Those who have studied the history of Walt Disney Studios know that the period of the early 1940s was a trying and difficult time for Walt Disney, employees, investors, and bankers. While Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a sensational box-office hit for the company in 1937 and 1938, the follow-up full-length features Pinocchio and Fantasia […]
Toward the end of my teenage years, in the late 1970s, I was curious about the writings of a fantasy/horror writer by the unusual name of H.P. Lovecraft. Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Weird Tales magazine writings and his Cthulhu mythos were relatively unknown in popular culture until much later when he became more widely recognized as a […]
In a recent episode of The Human Action Podcast by the Auburn. LA.-based Mises Institute, Dr. Joe Salerno is interviewed by host Jeff Deist about the proper methodology of economic science as put forth by such economics luminaries as Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises. The reason the topic of valid methodology in economics and […]
[Other posts in this series can be found here.] This series of blog posts was inspired by a question from a reader inquiring how I went about organizing so much information contained in The Business of Walt Disney and the Nine Principles of His Success so that it was “all at your fingertips when you do […]
[Other posts in this series can be found here.] Writing a business biography about Walt Disney was a time-consuming and challenging project. The thing I wanted to most avoid was to have a recognized Disney expert read The Business of Walt Disney and the Nine Principles of His Success and write a review that concluded the […]
[Other posts in this series can be found here.] While the first part of The Business of Walt Disney and the Nine Principles of His Success is research-based and tells the business story of Walt Disney, the second part applies what is presented in Part 1 and pertains to the identification and justification of the identified […]
[Other posts in this series can be found here.] By the time the first rewrite (second draft) was complete, the first half of The Business of Walt Disney and the Nine Principles of His Success was in pretty good shape. The major research was complete and the content of the story was in place. There […]
[Other posts in this series can be found here.] When biographies of Walt Disney are written by isolating each major event along the chronology, the reader doesn’t get the feel for the totality and multi-dimensionality of pressures and responsibilities that rested on the shoulders of Walt and Roy as leaders of the business. The events […]
[Other posts in this series can be found here.] A considerable amount of time on the first and second rewrite of The Business of Walt Disney and the Nine Principles of His Success (TBWD) was taken up by the problem of continuity. There is so much raw information about Walt Disney and events at the Studio […]
[Other posts in this series can be found here.] One of the things I dreaded the most in researching and writing The Business of Walt Disney and the Nine Principles of His Success (Theme Park Press, 2017) was to find two factually different versions of the same event or a fact from a credible source that […]
[Other posts in this series can be found here.] My completed first draft of TBWD consisted of a single MSWord document, broken up into chapters and sections based on the various topics covered. Material consisting of my notes and author quotes were contained in relevant sections. It was now time to start over again from […]
[Other posts in this series can be found here.] Starting with my original Internet essay “Walt Disney and His Business Philosophy in Action” as a sketched out framework, I began to fill in the chronology of Walt’s career based on my own assessment of key events and without getting caught up in too much detail. […]