’ve enjoyed the Fords I have driven through the years.
Walt Disney
(speaking at the 1964–1965 World’s Fair)
In the world arena, the United States has watched its competitive advantage slip away over the past half-century or so. Where once the United States had a per capita gross national product 4 times that of Germany and 15 times that of Japan, the three are now, in broad terms, relatively equal contenders.
How did this happen? Quite simply, Japan and Germany used partnerships to propel themselves out of their weakened post-World War II states of economic disarray to become strong competitors in one industry after another. What’s more, an even bigger competitive threat is posed by the European Community, and what is this largest of world economic markets if not the product of true partnership?
If American companies are to rise to the competitive challenges that lie ahead, they too must reap the benefits of partnering. Fortunately, according to the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals, “Strategic Alliances have emerged as a distinct competency over the past decade in the management of the modern enterprise and have contributed greatly to the transformation of the modern corporation.” Admittedly, successful partnering does not come easily to most of us. As Broadway composer Charles Strouse’s lyrics proclaim, applause is what “we’re living for,” and top billing makes that applause ever so sweet. But when it comes to getting things accomplished in the business world, the savvy competitor will recognize the value of drawing on the expertise and resources of others. In fact, the wise man or woman already knows that it is a fortuitous combination of talents that most often produces the applause-winning achievement. The key is turning that knowledge into practical action.
The solution lies in examining the methods of companies that are top-flight competitors at home and abroad. The Walt Disney Company is a rich sourcebook of partnering expertise that is ours for the taking.
Partnerships Expand the Possibilities
Walt Disney certainly had his share of individual success, becoming a cultural icon around the world because of his many achievements. But even though he was blessed with creative genius, surefire entertainment instincts, and an astute commercial sense, Walt recognized early on that strong alliances were necessary to achieve what one could not achieve alone.
Were it not for his first partnership with his brother Roy, for example, Walt Disney might have remained an obscure animator and cartoonist. When the Disney Brothers Studio opened in 1923, Roy invested his entire savings of $200 in the venture, and it was Roy who took over the finances—such as they were—in those early days. This family partnership had its rocky moments, to be sure—one breach lasted years. But in the final analysis, the two brothers accomplished much more in partnership than either could have done alone. Without Roy’s assistance, Mickey, Donald, Pluto, and the host of other beloved Disney characters might well have remained nothing more than figments of Walt’s imagination.
Walt knew, too, that not only must an alliance work for both partners, but also each partner must work at forming and maintaining a successful affiliation. A partnership is, after all, an investment in the future, and just like any other investment, it must be carefully considered and skillfully managed to produce the optimum return. What’s more, you must know who your partner is and be sure he or she shares your values.
The latter lesson is one that Walt learned all too painfully in one of his first deals made outside the family orbit, a disastrous partnership with the distributor of his Oswald the Rabbit cartoons. Disney originally signed a contract with a New York distributor, Margaret Winkler. Trouble began when she married and her husband, Charles Mintz, took over her business. In a 1926 distribution deal involving Universal Pictures, Mintz persuaded the Disney brothers—whom he always referred to as “the bumpkins”—to create a new cartoon to compete with the very popular Felix the Cat. The result was the imaginative and successful Oswald series.
Mintz, however, was determined to acquire the Disney studio. When the distribution contract expired, he cut the studio’s payments by nearly a third and threatened to take over the operation. After all, according to the contract, he owned Oswald. Walt was devastated, but he had no choice other than to comply with the contract.
That contract, however, was limited solely to Oswald, and Walt was free to create new characters. In the end, the Oswald fiasco proved to be a serendipitous turn of events, because the failed partnership led to the birth of Mickey Mouse. But Walt never forgot that partnering with like-minded people is critical to the success of the relationship. One need only look at the list of highly touted mergers gone awry to understand the value of the lesson Walt learned so early in his career. Philosophical and cultural differences are frequently cited as the reason these unions fail.
Partnerships Take Many Forms
Business partnerships are entered into for a variety of reasons, of course. Some are formed to carry out a specific project, whereas others are joined on a long-term basis, like law partnerships.
One of Walt Disney’s first remunerative partnerships was with a small New York stationery firm. He signed a contract giving the firm the rights to sell schoolchildren’s writing pads with a portrait of Mickey Mouse printed on them. The firm paid a mere $300 for the rights, but it was 1929 and Disney was broke and eager for every nickel he could get. “As usual, Roy and I needed the money,” he said later.
Although on its face the deal was a small one, it opened Disney’s eyes to the possibilities of making money through ancillary uses of his creative product. He never overlooked an opportunity to do so from then on, and licensing arrangements became central to his management philosophy. A couple of years later, he licensed the sale of Mickey Mouse watches, which initially sold at the rate of about 1 million per year. Other similar agreements brought in 10 percent of the company’s income over a decade-long period. All the while, Walt kept a sharp eye out for any violations of his copyright, just as The Walt Disney Company does today.
