The Smile Factory: Work at Disneyland

Self-Experience on Disneyland

In general, this case shows the power of culture. It dominates how the Disneyland uses the culture to manage the employees’ behavior in the part. So that they can produce the products, the joyful experience in the journey on Disneyland. My own experience with Disneyland is that it provides the Care, the Warm Welcome and the feel of being in a fancy world since you are entering into Disneyland. Or we might say, it’s anywhere and anytime.

The Disneyland, it’s like a factory associated with standard procedure to provide a wonderful journey to its customers through different product lines.

Analysis

1. The key elements of Disney’s culture: In general, marshal the will to meet and perhaps exceed customer expectations. That is, providing smiles to customers who are visiting the park. And the most important is to let customers feel the smile provided by Disneyland. Disney enhances its culture through: )Pre-hired training in Disney University; On the job training and self-motivated, monitoring and helping each other on the daily work; b)Create a standard guideline for all employees to follow up and encourage a internal competition for a higher level symbolic position. Create a small society in the park and set up a work culture that leaves little room for individual experimentation. c)Not only to entertain customers but also to make its employee feel happy when working in Disneyland. )Though not all the employees can match the guideline of being nice but still it reach quite a good position to provide a good feel to customers.
2. The role that the culture plays in Disney’s success in satisfying their customers: The culture is like kind of compass. As Bill Ross, a Disneyland executive put it: “Although we focus our attention on profit and loss, day-in and day-out we can not lose sight of the fact that this is a feeling business and we make our profits from that. ” This make Disney to set up rocedure and guideline on each position very detailed. By do so, Disney will then able to satisfy their customers successfully.
3. I have worked with Maersk Line, a world’s leading container shipping company with its head office located in Copenhagen, Denmark. This company’s culture, the Blue Dragon is “cult-like” in the way described by Collins and Porras. This brings good as well as bad attitude to the organization. On one side it creates a strong cohesiveness in the organization.

Everyone is proud to be one of the members of Maersk Line. They are thinking that their blood is BLUE. But on the other side it makes the employees of this company be a bit arrogant to insiders as well as outsiders. It makes employees to compete with each other and over tough to outsiders such as customers and suppliers. The culture has brought a big trouble to Maersk Line during the financial crisis worldwide. That is not willing to change and slow in action. Finally Maersk Line made a huge loss.