Walt Disney on Corporate Governance

The 1941 Disney animators' strike grew from anger at pay inequities and privileges inside a non-union workplace whose animators nonetheless enjoyed the best pay and working conditions in the industry. Disney had originally directed twenty percent of short cartoon profits into employee bonuses, then suspended the practice. Snow White's success financed a new, larger studio in Burbank built with borrowed money, where a rigid hierarchy restricted the restaurant, gymnasium, and steam room to the studio's top writers and animators, who also received larger and more comfortable offices, while individual departments were segregated into separate buildings and heavily policed by administrators. The pay structure was disorganized, with some high-ranking animators earning three hundred dollars a week while other employees made as little as twelve; animator Willis Pyle recalled no rhyme or reason to the differences between men doing the same job side by side. Staff were also made to sign documents certifying a forty-hour week while their actual hours ran far longer, and they resented Disney taking credit for their work.

The Reedy Creek Improvement District, established by the Florida legislature at Disney's behest during planning for Walt Disney World, gave the company governing authority over 39.06 square miles spanning Orange and Osceola counties, including the cities of Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista. The Reedy Creek Improvement Act, signed by Governor Claude Kirk on May 12, 1967, created the district and its two cities, which handled land-use regulation, planning, building codes, drainage, waste treatment, utilities, roads, bridges, fire protection, and emergency medical services, answering to county and state authority only for property taxes and elevator inspections. The EPCOT city concept was the major selling point in the lobbying effort, but the governmental structure outlived the city it was built for by more than half a century. In 2022 the legislature moved to dissolve the district, an act widely read as retaliation for the company's opposition to a state education law, and in 2023 it was renamed the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District with governor-appointed supervisors, ending Disney's sole control of the jurisdiction.

Walt Disney formed Walt Disney, Inc. on December 16, 1952, with an engineering division tasked with designing Disneyland, then renamed it WED Enterprises in 1953 after objections from his brother Roy and from potential stockholders to a personal company carrying the Disney name; the initials stood for Walter Elias Disney. Formed to carry the park's design work outside the studio's formal structure, WED became the creative unit where a staff of illustrators, architects, engineers, lighting designers, show writers, and graphic designers planned the park, a group that became known as Imagineers. Headquartered in Glendale, California, the unit grew so integral to operations that Walt Disney Productions purchased it on February 5, 1965, acquiring the WED Enterprises name with it, and it was renamed Walt Disney Imagineering in January 1986. Disney filed for a trademark on the term Imagineering in 1989, claiming first use in 1962. The organization remains the research and development arm that designs and builds every Disney park and attraction worldwide.

To avoid a burst of land speculation, Walt Disney Productions used dummy corporations to acquire 27,443 acres beginning in April 1964, with tongue-in-cheek names like the Ayefour Corporation, Latin-American Development and Management Corporation, and Reedy Creek Ranch Corporation, later merged into the Compass East Corporation; some of the original names are now memorialized on windows above Main Street, U.S.A. Real estate agents unaware of their client's identity negotiated large tracts for as little as one hundred dollars an acre, much of it swamp whose owners were happy to sell, and Disney's team paid Tufts University fifteen thousand dollars for the mineral rights to prevent any sub-surface development. Recording of deeds was delayed until a large portion of the land was under contract. Rumors credited NASA, Ford, the Rockefellers, and Howard Hughes until Orlando Sentinel editor Emily Bavar, struck by Disney's stunned reaction when asked about the purchases, correctly predicted the project in October 1965. Governor Haydon Burns confirmed it days later, calling it the greatest attraction in Florida's history.

Difficulties obtaining funding for Disneyland prompted Disney to investigate new fundraising methods, and he decided to create a television show named after the park, broadcast on the then-fledgling ABC network, which in return agreed to help finance construction. For its first five years the park was owned by Disneyland, Inc., a joint venture of Walt Disney Productions, Walt Disney personally, Western Publishing, and ABC, with many shops along Main Street, U.S.A. rented to outside companies. The structure gave the studio outside capital without conventional bank debt and gave ABC guaranteed family programming, and by 1960 Walt Disney Productions had bought out all other shareholders. The partnership seeded a lasting relationship that culminated in the Walt Disney Company's acquisition of ABC in the mid-1990s. For Disney the arrangement solved the recurring problem of his career: financiers who controlled his projects also controlled their risks, and since Oswald he had understood that ownership, not participation, determined who collected the value.