But even Walt could not have dreamt of the multimillion-dollar cornucopia of Disney products that has evolved from that first Mickey Mouse school tablet. The company licenses its cartoon characters to manufacturers, and products bearing the names and pictures of those characters are then sold by retailers around the world. There are company owned and operated stores, as well as a Disney Web site that markets movies, books, art, clothing, jewelry, collectibles, and a host of other products all bearing the likeness of various familiar Disney figures and all produced under license from The Walt Disney Company.
Most of Disney’s numerous partnerships were formed for purely business reasons, but one of his most unlikely affiliations stemmed from a creative communion that developed quite by chance. One evening Walt was eating alone in a fashionable Hollywood restaurant when he spotted the famous conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, also dining alone. He invited Stokowski to join him. Stokowski was a giant in the world of classical music, and with his mane of white hair and sweeping gestures, he looked every inch the maestro, whether leading an orchestra or chatting with a friend over dinner.
Discussing future plans, Disney mentioned that he was about to start work on a new Mickey Mouse cartoon, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Stokowski expressed an interest in conducting the score and even offered to waive his fee. Over the dinner table, the two men then discussed the possibility of making an animated feature set to the music of great composers. Out of this conversation grew the 1940 movie Fantasia. Disney and Stokowski were equally charmed by the concept.
In the film, Stokowski conducted everything from Beethoven to the avant-garde music of Igor Stravinsky, while animated figures interpreted the compositions through dance. Visual interpretation of orchestral music was a new concept, and Fantasia won raves from the critics. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called it “simply terrific, as terrific as anything that has ever happened on the screen,” while another critic described it as “a new artistic experience of great beauty.” Because it was so unlike any other Disney movie, however, the public rejected it. Today though, the film is highly regarded, especially among film historians.
The partnership with Stokowski served Disney well in a creative and artistic sense, and represented a great step forward in the fusion of animation, color, and sound. And even though the film was, at the time, a financial failure, Walt viewed few things as absolute failures. He knew that even unsuccessful ventures provide valuable lessons, and such hard-won knowledge can be put to use elsewhere.
Taking its cue from Walt, The Walt Disney Company does not consign failed projects to the trash heap. Rather, it considers them to be assets of the company that may be tried again later or perhaps utilized in a different capacity.
Partnerships Can Secure Prosperity
Partnerships were obviously an integral part of Walt Disney’s business strategy, often serving as lifelines in times of financial distress. In the 1930s alone, a string of partnerships—ranging from an exclusive arrangement with Technicolor and licensing contracts that put Mickey and Minnie’s faces on toys and clothes to deals for a syndicated newspaper comic strip and a deal for the publication of the Mickey Mouse Book—pulled the company back from the edge of bankruptcy. At this particular time in Walt’s career, the cash flow from cartoons was little more than a trickle (he often had to wait months to be paid by his distributors), and the partnerships were crucial to survival.
During the building of Disneyland in the 1950s, Walt again found himself short of cash. Even though ABC invested $500,000 and guaranteed a bank loan of $4.5 million, the price tag for finishing the park came to some $17 million. Walt cashed in his life insurance policy and then began to search for ways to close the financing gap. The novel solution he came up with was corporate sponsorships, which, in effect, are another form of partnership. Disney signed agreements both Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay, giving them exclusive concessions at Disneyland. He also brought in small, unknown partners, even allowing a corset maker and a real estate agent to set up shop in the Park. Walt partnered with Art Linkletter and asked him to emcee the gala grand opening of Disneyland. In those days, Art was one of the best-known celebrities in Hollywood. When Walt told Art that he would love for him to emcee the event, but that having invested everything he owned in the construction of Disneyland, he was sure he could not afford Art’s fees. Art recalls the discussion: “Walt said, ‘I’m at a great disadvantage in talking to you. Why don’t you have an agent like everybody else?’ I said, ‘Well, Walt, I just do my own stuff. … We’re friends. I’ll do it for practically nothing.’ He said, ‘Will you?’ I said, ‘Certainly. We do things for our friends. Now, for instance, you have some things you are going to contract out. You aren’t going to do everything there. Restaurants, and parking, and film for everybody who comes there to buy film.’” At that time, Art owned several Kodak film franchises and asked Walt for the photo concession at Disneyland for the first 10 years. Linkletter recalled: “Walt said, ‘Good. It’s a deal. Now you see what could get done without agents.’ The Kodak people once said to me, ‘Mr. Linkletter, you own the world’s largest automatic film vending machine: Disneyland.’” Kodak once told Disney that 5 percent of all photos taken in North America are taken at Disneyland or Walt Disney World. One can only imagine the millions of dollars that 10-year concession generated for Art’s 90-minute appearance.
