Creating Business Magic. David Morey
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Houdini quickly escapes. He kills time behind the curtain, swimsuit-clad, dripping, passing the minutes, waiting, his ears attuned to the buzz, groan, gasp, and suppressed screams of the unseen audience. When their collective crescendo of suspenseful anxiety just begins to fade, Houdini knows the audience has just begun to lose hope. That is when he bursts out from behind the curtain, smiling, dripping, taking his bow before a theater full of witnesses giddy with the combination of awe, relief, and joy that comes from an aspiration realized.
“The American Academy of Achievement”—there actually is such a thing13—was founded in 1961 by a photographic journalist named Brian Blaine Reynolds “to bring aspiring young people together with real-life heroes—the kind of achievers [photographer Reynolds] met every week on assignment.” On March 17, 2010, the Academy published an interview with Bill Gates, a 1992 inductee into the Academy and a former client of David Morey. As anyone who has followed Gates and Microsoft knows, he issued in 1980 a most memorable statement of the Microsoft mission. It was an aspiration of boundless ambition: A computer on every desk and in every home.
“When did you first have the vision of a computer on every desk at work and in every home?” the Academy interviewer asked Gates.
“Paul Allen and I had used that phrase even before we wrote the BASIC (programming language) for Microsoft.” This would have been 1975, when Gates, Allen, and Monte Davidoff were hired by the makers of the now-legendary Altair computer to create the first high-level programming language for their machine. Released before Micro-Soft shed its hyphen, Altair BASIC was Microsoft’s very first product. “We actually talked about it in an article in—I think 1977 was the first time it appears in print—where we say, ‘a computer on every desk and in every home…’” 14
Talk about an aspiration!
Consider… The famous phrase became a formal mission statement in 1980, at a time when Microsoft, a software maker, did not even make computers. Three years earlier, in 1977, it was just beginning to make software. Two years before that, in 1975, three guys who were among a small group of “hobbyists” tinkering with the Altair 8800 were paid to write a version of BASIC that could squeeze some degree of practical functionality out of 256 bytes to 64 kilobytes of RAM with a processor chugging along at 2.0 MHz in a computer programmed via toggle switches and lights rather than with a keyboard and monitor. Altair BASIC, Microsoft’s foundational piece of software, was itself
an aspiration.
“It’s very hard to recall how crazy and wild that was, you know,” Gates told the Academy interviewer, “‘on every desk and in every home.’ At the time, you [had] people who are very smart saying, ‘Why would somebody need a computer?’ Even Ken Olsen, who had run this company Digital Equipment, who made the computer I grew up with, and that we admired both him and his company immensely, was saying that this seemed kind of a silly idea that people would want to have a computer.”15
Dream Bigger Dreams
In 1975, 1977, and 1980, when typewriter repair was a job you could count on, Bill Gates was writing, thinking, imagining, and dreaming the way Harry Houdini had done some fifty years before. Magic, you see, is at its very best all about dreaming bigger dreams. Dream bigger dreams could have been the mission statement of Harry Houdini, the very archetype of a modern magician. It was he who redefined magic for modern audiences by making it relevant to their innermost and yet most universal dreams. Houdini’s astounding escapes were also great escapes, because they were intensely relevant to an audience who dreamed of magically freeing themselves from the myriad chains of everyday life.
Arguably, Harry Houdini’s appeal would only have increased had he lived beyond the Roaring Twenties and continued to perform during the 1930s. The twenties were an era of relative prosperity—or at least of its glittering promise. The decade both embodied and encouraged aspiration. In bleak contrast, the thirties, marked by a global economic Great Depression of unprecedented severity, amputated dreams, locking people into the financial and emotional equivalent of the boxes, cells, and vaults from which Houdini had routinely escaped. A fascinating article published in the August 1932 edition of Popular Aviation asked the age-old question, “Can Man Propel Himself Through the Air by His Own Power?” The article’s author, W. I. Oliver, “[n]oted student of aviation history and ornithopter flight,” cited the Greek myth of Icarus, who flew on magical waxen wings his father Daedalus had fashioned for him as well as for himself to escape from the impenetrable labyrinth of the monstrous Minotaur. Young Icarus, exhilarated by the freedom of flight, sheered away from his father to fly higher and higher until, having approached too near the sun, the wax began to melt, and he fell back to earth and his death. This end notwithstanding, Icarus had realized—for a time, at least—the dream of human-powered flight.
Turning from mythology and the heat of the sun, Oliver went on to explore a more practical limitation of animal-powered flight. He invited his readers to “picture a sparrow and an eagle in a pen,” forty feet square, with no top, and with walls four feet in height. “The small sparrow rises vertically at the rate of nine to ten feet per second and could easily clear the walls. The eagle, on the other hand, could not escape, because the
eagle requires a wing flapping run of sixty feet to clear the four-foot fence.…the same rule applies to the condor, buzzards, seagull and other large heavy birds…” 16
In the 1930s, Popular Aviation advertised itself as having the “Largest Sale of Any Aviation Magazine.” That was really saying something, since the early thirties were a golden age of aviation. As the Great Depression threatened to drag everyone down, the wonders of flight promised to lift everyone up. The dream of escape and transcendence that Houdini had offered in the 1920s, flying machines offered in the 1930s. Too bad Houdini had succumbed in 1926 to peritonitis following a ruptured appendix, which may or may not have been aggravated by multiple gut punches delivered (all in good fun) by a fan. If anything, the 1930s offered an even bigger market than the 1920s for the kind of magical aspirations to which Houdini catered. As for W. I. Oliver’s practical mathematical calculations concerning the aerodynamics of birds and the human beings who sought to emulate them, perhaps the more important point is nature’s instinctive belief that we all need lots of room to take off, to aspire to bigger dreams, to escape from our version of the forty-foot-square pen. Houdini, it turns out, was not all about mere entertainment any more than the myth of Icarus and Daedalus was just a good story or Oliver’s fascination with bird flight was no more than an aerodynamic calculation. All these things were and are about the magic of aspiration.
“The Magic Is Out There”
In 1999, Michael Eisner handpicked Bob Iger to succeed him as CEO of The Walt Disney Company. During this time, Iger happened to be a client of David Morey’s company, and David’s business partner, Scott Miller, asked him a critical question. Do you really want the job?
The thing is, Iger was doing very nicely, thank you, as president and CEO of ABC, Inc., which Disney had purchased in 1996. Disney itself? Not so much. In fact, the company was in sharp decline. It was no longer delivering on the aspirational promise founder Walt Disney had invented way back in 1923. No, the parks, movie business, broadcast and cable television, and retail operations were all sliding. As for the Disney digital and gaming business, it never even got off the ground. To add proverbial insult to proverbial injury, the company seemed to be doing its damnedest to destroy its aspirational relationship with young parents by over-licensing the Disney brands, putting its beloved characters on everything from pasta to toilet paper, and generally abusing moms and dads with an ill-conceived Disney Store concept guaranteed to turn even the sweetest little kid into a spoiled rotten undersized tyrant.
As for tweens and teens, core Disney mainstays since the mid-1950s, the company was neglecting if not undoing these all-important consumer relationships. Half-hearted efforts to revive the classic 1950s Mickey Mouse Club TV show in 1977 (The New Mickey Mouse Club) and 1989-1994 (The All-New Mickey Mouse Club) were about as imaginative as the “New” and the “All-New” prefixes tacked onto the original name. True, Michael Eisner had performed like the bona fide business genius he was when Roy E. Disney and others brought him on board as CEO and Chairman in 1984. But by the 1990s, by many accounts he had become a manager who had challenges delegating, and he was