Lee Kitchen has 32 years of experience at the Walt Disney Corporation across multiple roles, including Innovation Catalyst. In that role, Lee trained groups within Disney on the design thinking process, and he conducted many ideas sessions across the company. He branched out from Disney five years ago to found his business, Magical Dude Consulting. Lee delivered the opening keynote at the 2022 Leading Reliability conference in Clearwater, Florida, where he spoke about the elements of success when it comes to new idea development. Lee recently spoke with Editor in Chief Thomas Wilk about how to foster greater creativity with your team.
PS: I'm really excited to talk with you today. This is great. and we get to continue our conversation that we started last week at the Leading Reliability show.
LK: I had a blast there, you know, anytime I go into a keynote like that, especially in a business that I don't know a whole lot about, I'm a little bit nervous because I don't know how I'll be received, but I think that in the audience, there was a lot of people there who know they're creative, but on a day-to-day basis, people don't tell them that they're creative, but they save the business, you know, so they have to come up with ideas all the time.
So it was really nice to chat with some other people after the session, because I think some of the principles that I was talking about really kind of hit home with them.
PS: You really did leave an impact. Every now and then at the following sessions, people would say, “oh, that's kind of what Lee was saying about how to socialize your message and how to, how to celebrate the wins”. You left a real mark. Let's start the podcast, with a question about you and your work. Could you tell us a bit more about yourself, what you do, some of the projects you've worked on?
LK: Sure, sure, sure. So I was basically a Disney lifer, so ever since I was six years old, I dreamed about working for Walt Disney World. I grew up in Northern California and when I, when I was in 1985, actually, I turned 18, I graduated high school and I moved to Florida, like all in the same three-day period. When I started work at Epcot, it was actually The Land pavilion. I told you I started in the Kitchen Cabaret, which is a classic attraction. It's no longer there, Soaring is in its place now.
I had fulfilled my lifelong dream at 18. And man, what is it? It was such a great ride. I started in operations, just helping people on the rides and attractions. I got to be a Guest Relations tour guy, which means I hosted all of like my favorite celebrities, including Van Halen and Duran Duran and things like that, just basically riding rides and eating at restaurants for a living for four years. It was awesome.
And then, I took that into a professional capacity and I started my job in marketing, in the early nineties. Disney marketing went through kind of a Renaissance where they started thinking about it more as brands. So they started basically kind of following a Procter & Gamble model of branding. I was one of the first cast members on the brand management team, the Brand Management Strategy and Events team. I got to start events like the Epcot Food and Wine Festival. I was at the very first year, very beginning of that, which was an awesome thing to do.
I helped with the Millennium Celebration, and then I was selected to be a brand manager for Disney Cruise line. And I'm not quite sure if you experienced that brand before. It's basically your love for Disney plus the luxury of a cruise ship, plus an amazing setting, and it's such a great product. I loved working there because every single person I worked with was just as passionate as I was about the brand. And, I got to sail 120 times, so definitely not complaining, it was a tough gig, right? Having the cruise ship as my work backdrop.
From there I went to, to start this, this job as an Innovation Catalyst and the job was advertised as: “We need someone to help us come up with ideas.” So I thought they were hiring me because I love being in an ideator and I love creating ideas, right? Well, no, they hired me so I could facilitate other people to come apply this. I had no idea how to facilitate at the time. I was totally making that stuff up, but actually they kind of were as well. A couple of years in, they actually got serious about it, they hired us a vice-president and then he hired a company from Accenture called What If, and What If taught us this amazing design thinking system, we called it The Toy Box at the time. It was kind of my first introduction to design thinking. And then I joined this awesome creativity community where I would share best practices with other people who do the same thing. And man, it just grew, my toolbox of awesome stuff, not only with this stuff I learned at Disney, but also with the creativity community.
So after I left Disney in 2017, I took this niche talent and I figured there's a lot of companies that don't have people like me on their roster, and I was instantly popular with those companies because they need someone to lead idea sessions, they need somebody to teach them to be more innovative and creative. So I've been in business now for five years, and they say once you hit the five year mark, you're doing good, so I feel good about that.
PS: Oh, that's awesome, congratulations in the business. You’ve got a lot of people who are listening right now, who are nodding their heads to a bunch of things you said. First off, we have a lot of folks in the maintenance and reliability field who transitioned from one to the other.