In building Walt Disney World, the company took the same tack, entering agreements that gave the likes of Exxon, AT&T, and General Motors pavilion space at EPCOT. EPCOT is, in fact, a testimony to partnerships. And when Michael Eisner and Frank Wells took over the leadership of The Walt Disney Company in 1984, 18 years after Walt’s death and 13 years after the opening of Walt Disney World, these original partnerships were still contributing thousands of dollars annually to the Disney coffers.
Although the Disney partnerships have certainly helped it fend off disaster at times, the company has never looked at partnerships simply as stopgap measures forced on it by market conditions. Quite the opposite, partnerships are viewed as long-term investments in the company’s future prosperity. Corporate sponsorships and the income they generate support this. But the company continues to exemplify, just as Walt did, the principle that alliances must work for both partners if they are to endure. Company executives must thus be willing to commit themselves to cooperating fully, trusting implicitly, and communicating effectively with partners. Even though the relationship may be a business deal, personal contact will help to cement it.
Personal relationships have helped make The Disney College Program a desirable opportunity for students to be simultaneously involved in both educational and real-world work experiences. The College Program’s National Advisory Board includes some of the most prestigious educational institutions in the United States and partners with Disney’s College Program Team to ensure the highest standards of learning, using the 47-square-mile “learning laboratory” known as Walt Disney World. Students are encouraged to network with Disney leaders, make professional connections in their specific fields of study, and discover career opportunities available after graduation. The Walt Disney Company and its Educational Partners consider their responsibility for developing young people into future leaders as serious business.
Indicative of how much the company values the personal touch is the three-day get-together Eisner planned prior to the Disney-Capital Cities/ABC merger in 1996. The CEO invited 200 people—executives and their spouses—from ABC television and The Walt Disney Company to the Disney Institute in Florida so that the two companies could build a more personal relationship.
This may have been the last true act of partnering performed by Michael Eisner at Disney. It seems that Michael lost the “pixie dust” that once enabled him to re-instill the magic in Disney’s once floundering movie studio. During Michael’s last 10 years, he dismantled arguably the most accomplished group of animation artists in the history of the industry and severed ties with Pixar. Destroying this partnership may have proved to be the final curtain on Michael Eisner’s stage at Disney. The recently ordained CEO, Robert Iger, has repeatedly stated that he is determined to restore artistic integrity at all levels of Disney. His actions speak louder than words. Mere months after taking the reins of the Disney organization, Iger announced the acquisition of Pixar. Pixar’s creative genius, John Lasseter, was named chief creative officer of the animation studios, as well as principal creative advisor at Walt Disney Imagineering. Reporting directly to Iger, Lasseter will lend his expertise in the design of new attractions for Disney theme parks around the world. The verdict is still out, but the Pixar deal could be the catalyst for rejuvenating animation in the tradition of Walt Disney’s original classics. By all initial accounts, Iger is a leader who understands the fragility of new teams and intends to carefully protect the relationships he is developing with Pixar.
As we stated in Scene 12 of The Disney Way Fieldbook: How to Implement Walt Disney’s Vision of “Dream, Believe, Dare, Do,” establishing solid partnerships helps create a “best show” experience for your guests and cast and will lead to profitable financial results. This was certainly true for Mello Smello, founded by husband and wife team Jon and Leah Miner, who teamed up with 3M in 1980 to create and produce “Scratch ‘n’ Smell” stickers of Disney characters. Over the past 20 years, Mello Smello has developed an innovative variety of other products and has also grown to become a multi-million dollar business and a valued partner to the nation’s largest retailers, including Wal-Mart, Target, Walgreen’s, and Kmart.
In 1986, the late Evelyn Overton, founder and co-owner of The Cheesecake Factory, learned how accepting the guidance of a larger and better-known branded company could result in a great partnership. Evelyn had always prided herself on her strict methods of creating fabulous cheese-cakes. Cleanliness and accuracy were huge factors in each and every step of the operation. When The Cheesecake Factory was about to land its first national bakery account with Darden Restaurants, Darden made some critical observations of Evelyn’s kitchen operations.
