Disney Flourished Under Powerhouse Duos Before. Can D’Amaro and Walden Do It Again?

On Wednesday, incoming CEO Josh D’Amaro and soon-to-be elevated President and Chief Creative Officer Dana Walden addressed the company in a global town hall meeting on the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, Calif., and projected the image of a unified, powerhouse pair.

“She’s incredibly creative, incredibly connected with her team, quick to make decisions, and engaged all the time,” D’Amaro said of Walden. “She’s a good person, and I think that partnership is only going to grow stronger.”

Walden, meanwhile, recounted a moment when the pair were in Walt Disney World, outside of Orlando, Fla. It started pouring, as it often does in Florida, and D’Amaro witnessed a young boy, separated from his family, who started to cry.

“It was as if he didn’t have to think about it. He moved quickly, calmly, and with so much care… The team reunited the child with his family so fast, and watching Josh in that moment spoke volumes,” Walden explained. “He cares deeply about every person who walks into our parks. He cares about people.”

Just a few hours into the job, at least officially, and D’Amaro and Walden were establishing themselves as the new duo behind the Walt Disney Company. Together, they will follow in the footsteps of those that came before them – Walt and Roy Disney and, decades later, Michael Eisner and Frank Wells.

The team leadership dynamic has been an essential part of the Walt Disney Company story. The previous executive teams at Disney led to thriving eras for the company, where technological breakthroughs and creative highs were accomplished alongside similarly impressive financial feats. There’s hope that D’Amaro and Walden can reach similar heights – with each contributing mightily to the next phase of Disney supremacy.

Walt & Roy

What we now know as the Walt Disney Co. was co-founded by Walt Disney and his older brother Roy O. Disney and together they ran the company until Walt’s death in 1966. Roy stayed with the company, determined to realize his brother’s dream of an east coast Disney hub and died just a few months after the opening of Walt Disney World.

You’ll often read about the push-and-pull of the brothers as they initially struggled to get their animation studio off the ground and then, in later years, as ambition and technological innovation pulled them into areas like live-action features, television series and theme parks.

“I always have felt that organizations, particularly in a creative enterprise, will tend to have a leadership team as opposed to an individual leader,” explained Disney historian Jeff Kurtti. “I use Walt and Roy as a key example all the time. At its most crude, it’s Walt was the dreamer and Roy was the doer. The Walt and Roy relationship in and of itself is much more complicated because they’re siblings. But it’s a great example.”

Kurtti continued: “I worked in an organization and my motto became do what you do and don’t do what you don’t do. That’s what Walt and Roy got to. Walt could be fascinated with technology or interested in a performer or an idea or an art form and Roy would listen and would filter it through the business. It led to lots of great success and lots of hearty disagreements between the two of them. But balancing those two roles I think is always really efficient.”

If there was a downside to the leadership style of Roy and Walt, Kurtti said, it was that divisions would be drawn in the rank-and-file Disney employees (now known, in Disney-speak, as cast members).

“During Walt and Roy’s lifetime you saw a lot of the staff bifurcating into Walt’s boys and Roy’s boys,” Kurtti said. “That was the downside of that blunt team dynamic.”

But the scope and scale of what Roy and Walt accomplished together was staggering: they made the feature-length animated film, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” almost single-handedly popularized the color television set in American homes and revolutionized the concept of a true theme park, replacing the concept of a dingy amusement park with something more elegant and effortlessly immersive.

There was just as much dreaming as there was doing, clearly, with Roy finding a way to bring to life and finance some of Walt’s wildest flights of fancy. While they might have been more church-and-state, undoubtedly due to the inherent complication of being siblings and business partners, what they were able to do when they worked together is still being felt, all these decades later.

Michael & Frank

After Walt and then Roy passed away, the company was relatively adrift, overseen by Card Walker, Donn Tatum and, later, Walt’s son-in-law Ron Miller. Miller, who was the president and CEO of the company from 1980 to 1984, is a somewhat underrated leader in the history of the company, establishing the Disney Channel, the home video division and Touchstone Pictures, the film label that would release slightly more adult-targeted movies — all divisions that would prove to be major moneymakers in the decades ahead.

But the true next incarnation of the Disney leadership dynamic would come in 1984, when the company tapped Frank Wells as president and chief operating officer and Michael Eisner as chairman and CEO. The two were outsiders – Eisner came from Paramount and Wells advised Warner Bros. after holding a series of executive positions at the company. Their appointment came at a particularly fraught time for the company, as it had just survived a greenmail attempt by corporate raiders, and had to be approved by some of the company’s biggest shareholders, including Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew, and his partner Stanley Gold.

