“It’s time to take risks,” Mr. Fielding said he told them. “When consumers are ready to spend again, we will be ready.”
The involvement of Mr. Jobs, the Apple chief executive who joined the Disney board with the 2006 acquisition of Pixar, is particularly notable. For the first time, Mr. Jobs’s fingerprints can be seen on Disney strategy, in the same way that he influenced the look and feel of Apple’s own immensely popular retail chain. While Mr. Jobs did not personally toil on the Imagination Park concept, he pushed Disney to move far past a refurbishment.
“Dream bigger — that was Steve’s message,” said Andy Mooney, chairman of Disney Consumer Products."
Brooks Barnes, "Disney’s Retail Plan Is a Theme Park in Its Stores," New York Times, 12 Oct 2009,
www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/business/media/13disney.html.