“Darden looked at our company as an entrepreneurial, West Coast company that had true quality with their cakes,” says Max Byfuglin, president of The Cheesecake Factory Bakery, Inc. Evelyn was proud of cracking the eggs, but the first time Darden came to visit us in 1986, they said, “You can’t do that.” Evelyn was also proud of the butcher tables in the bakery and they said, “You can’t use those.” After that visit, I got a three-page letter saying that they’d love to do business with us, but first, here’s a list of the things we would need to do. We were just building a new bakery down the street, so I was able to incorporate their suggestions in the areas of quality and safety. That was the beginning of becoming a national company on the bakery side. Darden has been a great partner for us.”38 As The Cheesecake Factory discovered, a great partnership can dramatically increase both your reputation and your profitability.
Restructuring Your Business through Partnering
Business alliances, as we said, are formed for any number of reasons. There is partnering between customer and supplier and between managers and coworkers. There is also partnering between manufacturing and service companies; between business, community, and educational institutions; and between government and industry. In our consulting business, we have encouraged a multitude of organizations to consider restructuring their businesses through partnerships. By this we mean a coming together of suppliers, manufacturers, and service providers to support and strengthen one another’s positions. We envision quality performance through teamwork. Small companies can join forces to take on the giants of their industries; big companies can form alliances with smaller companies that are less restricted by bureaucracy. These joint ventures or strategic alliances champion the sharing of knowledge, markets, and profits. The Commonwealth Alliance Program (CAP) reports that businesses now attribute approximately 25 percent of all revenue to strategic alliances, estimated at $40 trillion.
Certification versus Partnerships
According to old economy rules, customer and supplier partnerships were defined by a process of vendor certification. The process required the vendor to adopt a new culture that entailed meeting a wide range of quality and product standards. In effect, the vendor’s performance was constantly tested against a set of standards designed to conform to the needs of the customer.
Moreover, one vendor was leveraged against another because organizations insisted on having two or three sources for the same item. Often a vendor was required to reduce prices to remain competitive, regardless of the impact on the vendor’s organization. The rationale for the price cuts lay in the expectation that the vendor should constantly be improving processes and sharing the resultant savings with the customer.
While certification streamlined the buying process, strategic direction was developed without vendor input. Thus, little was done to improve the competitive position of either the customer or the supplier.
In contrast, true partnerships envision working with vendors to develop compatible cultures. If sole-source relationships are developed, win-win performance measures can be devised that take into consideration the needs of both parties. In addition, sole-source relationships encourage process integration and the cross-company sharing of results. Vendors can more readily be included in strategic planning. The end result is an efficient and productive alliance for both suppliers and customers. Indeed, the term partnership pre-supposes the willingness not only to share the spotlight but also to work out in a straightforward fashion what is best for both parties. Sometimes these arrangements aren’t bound by legal contracts and actually bear more of a resemblance to the kind of teamwork we discussed in the preceding chapter.
One of our clients, for example, established an innovative and productive relationship with the company that supplies its packaging. Constant problems and the words “This isn’t working” marked the association between the two companies before they decided to set up an informal partnership. Now, teams comprising staff members from each company consult with one another about a variety of issues: the design of the packaging so that it meets precise specifications, the costs involved, the materials to be used, and so forth. Engineers, purchasing agents, and managers from each company now meet regularly to discuss their respective needs. The two companies work so closely together that some of the packaging-supply people have desks at our client’s offices, and a new computer network keeps everyone informed of progress on issues of mutual interest.
To confirm that it was on the right track with this informal arrangement, our client compared the costs of using traditional purchasing methods against the costs of its new method. The new procedure won hands down, and it is producing substantial cost savings. Equally gratifying, this collaboration has produced a welcome reduction in material needs, a critical factor at a time when forest shrinkage is reducing the supply of wood pulp.
A close alliance is also producing big rewards for both Wal-Mart and Bristol-Myers Squibb, which supplies the discount retailer with its products on a quick-delivery basis. As the products are sold, Wal-Mart’s purchasing department informs the sales department at Bristol-Myers and replacement products are shipped out within 24 hours. The partnership has worked so well that Wal-Mart chose to honor Bristol-Myers as a Supplier of the Month, not because of size, for many of Wal-Mart’s thousands of suppliers dwarf Bristol-Myers in terms of volume, but because of reliability.
The Walt Disney Company has long understood the importance of respecting its suppliers and maintaining strong alliances with them. Michael Vance, former head of Disney University, tells the story of when he and Roy Disney visited the construction site during the building of Walt Disney World. As the two men entered the site, the first thing they saw was a large sign announcing, “All contractors immediately report to construction shack 47 upon entering the premises.”
Reading that clear and curt order, Roy turned to Mike and asked, “What does that convey to you?”
Without hesitation, Vance responded, “It says that we don’t trust our suppliers to be on the property.”
“Right,” Disney replied. “And who’s responsible for communicating the Disney culture and values to all employees on the property?”
