Transcript:

Rick: Could you elaborate more on business being a school, and by the way I could not agree more. And given the state of higher education both high schools and universities what purpose does business have in terms of being a school? And what’s in the school? What kind of components are in the business of being a school?

Michael: First of all you have to understand that the high schools and “higher education” today all suck. Effectively they’re operating absolute disaster. And so any kid who comes out of any school you can be absolutely assured has not truly been inspired to learn and to grow, none. That’s not happening on the street.

The only place it can happen then is where we work. And so the owner, the operator, the executive, the chief executive officer of the group, whomever and whatever must know that it’s their primary responsibility to grow their people.

And that means to grow them in a specific way. So it’s not just stuff that you’re throwing at people, it’s truly a well-thought out strategy for how to grow people from where they begin to where they themselves wish to go.

In that context it’s not enough for the company to have a dream. The company’s inspiration must be for every single human being within that company to have a personal dream. And unless every single person is connected with themselves that there’s no possibility for a true connection with the company. We’re all interested in ourselves.

And any company that forgets that, that every one of our people are solely interested in themselves and how they’re going to move through the whatever next stages of their life that the company becomes a medium through which that exchange can occur, that path can be pursued, and those outcomes can be achieved.

Everything we must do then to awaken the inventive spirit within our people, the responsive spirit within our people everything we must do to do that we must try to do. And it starts with the story of the company.

Every company must write their story. And within that story is what I mentioned at the very outset of this call the story of Apple, and that very first commercial that they ran in the Super Bowl. And that commercial which positioned Apple as the David to IBM’s Goliath. And the calling it had that drove its development to transform the state of life for every single one of the ordinary people who began to use Apple products.

Remember there was no personal computer really then. None. It’s hard to even imagine, it’s hard to even think of the time when there wasn’t a personal computer. There was no personal computer then.

Steve Jobs saw the power of that for every individual, the ability for every individual to seek out the world in ways that had never been possible for them before, with intelligence that had never been available to them before, with a mechanism that had never been provided to them before, major, major thing to do that with an ordinary commodity, like a tire.

Rick: That little rubber stopper I was talking about.

Michael: How do you do that? You use your imagination to do that. You go back to the source. And the source of what is called at Disney the Imagineer, you go back and you create it. You go back and you define it. You go back and you design it. It’s beyond the world of tires. There’s something absolutely critical to be told there.

Rick: And I think it’s fair to say that ties into your result, the great result.

Michael: That’s what the dream is the, great result.

Rick: A great result for humanity, whether it’s a tire that little red stopper that things are substantially better because this innovation exists.

Michael: The world runs on our tires. We made a commitment to create the most spectacular tire the planet would ever see, and to continually improve it beyond anyone else in the world. And our tires run the world. Think about that. The world runs on our tires. Get a flat, you ain’t going any place. But you’re not going to get a flat with that because that’s our tire.