Oftentimes they'll go to sleep on Friday a maintenance tech, and they’ll wake up and they'll be reliability on Monday, and the company is not sure what that means, but they know they need someone who wants to be put in charge of more proactive work management.
Let's focus right away on something that was central to your message during the keynote, which is why it's so important to recognize that we are all creative people. That's something which I did hear definitely also repeated over the week. You really drove that home in an inspiring way. The field of industrial asset management, our core readership, it's full of people who like to solve problems. They wouldn't have gotten into engineering if they didn't like solving problems, yet these workers, they face a couple of different challenges. Number one, they only occasionally get credit for demonstrating that quality (of creativity). They can get ground down when it comes to, okay, you do your routes and the machines, you check the condition and there's not a whole lot of room for creative thinking, you sort of follow the instructions.
LK: Plus, it’s probably reactive a lot too. When things break down, they have to be there to help. Right.
PS: That's it. And people who want to move out in front of that reactive mode often get stifled because it's tough to get time on the machine sometimes, when production rules and output is king. So general question: What would you say to those teams in order to keep them inspired while helping them message better with other people in the organization about their own creativity?
LK: Yeah, I think a lot of times when people equate creativity, they equate it to people who have creative in their title. So if you're not a creative art director or creative writer or whatever it is, then you're not creative.
Well, of course, everybody in the organization is creative. You heard me say that my finance manager was one of the most creative people in my realm because they would always figure out what to do with that budget by the end of the year, really creatively.
I talked a little bit about competence and structure. Creativity, you have to exercise it, it's a muscle. And so when you think about those, like in marketing, they're exercising that every day they have to come up with ideas for ads and things like that on a daily basis. So I think just having the mindset of, hey, I have to start with creativity, but I want to add to it by collaborating together, I think would be a good message for them.
You guys have to partner with different styles of people throughout the day, like people who do different things. And I think that partnership, and that collaboration leads to that next big idea, always. I wish in my mind's eye, I wish it was more of a collaborative effort, where they kind of work together saying, Hey, we have to do this. How might we make sure it's best for both of us kind of thing?
So I would say keep exercising that creativity, keep practicing it. I talked a lot about fresh input, going outside your realm and outside your organization is really important just to see how other people are solving challenges. But again, collaborating with those closest to the problem is important, it's an important part of the step. It's not just me and you, it's us doing this, right? It's we.
PS: Yeah, a couple of times, sessions later in the week, people joked about the fact that maintenance and operations often goes head to head. And at one point. I think it was Shon (Isenhour), when he was presenting, he asked everyone in the room to raise your hand if you're in maintenance and about half the hands went up; raise your hand if you’re in reliability, more hands went up; raise your hand if you're in operations, and one hand in the whole room. Everyone kind of everyone kind of chuckled because we're like, well, that's part of the problem, right? Is that you get isolated, sometimes people you have to talk to are the ones who aren't in the room when these sessions are going on.
LK: Yeah. I found when I would host brainstorms specifically, I would want to make sure that whatever we were seeking to solve - so in my realm, it was a market marketing situation, but still marketing affects the operations team, it affects the merchandise team, it affects the custodial team. So I would invite a representative from those teams to join us, even though marketing wasn't their expertise.
I wanted them early on to have a stake in what we were doing, because when it comes time for, like I told you about a principle called “assisters or resistors,” right? I like to invite those resistors early on because I want them to have a piece of it, have a stake in it, so they have a little bit of ownership to it when it goes live. There's nothing worse than coming up with an idea in isolation and then going to your legal team and your HR team afterwards, because they most likely don't understand how we got there, and so the first thing they're going to do is try to poke holes in it. So I say, let's involve those people early on, because again, they will help collaborate with you. And when it comes time for execution, they will own it more and they will become those assistors to help you bring that idea to life.
And I know it's probably difficult in your, in that environment. You know, there's probably standard meetings where those teams get together. Let's set aside time just for, hey, this problem might come up, let's talk about solving it now, before we get to the reactive part of it, right? Let's do that part together and have input on it together. I know that sounds like kind of an ideal situation. You know, you can always seek for the best, right?