As it happens, that is one of the goals of Disney University, so Vance put together a team that designed and built a new reception center. Now contractors and construction workers at Walt Disney World are treated like the valued partners they are. The reception center offers them coffee and cold drinks, telephones, and meeting rooms, all in a pleasant and welcoming atmosphere.
As Roy Disney explained to Vance, not only were company values at stake but also the wider reputation of the company. “We need to be partners with our contractors for the park to open on time, but even more importantly, they have to be proud to be a part of this, so they will call friends and family all over the country and tell them to come down to see what they’ve done.”
Lessons Relearned
Do any of us always follow the rules, even though those rules may stem from our own stated convictions? Probably not.
EuroDisney is a case in point for Disney. Even though partnerships have always been central to Disney’s business strategy, the company deviated from standard practice when it came to building the French theme park. For example, in the early 1990s at both of its domestic sites, Disney retained a percentage of the hotel rooms (14 percent at Walt Disney World) and also entered into partnerships with other hotels, such as the Sheraton chain. But management avoided partnership arrangements with any French hotels, which meant that the rooms were not furnished to French tastes. For example, the French expect fireplaces in their vacation villas and Disney had neglected this detail. Today, Disney has corrected this problem by retrofitting each room with a fireplace.
One of the biggest mistakes, though, was in naming the park. The French are enormously proud of their country and their culture, and they greatly resented the lack of a French identity in the EuroDisney name. In this instance, the entire population of France was, in effect, Disney’s partner, and in forgetting the lesson Walt took away from the Oswald calamity (that is, to know and understand your partner’s culture and values), the company made a serious error.
Fortunately, Disney took steps to rectify the problems before the venture failed completely. Today, the park is known as Disneyland Paris, and refinancing has established partnerships within the business community. Not surprisingly, the park has demonstrated clear signs of a successful turnaround.
Disney has suffered the consequences of reneging on the implicit partnership it maintains with employees at home, too. For example, when problems arose with Disney’s Golf Resort Hotel (now Shades of Green® Resort, an Armed Forces Recreation Center (AFRC) in Walt Disney World that is owned by the federal government for exclusive use by armed service members and their families), management went through the motions of welcoming front-line input from employees, then promptly rejected it.
To determine why the Golf Resort’s occupancy rate hovered in the low 90 percent range while every other Walt Disney World hotel was actually over 100 percent by having guests on a waiting list, management called its reservations staff together. “The problem,” the staff said, “is in the name. Most reservations are made by wives. When they see the word golf, warning signals go up. They don’t want their husbands to spend vacation days on the golf course instead of joining in the family fun at the park. So they request reservations at one of the other hotels.”
Management’s reaction was incredulous: “You guys don’t know what you’re talking about.” Dismissing the opinions of the very people who dealt with would-be guests on a daily basis, the company hired a marketing firm, which, lo and behold, came up with exactly the same answer. Red-faced and apologetic, management went back to the reservations staff to get suggestions for a new name. The name The Disney Inn was eventually selected as a suitably neutral alternative to The Golf Resort and remained so until the change in ownership.
As the above examples indicate, Disney has occasionally made the mistake of ignoring its standards for working in partnership. And every time, management has had to backtrack when the mistake was recognized and re-embrace its time-tested principles. No matter how big or how successful a company becomes, partnership with other companies, employees, suppliers, customers, or the community is a valuable asset that needs to be cultivated.
Partnerships are being cultivated and used in creative ways by a diverse range of organizations. One of the most novel partnerships we ever participated in occurred some years back when we were working with the School of Nursing at the University of Southern Indiana. A dispute arose over the amount of continuing education that was available to the nursing faculty. The nurses wanted more, but the administration said there was simply no money for such a program.
Having already established a team at the school during a strategic planning retreat, we worked with team members to devise a simple but ingenious solution to the dispute. The school approached a local hospital and offered to staff a unit for one shift a week, using student nurses from the school. The fee to the hospital was less than the hospital’s usual staffing cost for the hours involved; the students got credit for practical experience; and the school used the money from the hospital to fund courses in continuing education for the faculty. It was a deal in which everyone came out a winner.
Another result of good partnerships is that they often lead to welcome but perhaps unexpected outcomes. At Asea Brown Boveri of Canada, for example, a partnership with customers helped turn around one of the electrical engineering concern’s faltering regional operations. A new manager, who was sent in by headquarters to boost revenues, eschewed the traditional approaches of making changes in product and processes and of downsizing. Instead, he asked staff members to find out the needs and problems of the businesses in their marketing area. He also established partnerships with local business people to explore potential areas of improvement. In only one year, the new manager’s unorthodox reliance on a partnering approach with customers began to pay off as the operation returned to profitability.
