Rocket Bomber - article - bookselling - Monuments of Imagination

[blockquote]
“The great benefit of metaphors is that they simplify… The downside, however, is that a strong metaphor can create a false sense of understanding.

“Metaphors and analogies in general often distort our thinking in hidden ways, by drawing attention disproportionately to what fits and obscuring what doesn’t get highlighted in the analogy. As Einstein noted, ‘we should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.’ The question is whether some of your favorite metaphors for thinking about complex subjects, such as the economy, leadership, joint ventures, team work, or competition actually offer you flawed or simplistic analogies.

“For example, consider the widely used product life-cycle concept in marketing. This biological metaphor suggests that products naturally arise, grow, mature and die, just as individuals do. So if managers wedded to this view see a product’s sales decline for several quarters in a row, they would naturally think that the product is in decline. And once the product strategy is adjusted to reflect this presumed stage of decline, resources may be withdrawn and decline will quickly follow (as a self-fulfilling hypothesis)…

“Procter and Gamble as well as many other companies, however, reject the product life-cycle metaphor as unduly self-limiting. Rather than viewing the product as a single organism proceeding through its life stages, they view the product as the species itself. So, the product must be adapted to changing circumstances to remain viable.”
[/blockquote]

How Metaphors & Analogies Influence Your Thinking : Paul J. H. Schoemaker, Inc. Magazine [www.inc.com], 21 November 2012

Key point: The Product must be adapted to changing circumstances to remain viable.

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I’m a bookseller, and I’ve been writing about bookstores and bookselling for more than 5 years now — so you know this is going to circle back around to that topic eventually. But first, the long diversion…

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The story, almost surely apocryphal (or at the very least, embellished and embroidered over the years) is that the original idea for Disneyland came to Walt on a park bench:

“As Walt Disney sat at a bench, at an amusement park, watching his daughters play, he noticed how ragged and filthy the small amusement park was. He also observed people’s reactions to different rides, and noticed how children’s parents had nothing to do. They would be anxious to go home, while their children were still having fun, and playing.

“This is where Walt was conjuring, and planning a new type of amusement park; one that would be clean, and would have attractions for parents and children together. This was Walt Disney’s idea, which eventually turned to be Disneyland.”

Walt Disney’s Disneyland : undated, unattributed article at JustDisney.com

“Disneyland was Walt’s dream. For years he dreamed and hoped of building a ‘little family park’ where parents could take their children for a day of fun — for both kids and adults. The amusement parks of the 1920’s and 30’s were tawdry, dirty, sleazy places. The short-lived turn-of-the-century family ambiance of Coney Island had turned into a hard-boiled rough and tumble atmosphere. Other parks across the country were no better. By the early 1950’s, Cedarpoint, in Ohio, had begun to pass it’s apex and began a steady decline as did Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Kennywood Park (both of which have experienced tremendous improvements in the 1980’s and ’90’s). Still, Walt felt that it was possible to build a different kind of park…a ‘themed’ park that had fun attractions and a beautiful atmosphere.”

A Brief History of the Disney Parks : undated article by Brian Bennett at MousePlanet.com

“Roy took the detailed drawing with him to ABC and managed to turn the tide. ABC agreed to loan Disney $500,000 and guarantee $4.5 million in loans in return for a one-third ownership in Disneyland and a promise of a weekly Disney television show for the network.

…

“After one full year of rigorous construction demands and a total investment of $17 million, the gates of Disneyland would be opened for its first guests on Sunday, July 17, 1955.”

The Construction of Disneyland : undated, unattributed article at DesigningDisney.com

[The video embedded above is just the first ten minutes, the full broadcast is a little over an hour.]

That $17M in 1954, adjusted for inflation, would be about $144 Million today. Cheap at the price?

