Are you Monday’s Child?

A lesson from Mickey Mouse.

As children, the amount of interference between receiving an idea in our childlike minds, and bringing that idea to life, is minimal. Everything that comes to us, comes from unfettered imagination and play. It’s pure.

It just is.

As adults, though…lord, we like to stick a rusty wrench in those works.

We create meetings, emails, committees, process, hierarchies…check-in’s. You name it. We unwittingly add to the interference that turns play into number-crunching-margin-driving-idea-crushing work.

Sure, it all makes sense at the time, and people get promoted because of it, tethered to these systems and beliefs for job survival. So it must be right…right?

But great ideas come from people and places that find a way to remove the interference as much as possible, and limit the tragedy of adult noise. I call it a tragedy, because, that’s exactly what it is. A tragedy of creation.

Noise is like the adult voice that tells the kid inside us, that the picture we are drawing doesn’t look real enough. Isn’t accurate enough. Doesn’t have the right colors. So we put down the pen and go back to being sensible.

Back at my time at Disney, we were given a monster challenge, to make Mickey cool again. Believe it or not, at the time, he wasn’t much more than a corporate mascot. A mouse with big ears whose only job was to wave from our business cards and scare kids in the park.

And as the head of the Mickey Mouse brand, I was the one who had to help bring him back.

What could have been terrifying (trust me, it was), became exhilarating (trust me, it did).

From the top, we were empowered as a team to break all the rules of a big, siloed and deeply political corporation. Do what we think needed to be done. Just do it.

We called ourselves the Hot House team, a down and dirty skunk works that could drink its own brand kool-aid, do what it wanted whenever it wanted, and lather itself in creative ideas with just enough oversight not to get arrested.

Looking back, I see how and why Mickey became the revitalized icon that he became. How the act of giving ourselves a name and permission from the top to imagine and play, was all the confidence we needed.

It wasn’t perfect, and this isn’t written with rose-tinted hindsight. Trust me, we pushed the limits of the Disney brand. We got slapped on the wrist more than once.

But the turn-around from mascot to icon would never have happened if we’d have acted like adults think they should act, and approached it like work. Orderly. Neat. On a PowerPoint that made everyone feel good. Recommendations to committees. Sign-off’s up the wazoo. We needed to get our wrists slapped. Just like the kid who ventures too far.

Our CEO and chairman of Disney Consumer Products, was Nike’s former CMO, a no-nonsense, no frills Scot. A man of few words, who had a genius brain for marketing, and a deep understanding of how humans mess things up when they work in big groups. Yep, he was the one who empowered us to just do it. He’d handle the rest.

Our division became an internal rogue, the Tom Waits of the company; banging on tin cans with hammers to see what sounds they made, when we were all supposed to be playing magic flutes with pixie dust.

But it worked. The tin can drum banging became billions in retail sales, and it drove growth across every brand in the company. I mean, love it or hate it, Disney Princess was invented because of it.

The Jolt?

I guard myself now, not to tune immediately to the things that look right on paper, but to take a pause to tune to the things that feel right to that little scamp from many moons ago; me as a child.

He’s the one that remembers how to imagine and play. Sure, he’s often hard to find. He frequently thinks he’s wrong. Going to get into trouble. And he’s sometimes downright grumpy, like he’s been woken abruptly from a very long sleep.

But if I sit long enough, he’s there, and if I watch him long enough, he shows me things I might have missed.

The ability to look beyond the template, committee, or meeting, to think “why not?”, to see past the ordinary to what at first may be invisible, is where great ideas lie.

This week, take a look around you.

Is what you are doing sparking your childhood light?

Or checking your adult to-do list?

The difference could be massive.

With love (and a little bit of Mickey), your friends,

The Jolt.