It almost goes without saying that when people from varying backgrounds and endeavors are involved, some glitches are bound to develop along the way. But if all participants are prepared at the outset for this eventuality, with a little give and take, most such difficulties can be smoothed out. The key to effective working alliances is sustained communication among all the participants and a genuine understanding of the purpose of the association. The overriding value of the partnership must not be tarnished by minor problems.
With that in mind, we urge you to identify your key suppliers and partners and then make an honest effort to spend time with them so that you can begin to understand one another’s needs. Organize dream-type retreats where you can identify customer problems and customer dreams. Build long-term relationships in which you share the spotlight with “costars.”
Our work with numerous companies large and small has made abundantly clear the power that is generated when two or more organizations direct their creative energies to solving shared problems. Mastering the art of partnering can give your organization the confidence to wholeheartedly embrace the third principle in the Disney quartet: Dare!
In the next chapter, we will look at what it means to take calculated risks and how an organization can thrive on the opportunities that arise when one is willing to accept challenge.
Questions to Ask
Do you trust the judgment of your employees and treat them as partners?
Does your organization have true alliances with suppliers?
Do you routinely meet with your suppliers to involve them in strategic planning?
Do you believe that the best ideas often come from those outside your own organization?
Actions to Take
Gain feedback from employees on a regular basis by asking the following questions: (1) How are we doing as a company in developing partnerships with employees? (2) Do we invite your input and creativity on problems and solutions on organizational issues? (3) How are we doing as a company in developing partnerships with our suppliers? (4) Are we considering partnerships with organizations that share our goals?
Invite employees to investigate organizational issues by identifying barriers to success and encourage them to develop solutions.
Meet with suppliers two days or more per quarter to discuss ways to solve customer problems and fulfill customer dreams.
Suppliers as Partners
Of course, when a radical new design for a product is initiated, the costs are high. Changes have to be made in basic drawings and design. Then bids are put out to suppliers, who must, in turn, redesign their products. “This is going to cost you an extra $5,000 because we have to retool,” is often the suppliers’ answer.
The Global No-Frost team tried a different and innovative approach. As the work moved forward, the team became involved with the company’s capital equipment suppliers, who were supplying the equipment for the plant in India. The structure was to be built on an empty site in the middle of a wasteland on the outskirts of Pune, near Bombay. There were some 10 equipment suppliers, and the company was spending, at the very least, $5,000 with each one.
The team set up an unprecedented two-day meeting with all the suppliers. The meeting opened with Jerry McColgin, the team leader, standing up and informing his audience that, first of all, everyone would have to sign a confidentiality agreement to protect the company. Then, he continued, “Traditionally, you’re told exactly what is wanted, but this time it will be different. I want you to understand how your contribution fits into the overall project.” He proceeded to explain the whole schedule and where each supplier fitted in. “I pointed out as well that our success was entirely dependent on them.”
The response was amazing. They were thrilled to be included and to understand their role in the process. Usually, suppliers’ contact with the company is limited to one manufacturing engineer. Now they were dealing with 35 people as a team. To keep them abreast of developments, they were sent a monthly update, which not only included an account of the team’s progress but also mentioned suppliers who were on time, and even more to the point, suppliers who had fallen behind schedule.
A true measure of the team’s partnership with suppliers came on the question of one part’s specifications. When this particular part is manufactured in North America, a thickness of 3.8 millimeters is required. The suppliers suggested that the part could be produced with a thickness of 2.9 millimeters and function just as well and at considerable savings. Without their early involvement and attention to detail, the planned refrigerator would probably have ended up at the required specification, but too large and too expensive.
When it came to inaugurating the new plant, some of the suppliers came to the dedication—at their own cost. That’s how involved they felt in the project.
Our Featured Organization:
Downtown School of Des Moines, Iowa
BATTLING STUPIDITY IN AMERICA
In April 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education declared the United States “a nation at risk”. One staggering report read, “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and people.” Sadly, over the past few decades, most schools have done precious little to eliminate these crises.
One notable exception is the Downtown School of Des Moines, Iowa. Downtown School was born out of a partnership between the Des Moines Business Alliance and the Des Moines School District. Local business leaders dreamed of a school without failure, where no child is left behind, where students are self-motivated to achieve long-term goals, and where teachers are geared to unleash the potential of each and every student. The partnership team shared the conviction of the National Commission on Excellence in Education.
In February 1990, the Des Moines Business/Education (B/E) Alliance was established as a partnership between the Des Moines Public School System and the local business community. Jan Drees, executive director of the Alliance and principal of Downtown School, spent three years researching what worked and what had failed in other institutions. Her findings and the backing of the Alliance were the springboard needed for establishing Downtown School, just a few steps away from where the parents of enrolled students worked. The close proximity to their children facilitated parental involvement, which is still the case today.