For those with an interest, here are a few more links (in addition to the sites cited above) for your perusal:

http://www.justdisney.com/disneyland/history.html
http://micechat.com/224-walt-disney-disneyland/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland

10 years later, Walt would open Disney World

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The Amusement Park was decades old, and a relic of a time before the advances in electronics flooded the market (and the airwaves, and our brains) with entertainment options — some of which (even in the 1930s) didn’t even require one to leave the home. In the 1950s, radio sets were being rapidly supplanted by the new medium of television — and yet, not only did Disney not abandon his idea, he leveraged his existing product, and tapped the new television industry to help fund his dream.

With The Wonderful World of Disney appearing weekly on TV sets, and with an already successful movie studio, Walt didn’t need an amusement park.

Or did he?

C’mon — Mickey Mouse kind of sucks, compared to wisecracking Bugs Bunny. (And both Mickey and Bugs are playing second fiddle these days to a certain Italian/Japanese plumber.) The enduring popularity of Mickey Mouse has quite a bit to do with the magic of the Magic Kingdom. The “theme park” — which was Disney’s innovation — is a step above just a simple amusement park, or the meagre offerings of the state and county fairs. Disney is a destination, and folks plan and save for years to make a trip. Even if the parks didn’t make any money (which they do) I might argue that if Disney hadn’t opened Disneyland in 1955, the company that bears his name would have been little more than a film library being passed around in mergers and sales, like MGM’s in the 1980s and 90s. Instead, Disney became of the major media players, one of only eight or nine globally.

[someone needs to update the Merchants of Cool chart, but it’s still a great resource to link to]

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People tell me books are dead. Or at least, that bookstores are dead, or dying, or obsolete, or at a very minimum: that bookstores are threatened on multiple fronts and there is no way that the Bookstore is going to survive the onslaught.

There are too many other entertainment options — DVDs, video games, and the internet included — so there is no reason to buy a book, and if one must have books, well, it’s easier (and cheaper) to order them online, or to download a digital version.

And that is fine. It even seems inevitable.

I’d also call it a failure of imagination.

The bookstore is the only retailer that people go to for fun, or to ‘kill time’ — and certainly the only retail store parents regularly bring their kids to. A bookstore is not a seller of staple goods (like groceries or gasoline) but neither is it a luxury, specialty shop: some books can be plenty expensive, but for less than $20 you can pick up a novel that will take you hours to finish. Sometimes you can get one for less than $10. Unlike Target or Walmart, customers can waste hours in our bookstores — in fact, instead of casting about desperately for enough foot traffic, the main problem we have as booksellers is that the stores are too full. Most afternoons every seat is taken, the customers are even lounging on the floor, and booksellers spend most of their day reshelving books and just cleaning up after all these folks.

We need to figure out how to monetize this traffic, but getting people to ‘like’ the bookstore is not the problem here.

In the 1930s, Walt Disney looked around at one of the entertainment options of his day and saw a lack. A need. A special opportunity. Others no doubt looked at the same park and came to the conclusion that the amusement park was a dead-end niche, barely popular, and soon to be a historic footnote. Even armed with the idea, though, it took Walt some time to rustle up the money, and to find the requisite space. Disneyland was not an upgrade to an existing park — Walt had the whole thing custom built, and even then it was too small. When it came time for the East Coast version, he bought 30,000 acres. Walt’s park, his dream, was HUGE and while some of the component pieces are the same as other parks, it became something altogether new.

Now go back and re-read my post about buying a shopping mall and converting the entire thing into a bookstore.

From first idea to opening day, Walt Disney took twenty years to finally open up the park he always knew would be a success. He did some other things before, and of course, kept doing those other things after, but the park immediately became the centerpiece of his corporate empire. Look at the Disney logo: the park, not Mickey Mouse, is the public face of the company.

I’m not Walt Disney; I’m just a bookseller. But I can see the opportunity here and I know that there will be a bookstore in the future — A great big bookstore, bigger than anyone has ever seen, and doing some things no one else ever thought a bookstore would do.

I just hope it doesn’t take me 20 years to get there.