“All too often when new management takes over, they arrogantly assume that they know best and disparage their predecessors,” Eisner recounted in his memoir “Work in Progress.” “Frank and I agreed immediately that Disney had a legacy which it was critical to protect. The company’s past wasn’t an accident and while it had struggled in recent years, there were still very talented people in the ranks.”

With Eisner and Wells, gone were the firm lines between business and creative minds.

“Roy and Walt were much more bifurcated but Michael and Frank were intersections and parallels a lot of the time because Michael did have a savvy business perspective and Frank was not without his great relationships with creative people,” said Kurtti. “It was almost like Michael and Frank were another step beyond Walt and Roy, because Michael and Frank understood each others’ roles but Michael was very much the visionary guy, Frank was the taking-care-of-business guy, but he was not without vision.”

Together, Wells and Eisner rejuvenated the studio’s dormant animation division (with the help of Jeffrey Katzenberg, whom Eisner recruited from Paramount), invested heavily in the theme parks, and made Disney a company that was hip. The story goes that when they took over the company, there were several major studios … and Disney. They transformed it into the studio.

And it’s unclear how far they could have gone had Wells not died in a helicopter accident on April 3, 1994, just a few weeks before “The Lion King” would open in theaters and become a record-breaking blockbuster.

“In my personal experience, Michael and Frank always presented as a team. You look at the annual reports, you look at the public facing communication, they were always presented as Michael and Frank,” said Kurtti. “Within the company, I always felt exactly the same way. Michael knew that Frank made him better.”

Not that they were always on the same wavelength.

“Michael and Frank were complete opposites. But Michael knew the business community and Frank knew the creative community. They could trade things off. Frank was very buttoned up. His staff called him Mr. Wells,” said a former Disney exec. “Frank had the choke chain, Michael was the dreamer. They had a good double act together.”

This executive also compared D’Amaro and Walden to Wells and Eisner and Roy and Walt. “What has happened is that, most of the time, it was a good thing,” this executive said of the history of Disney double acts.

Josh & Dana

After Eisner was forced out in 2005, in part due to a grassroots effort by Roy E. Disney called “Save Disney,” Bob Iger, a former weatherman who had joined the company as an ABC executive following the company’s purchase of ABC Capitol Cities in 1995, took over. Iger ran the company more like a portfolio manager than a creative executive, acquiring Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and the 21st Century Fox assets, giving Disney the Fox film library (and legacy properties like “The Simpsons”) ahead of the launch of Disney+.

The first time that Iger retired, on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, he handed things over to Bob Chapek, a veteran of the consumer products and parks divisions. It was a disaster; Chapek radically restructured the company and clashed with creatives (Scarlett Johansson famously sued the company over profits from “Black Widow”). The board convened and decided to fire Chapek, bringing back Iger for another stint.

Now, he’s settled on an executive duo to follow his historic run. This time, he’s not taking any chances.

The jury is still out on D’Amaro and Walden’s compatibility as creative executives, considering they don’t assume their new roles until next month have only truly been partners for a couple of days. (You have undoubtedly have had milk in your refrigerator longer than they’ve been a team.)

But Kurtti sees their dynamic as echoing Eisner and Wells in some key ways – like Eisner and Wells they both have strong footholds in the creative community and both have sharp business acumen. The trick will be aligning their strengths and creating something really unique.

“It’ll be a case of interweaving their two breadths of experience into a team cohesion. I don’t think that’s a problem,” Kurtti said. “Ideally they will combine talents that will create a team that is much more aligned to what Michael and Frank were.”

There is also the matter of the complexities of the company’s culture and its legacy, two key elements of the Disney brand that, by all accounts, D’Amaro is keenly aware of and invested in.

“Michael didn’t know how it worked but knew it was really important – he protected legacy and culture stuff,” Kurtti said. It was important to Eisner even though he couldn’t grasp exactly why.

“There are very few brands in the world that are 100 years old and still as meaningful and impactful as The Walt Disney Company,” D’Amaro said at the town hall. “We are 100 years old, but we’re 100 years young as well, willing to embrace new technology, new creators and new markets. That willingness to change and take risks is what keeps the brand going, and it’s something I intend to continue to push on.”

We wondered then, since their dynamic does seem to echo, at least superficially, the team-up of Eisner and Wells and to a lesser degree Walt and Roy, how Kurtti was feeling about the newly appointed heads of the Walt Disney Company.

Kurtti paused, then answered.

“This feels good to me,” he said.

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