Downtown School opened with 45 students in August of 1993. The premise of the school was to create a place where real learning could take place, not as an exclusive campus for the children of the Des Moines top executives. Steve Schaaf, Alliance president, told us, “The plan from the beginning was that we would try to match the socio-economic statistics of the Des Moines Public Schools with Downtown School. It’s also a school based on the philosophy that everybody is here to learn and can learn. If we aren’t careful, and turn this into an elitist institution, we have lost our mission.”39
Partnering with the business community was only a piece of Downtown School’s partnering strategy. Finding the right teachers who would embrace a new way of teaching was the next hurdle. As Jan stated, “I look for teachers who do not want to be the power person in the classroom. I don’t want teachers who feel ‘I’m the boss, you’re the student, now go sit down.’ I want teachers who are child-centered!”40
While attempting to identify the best teachers for Downtown School, Jan ran head on into a roadblock—the union, the Iowa State Education Association. Its contract requires seniority rules; that is, if two people are equally qualified, the one with seniority gets the job. Jan remembered the anger of a key partner, Roger Brooks, CEO of AmerUs, who said “I don’t like the way the school district just takes anyone, no matter how good or bad the teacher may be. I won’t support the school if you do it this way.”41 Jan credits Roger for insisting that she hire the right teachers for the job, not who’s up next in the Union batting order. “That gave me the power to do it differently; we had to take the best person for the job. I thank Roger every day for his insistence,” remarked Jan.
The Union has not yet endorsed Downtown School’s teaching philosophy, but it has not publicly opposed it either. Interestingly, of the Core Values cited by the Iowa State Education Association, “We value quality public education” tops the list. It just so happened that one day, a high-ranking Union official entered Downtown School during school hours. Usually, this would spell trouble for the principal, likely resulting in countless hours negotiating a grievance. The official reassured Jan, “Don’t worry, I’m here on a personal matter. My granddaughter has applied at Downtown School, and I wonder if you can help me.” Jan held her ground. She had always believed in her duty, and her true desire was to uphold the original credo of Downtown School and the procedures that had been instituted to insure the same socio-economic student mix as the Des Moines Schools. She told the union official that she could not help him. Fortunately, his granddaughter was admitted to Downtown School under normal guidelines.
So what is this new way of teaching all about? When you walk into a Downtown School classroom, there are no traditional rows of desks. Instead, there is a “buzz” about the room, a clear sign that children are alive and active. You may witness a group of students discussing a project, or see a child stretched out on the floor reading, or yet another making a presentation to classmates using histograms and flipcharts—or the classroom may be completely empty. The reason is that all of downtown Des Moines is the classroom. So, if you walk into the local bank, you may see students learning firsthand about business, or they may be doing research at the public library.
Is it working? Tracy Donovan, a Downtown School teacher says, “It’s 100 times harder, but 100 times better than the traditional classroom approach. It’s just a better way to teach. The students love coming to school and love to learn.” Tracy spent her first years out of college in a traditional classroom. When asked if she could ever go back to the traditional teaching process, her answer was an emphatic “No.”42
The next piece of the partnership model at Downtown School is the partnership between the teacher and the student. You won’t find any traditional textbooks in the classrooms. The learning process is built around classroom projects. As Tracy explains, “We start by brainstorming the project with the whole class. Students have ownership in the project.”
A recent project was “the changing landscape of Iowa.” Some students became interested in what the land was like in prehistoric times, millions of years ago; others were interested in learning about the first settlers in Iowa hundreds of years ago. One nine-year-old girl became interested in soil. She enthusiastically read everything that Tracy could find on the topic. This was the little girl’s first year at Downtown School, having transferred from a traditional school. One day, she asked Tracy if she could go to the public library and do some additional research on soil. She told Tracy that she wanted to check to be sure that this would not be considered “cheating.” The child’s passion for the subject translated into real learning and, best of all, she wasn’t saddled with what the author of a textbook thought she should learn. Tracy explains the direction given to students at Downtown School: “If you want to know something, here’s how to find it. I don’t know all the answers, and the students won’t have someone next to them all their lives telling them the answers.”
During our interview at Downtown School, we met a fifth-grade student named Amanda who shared with us her perceptions of her teachers, “Very, very fun. I have never heard them yell. They never talk loud. They are really nice. A lot of my other teachers (from her previous traditional classroom) were nice, too, but they can get a lot louder. So, it’s better here.” Tracy Donovan believes that children feel this way because Downtown School chose to build an environment where children are treasured and respected.
