Disney, Creativity & Teamwork

The brand of Disney displays many forms of creativity in their everyday business processes. Disney displays their success in creativity and teamwork everyday through theme parks and resorts, media and entertainment, and merchandise. Before achievements are made, there is a creative process to be explored. Creativity and teamwork are strongly correlated in business and in order for those concepts to be jointly successful, three steps should be addressed. Using Disney as a parallel, this paper explores the beginning stages of creativity and teams through individual contribution, investigates the roadblocks associated with teamwork and creativity, and finally, presents the success of the creative process within teams. The very beginnings of a team and the creative process start with the establishment of individual goals, skills, and knowledge. It is important for the individuals of a team to share knowledge inventory to establish everyone’s goals, experiences, abilities, and style. It is beneficial to identify differences to help decide roles in the team and also the right people to best fit a particular section in the project. For example, Disney employs hundreds of people called “Imagineers” based on their skills and experiences whose sole purpose is to develop creative ideas (McGinn-Cardwell, 2003). The dual nature of creativity should also be addressed to know when it is appropriate to use divergent and convergent thinking during the creative process. Divergent thinking helps develop fresh ideas (used by the “imagineers”), and convergent thinking is used to apply those ideas and make them valuable. Knowledge inventories along with divergent and convergent thinking allows for idea generation, analyzing alternative solutions, and for all to be receptive of new thoughts. Disney has a specific and successful creative process that showcases these ideas and has also become famous as a benchmark for many businesses and managers. Robert Dilts developed the ‘Disney

Citations: Dilts, R. (1996). Walt Disney: Strategies of Genius. NLPU.com (website article) Handel, S. (2010). NLP and Creativity. The Emotion Machine. (website article) Kotelnikov, V. (2011). Disney Creativity Strategy. 1000 Ventures. (website) McGinn-Cardwell, C. (2003). The Disney Way: Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company. Management and Accounting Web. (website article)