Gabrielle Russon
The leader of Disney’s multibillion-dollar theme parks remembered one meeting early in his career where the agenda topic wasn’t sexy or glamorous. If anything, it was downright smelly.
A young Josh D’Amaro joined finance, marketing and operations and creative — “everybody was there,” D’Amaro said — to discuss moving trash cans for a construction project happening at Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A.
“I remember sitting in that room thinking, ‘Who cares about trash cans?’” D’Amaro said late Wednesday as he spoke at the Inbound 2024 conference in Boston. “Well, as it turns out, we do.”
D’Amaro hyped up the company’s storytelling abilities and intense focus on the small details — not even the trash cans are overlooked — as the company builds ambitious expansions devoted to Disney Villains, Cars, Encanto and other Disney films.
D’Amaro is the recognizable Chair of Disney theme parks whose name has been thrown out in media reports as a possible heir to CEO Bob Iger.
“We’re embarking on a bold new path forward with some of the most ambitious investments that our business has ever made,” D’Amaro told the crowd during his talk, which was livestreamed. “We’re not following a formula as we bring these experiences to life. This isn’t a rinse and repeat at Disney, great storytelling is part of our DNA, and we expect our entire team to be the best storytellers that they can be.”
Don’t sweat the small stuff? Nope. That’s not the Disney way, D’Amaro said.
“You have to sweat the details. That is the North Star for Imagineers,” D’Amaro said he highlighted how Imagineers used the original R2D2 to create tracks in the ground when Disney opened up its Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in Orlando and California.
D’Amaro brought up the company’s history with the man himself, Walt Disney, and his brother, Roy, who were the creative and financial geniuses behind The Walt Disney Co.
In modern times, D’Amaro credited the Imagineers for bringing the impossible to light — like building a Spiderman animatronic robot that can fly 60 feet in the air, untethered. Their pursuit to innovate and take risks is what sets the company apart from its competitors, he touted.
“At the same time, I challenge my team not to let our history be the gravity that holds us in place,” D’Amaro said. “We should never rest on past successes. We should always look for the next big idea, the next big challenge. If we’d always relied on what worked in the past, The Walt Disney Co., I don’t think, would exist today.”
