We can do this figuratively, but you open a barbecue place tomorrow.
What's the name of the barbecue place?
Bob's Big Boy is taken, right?
We have to ask chat GPT, but I think it is. I think it would be copyright infringement of something of sorts. I don't know, Alan. That's a tough one. How about just Bobs?
Okay, Bobs. I'll go to that.
Don't kiss. Barbecue and big ideas. You going to get yourself in trouble. Your true love will leave you.
Let's talk about the past and the future. So Disney, you know, incredible founder culture. Walt Disney, you've talked about it a lot. And just for the audience, describe the founder culture that existed at Disney. Just what it meant to you.
Well, Walt founded the company in 1923. So the company's over 100 years old. He died in 1966. That was after Disneyland had opened and before Disney World had opened, and it was a relatively small company. He was a true force within the walls of Disney and actually in the world. As an aside, some years back I discovered that all the contents of his office had been kept in a vault somewhere on the Disney property. And all over the world there was reporting on Walt Disney dying. And in 1966, maybe next to at the time Muhammad Ali and I don't know, maybe the Pope at that time, he was one of the most well-known, if not the most well-known person in the world. Elvis Presley might have been up there.
So, you can imagine if the person who's running your company is one of the most well-known people in the world, their personality, their vision, their ethics, their everything is just imbued in it. It exists in every corner of the company that he founded, which is quite interesting really because sometimes you could argue that that almost creates a cult-like culture, and I think actually to some extent that was the case with him. Now, he was very talented. He was very energetic. He was clearly very communicative. And so, he had his hand in everything.
And that probably almost strengthened the cult in a way. And nothing happened at the company without Walt approving it. And when he died, they say they took 10 years for the company to get over his death. That for 10 years they spent asking what would Walt do, which is ridiculous, because one of the things that if you've studied Walt you'll quickly discover is that he was an innovator and a futurist and someone that was never wedded to the past except understanding what the past contained or had in terms of values that was important to bring forward. But he knew the world was always changing and he was the ultimate innovator. Talk about how do you honor the culture but still be innovating.
So it's interesting. So 2005 I become CEO of the company. Walt is dead for 40 years really, and actually while people aren't going around asking what he would have done, there still is adherence to the past that I actually thought was unhealthy, and in effect they were letting the past get in the way of innovation. So I tried to articulate both a respect for the past but a desire to move the company forward. And what I ultimately concluded was that the past is something that should be respected but not revered. And there's a big difference. If you revere something, you might as well just put it in a glass case and make sure that it never changes. You might put it in a museum if you'd like. And so I talked about let's respect the values that got us where we are. What is the essence of Disney? Who are we? And let's make sure that we're not only bringing them forward, but they're core to everything we do. But let's not revere them to the point where we're not capable of doing different things. And that actually resonated, and there was this belief that everything we did that was different than had been done in years past, the empire was going to crumble.
I mean, little. So at Sixth Street, two years ago at our offsite, we talked about this concept of self-improvement at scale, which is a Japanese philosophy that I've always lived by called Kaizen, which is basically continuous self-improvement. You have also your own form of a Japanese philosophy that you followed called Shokunin Shukun. Talk about what that is and what it means to you.
That's basically the relentless pursuit of perfection. And the inspiration to me in terms of that term and that belief came actually not that long ago from a documentary that was done about a sushi chef in Tokyo named Jiro. And here was a guy, at the time he's now in his 90s, who at 88 years old, having earned three Michelin stars, was still trying to improve. And that just really resonated with me. I actually took a clip of the documentary and showed it at a Disney offsite to about 350 executives. And that constant desire to learn more, to do more, to get better is something I think is incredibly powerful as a mechanism for propelling someone forward. And it's also, I think, critical for a company. And I tried to teach that at Disney. If you have time and you got resources, then don't accept something that's only good. Work to make it great. For instance, never accept mediocrity. And basically never stop trying to improve something. And then I was lucky because when we bought Pixar in 2005, Steve Jobs became our larger shareholder. I had known Steve a bit, but we were not friends. And I did not expect that we would become friends, but he became a really dear friend to me. And in learning as I did about Steve, I discovered that's exactly who he was. Now, he was a relentless perfectionist and he could drive people crazy at times because he demanded such perfection from everybody else. But that quality of expecting perfection and demanding that people really work hard to make something better than it potentially was or than it could be is very powerful. And that was Jiro for me and Steve Jobs.