In the words of one Downtown School parent, “There is a close, personal relationship between the kids and teachers, and the teachers know those kids very well. On the last day of third grade, I came in and saw my daughter Lillian with three or four of her friends crying their eyes out because they wouldn’t see each other for six whole weeks. I had a flashback to my last day of a Catholic parochial school where I was shouting Hurray!”
The rich and energized learning environment of Downtown School may indeed have a direct relationship to the surprisingly low incidence of children who are taking medication for a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Today, it is commonplace that behavioral problems in schools are addressed with drugs like Ritalin. USA Today reported in 2003 that “Ritalin is prescribed at disparate rates.” And, if you live in Louisiana or North Carolina, your child is more than twice as likely to be medicated as children living in New Jersey or California. David Fassler, child psychiatrist, reports, “There is no evidence that ADHD is more common in one region than another.” The AMA reports that as many as 5 percent of U.S. students ages 5 through 14 suffer from ADHD and 80 percent of those are medicated. As was reported in Megan Farnsworth’s article “Schools a High-Test Formula for Success,” Principal Thaddeus Lott of Houston’s Wesley School stated recently, “Disruptive children are either bored or frustrated. The easiest way to maintain order is to teach to everyone’s appropriate instructional level.” But, instead, we have become a nation where it is acceptable to label these kids’ “special education status” and pour drugs into them. In most public schools in the United States today, the fastest growing and often the largest department is special education. These children who apparently cannot “focus” in the classroom are perfectly able to spend hours playing computer games, are mesmerized for 90 minutes when watching the latest Disney animated feature film, and spend hours excitedly researching a topic that interests them.
Jan Drees and her team have created a classroom environment where each and every student is self-motivated to learn in an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust. Downtown School classrooms are as engaging as any computer game. Jan and her team believe that if a student is motivated by World War II, then why not use WWII reading material to teach basic reading skills? Principal Ronald Williams of Detroit’s Newberry Elementary School narrows this down to a single success factor, “If a child can’t learn the way I teach, then I must learn to teach the way she learns.”
Jan’s daring deviance from conventional wisdom has resulted in five times fewer Downtown School students on ADHD drugs than the national average. Using AMA statistics and Downtown School’s current enrollment, Jan should have 11 or 12 students on Ritalin-type drugs, but she has only two at the present time. When a student who has been on a course of ADHD drugs transfers into Downtown School, Jan asks the family to try to eliminate the drug and see what happens. In almost all cases, the student is suddenly cured of ADHD!
The final piece of Downtown School’s partnering strategy is its partnerships with the families. Parents, teachers and students all participate in student-led conferences. These conferences are held three times a year and usually last between 45 and 60 minutes. Jan believes that leading the conference helps students take responsibility for their own growth and learning. As one parent explained, “It kind of gives the kid somewhat of a star status, telling you what he has done, instead of the teachers and parents talking over his head.”
Is it worth it? Downtown School has been in existence for over 10 years and continues to exceed the state and national standardized test results by more than 10 percentage points. The “experiment” that began with 45 students in 1993 is now nearly 300 students strong with over 900 names on a waiting list. Even more significant than test scores is the passion for learning and problem solving that Downtown School graduates take with them as they move on to sixth grade. For many children in traditional environments, that passion for learning is stifled by the end of their second school year.
The depressing truth is that although Downtown School is no longer an experiment, the Des Moines School District has not totally embraced its philosophy. And when students leave Downtown School after fifth grade and enter a traditional sixth grade class, the evidence of this is crystal clear. One sixth grader, a former student of Downtown School, was given a worksheet with questions to answer on the subject of volcanoes. As she would have done in her classroom at Downtown School, she took the worksheet home, got on the Internet, and researched volcanoes for several hours. She made notes all over the worksheet and gathered her thoughts for a presentation she intended to make to her class. When she sat down in her new classroom on the following morning, the teacher asked students to pass in their volcano worksheets. When the little girl asked if she could present her findings to the class, the teacher denied her request and recorded a “zero” on her worksheet. When the student questioned the grade, the teacher explained that she had failed to answer the questions and that her worksheet was “messed up” with all her notes. However, in a spirit of a benevolent dictator, the teacher gave the girl a second chance to complete the worksheet. That evening, this devastated child took the worksheet home and announced to her parents, “I get it, they don’t care about learning at my new school. They just want me to fill in the blanks.” For six years, this student loved learning, loved coming to school, and now was poised to become a stagnant, detached rote learner who felt only contempt for the educational system in America. Hopefully, as students and parents experience travesties inflicted by traditional school systems, they will demand an educational environment such as Downtown School provides. If our children begin their education in a place where they become self-motivated and take responsibility for their own learning, where teachers establish a creative atmosphere of mutual respect and trust, and where their potential is unleashed, shouldn’t we expect this level of excellence to continue through high school?