Disney’s Kimmel Communications: Speed and Org Charts Explain
One evening, an MBA professor of mine showed our class this wonderful picture (c. 1950s) of Disney’s company-wide business model. There were boxes for music and TV, movies, parks, comics, books, merchandise, and legions of arrows connecting everything to everything.
This was before ABC, before sports (ESPN), pre Disney-themed cruises, pre-video games, and definitely ahead of streaming, Disney+, and Hulu. Big picture: their business was complex then, and it’s certainly become even more so now.
Past a certain point — let’s say 10,000 to 20,000 employees — a certain tension develops inside an organization: centralization vs. decentralization. It’s normally the context behind any company’s press release announcing a reshuffling of senior leadership and new teams, and Disney is no different.
As a global company with more than 233,000 full-time employees, Disney is stretched to support each one in various countries, as well as each of the many different teams within each of those countries. But first, a quick primer on the lexicon…
Types of Teams
Corporate: Normally, these are the non-sales (revenue generating teams) and non-business units (product teams) that report to the CEO. Teams like HR, Legal, MarComm, IT, Finance… you get the gist.
Business Units (BU): These folks are normally creating the actual products — for Disney, this looks like theme parks, movies, scripted and non-scripted TV (shows/sports), and more.
Geographies: This can be standalone teams or a mix of everything above. Sometimes you “just need someone” to “own” expanding your presence in Asia Pacific, for example.
“Dotted line”: A relationship between teams that serve similar functions; however, the smaller team does not formally report to the larger team (normally to the chagrin of the larger one.)
KHANER - Enough already! (I agree, let’s get to it)
How Many Disney Comms Teams?
I’d put the over/under on the number of overall teams at around 23.5 (yay decentralization?). Yes, the main one that reports to Bob Iger is “the most important,” but let’s dive until we hit Kimmel:
Disney Global Comms: This team reports directly to the CEO. They are the drumbeat everyone listens to, and occasionally—if not frequently— ignores.
Global Entertainment Comms: This would be directly supporting their entire BU. They probably dotted-line report to Global Comms, but their entire raison d’être is to promote their BU’s many products.
ABC TV Comms: Okay, we’re getting closer to the Kimmel show. This team is smaller in size, and very focused on packaging / promoting their programming lineup. From Jeopardy to Kimmel and everything in between.
Late Night with Jimmy Kimmel Comms: Likely a couple of people (or maybe even one person) whose job is as much supporting the show as it is informing the team above them.
Navigating Crisis Communications
Companies everywhere are handling pushback as employees share their personal views on Charlie Kirk’s death. I can only imagine the number of “Reminder of our Social Media Policies…” emails that have been sent by now — we’ve certainly been writing them for clients.
In moments like these, the quickest and easiest thing to do is to turn to your head of communications and have them simply share what’s happening. They do this in a silo and without consulting their peers within the impacted BU. Crisis comms must favor centralization versus finding consensus among the decentralized groups.
You can see the push-pull happening in real-time between Disney’s centralization and decentralization forces in the statements from last week compared to this week’s:
“Jimmy Kimmel Live will be pre-empted indefinitely.”
"Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
You can feel the many numbers of teams that went to work on yesterday’s statement (this would also include Jimmy Kimmel’s publicist, his agents, etc.), and, by proxy, you can watch Disney’s focus shift from one pressing concern (blowback from Kimmel on Charlie Kirk) to another one (the blowback from their suspending Kimmel).
Speed = Importance ≠ Accuracy
Both moments are crisis communications moments; however, the inherent speed of one versus the consensus building of the other sheds light on which one the company felt it needed to react to the quickest.
In today’s landscape, Disney ‘the business’ puts more weight on moments like responding to blowback involving Charlie Kirk’s death than responding to the blowback from suspending Kimmel.
Disney’s business model is extremely complex and widespread. Most of the time, finding cohesion and setting direction for all of those competing teams is the general job of the CEO and most of his direct reports (the Corporate teams). Thinking back to that MBA class in 2013 and knowing what I know today, it takes an enormous amount of disruption to the entire decentralized system to ultimately forgo and bypass the harmony of that system.
