In this transcript, Lee Cockerell (business coach and former VP of Operations of Walt Disney World Resort) talks about how he managed Disney and created his own happiness, along with customer service training, on Thrive15.com!
In this transcript, Lee Cockerell (business coach and former VP of Operations of Walt Disney World Resort) talks about how he managed Disney and created his own happiness, along with customer service training, on Thrive15.com!Caleb Taylor: So you’re here to learn about management, right? There’s no one better to learn from than Lee Cockerell. Today Clay is sitting down with Lee Cockerell who was the Executive Vice President of Operations for the Walt Disney World Resort, managed over 45,000 people. Today he’s going to teach you how to manage for results and insight from a business coach.
Lee Cockerell: Good morning everyone, it’s great to be in Portugal. My very first trip and I already have hundreds of Facebook friends and and LinkedIn and Twitters are coming in so it’s great to meet new people and to be here. I think we’re going to have some fun this morning, like that film shows, Disney’s all about magic and creating magic but we’re going to have some reality today also. I tell people in my book you received, the first sentence says “It’s not magic that makes Disney World work, it’s the way we work that makes it magical.” I assure you that if you’ll follow those same principals and those same strategies, you can create magic in your business, in your organization just as well. It’s some basic principles we’re going to talk about this morning and I’m going to talk to you for a little while and then I’m going to start covering those strategies that are in the book. In your bag you received this. I don’t know if you found it yet. Maybe you think it’s a sandwich in there. These are the 10 strategies, I’m going to go through them after I speak to you a little while, kind of set this up and prepare you for a more in-depth discussion. Even if you don’t look at this this morning, you’ve got the book, you go through the strategies. At the end of every chapter in that book are things you can really do in your business. You can go and you can implement these, you can start practicing them and I assure you, you will get better results, you will make a better bottom line, you will have more satisfied employees and you’ll just be happier. Is everybody happy today? Learn what you need to know from an expert business coach.
Audience: Yes.
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Lee Cockerell: Okay, so you’ll be happy for 2 hours and then we go back into reality, real life, where the problems are and its your job to resolve those problems and to fix them. I don’t know what Carlotta said about me. The only word I understood was “Disney” while she was talking. I hope she told you about me and my career and the things I’ve done and what I’m doing now. I get introduced a lot when I go give speeches and it says “Lee Cockerell ran Disney World for 10 years and we have 50 million visitors and we have 7,000 managers and we do huge numbers of people” and it goes on and on and on and on about how Lee ran this and Lee ran that and I tell people the truth since I retired. I didn’t know what was going on half the time and I was the boss and frankly, most bosses don’t know what’s going on and you know that, right? Because you can’t, the world is too complex, there’s too much going on. The first lesson I’ll tell you this morning is you don’t need to know everything that’s going on, you need to decide where you’re going to spend your time and how you’re going to make a difference and then you need to surround yourself by experts in IT, finance, human resources, strategy, marketing, sales. It takes real expertise today and one person cannot be an expert in everything. The first lesson I learned at Disney … this is why I was successful … I didn’t know what was going on but I had people around me who did and I made sure I hired the right people and I made sure I let them do their job. I didn’t micro manage them because when you hire really great people, you’ve got to let them have authority, you’ve got to let them do their job and you’ve go to think about that. The first lesson this morning may be I’m going to talk to you a lot about where you spend your time, how you spend your time, where you spend your time, where you don’t spend your time, where you should be spending your time and why don’t you. We all don’t go where the hard work is, we go where the easy work is so we spend our time in the wrong place. In our personal lives, we spend it in the wrong place, in our business lives, and then we have regrets later in life. We wish we had done this, we wish we had done that. I want to talk about that today and I guarantee you if you go back in the next 2 or 3 days and sit quietly and think about where you spend your time and how you need to change where you’re spending your time. This is a big issue and most people don’t think about it. Life goes by very quickly and then it’s Christmas again, and then you’re 65 years old. I married a 22 year old young girl and she’s on Medicare now and insurance. I’m sleeping with a grandmother. How did this happen? I have a 45 year old son, where did he come from? I have grandkids in college, huh? This is unbelievable and it went by like this. Don’t have regrets. Start spending your time in places that make a difference and I had to decide how to do that at Walt Disney World. A business coach can help, check out thrive15.com.