PS: It's funny, I've heard stories from people in maintenance who have reached out to the finance teams. You mentioned the finance person was in the meeting. Finance is, weirdly, oftentimes reliability people's best friend, because finance knows the exact cost of being exposed to greater risk. So when people are looking at the industrial assets, they're trying to figure out what is the risk potential of letting this operate two more months, or four months without certain work finance can help them out and say, okay, let's quantify the risk.
LK: You can't argue with facts, and that's why I always talk about, how important it is, the step before you get to ideation in the design thinking room was called empathy, right? It's walking in your end users and your consumers shoes. And what I always tell my groups when we're working on this is, trust facts over assumption. You can make intuition later, but exhaust all the facts you have because it's hard to argue with data. Everybody has an assumption about what's going to happen when that critical moment happens, but if somebody in your organization has data that shows, “hey, actually that's not going to happen, here's how we see it, so we do have an opportunity here,” that's a beautiful thing. But the trick of that is, everybody has to have that a-ha moment together. Do it as a collaborative group, get that data, throw it out on the table, make connections with it and decide together. “Well, the data is showing us this, so we should proceed this way.” And that way we, again, we all agree on it. We all have those epiphany moments.
We had a great consumer insights team at Disney and they were at one time they wanted it to be the gurus of information, so they held it close to their chest and it was just like, “well, wait a minute. These people that are working on it, we need to be inspired to, so let us go along a little bit of the journey with you.” We found after we talked them into that, that the end product came out richer because they had the inspiration too.
I say, “how can data be inspiring?” Dude, sometimes you learn something you didn't already know, and you had this huge assumption about it and it totally debunks your assumption. And you're like, wow, that possibilities just open up when you found that out. So I say, trust the data. use your intuition if you have to, but don't just rely on assumptions. And do it together!
PS: That's excellent points all around. especially not holding all your ideas and data close to the vest. People who do that, they may have tribal knowledge, but I find that those who share effectively, suddenly they don't give their power up suddenly because they become leaders. They happen to become more powerful.
LK: Yeah. I found that. I found that I did a lot of sessions where I basically had to throw things over the fence. I never saw a lot of the things that I helped brainstorm until three or four years later. I'm like, oh, there's, Disney's Magical Express. Oh, there's FastPass. There's all this stuff. And I knew I had a part of that, but I had to let go early because I wasn't really an owner of it. There was another group that was going to be an owner, but I felt good enough that I was part of the process.
I think letting go has a lot to do with it too, knowing that the world is still going to be a better place because you had that influence. I know that it's a tough gig, especially when our salaries rely on it. So a lot of folks, when I worked in yellow shoes, those art directors, when they came up with the idea, they were compensated for it, right? They got bonuses and things like that. It was hard for them to share their ideas because of that. But I still think that equality of all of our work will be better if we collaborate together.
PS: You know, Lee, another point you made during your keynote also stood out to me, which is the point of the pitching part of ideas is really important. I'm a recovering gifted kid who was really good at school, and I kind of had to figure out how to be good at the rest of life too. I always figured, isn't the answer enough? And the answer is no, it's just one of those lessons solving the immediate problem, fixing the machine, that's only part of the process. The best, most effective solutions also involve the pitch, inviting others to share your vision. So maybe you could talk a little bit about how that works.
LK: Yeah. I was really passionate about this specifically in my last couple of years at Disney, I worked for the Yellow Shoes Creative Group, which was the advertising arm of Disney, and we were responsible for advertising Disney Parks around the world.
The structure of basically, was there was a guru senior leader, right? And we all kind of bow to the guru senior leader and they expelled their opinions on stuff. What really floored me sometimes is a lot of art directors who usually led the process would go in on the day of the pitch, after we had worked three months on something, right? We did a lot of empathy work. We got people together for ideation sessions. We finally came to the stuff. And the first thing that they would do was self-deprecate the ideas and be like, well, these aren't really the best compared to whatever.
I'm like, dude, we just, we just spent three months working on this! So I'm a really big passionate person on that. That pitch is so important because you just spent a lot of time, and you spend a lot of effort. Why would you fall short at the very end of the process on that? I always compare it to the Shark Tank. You pitch this like your life depends on it, no matter how big or small it is.
The other important thing is I, and through my creativity training, there's a principle that talks about how people have different learning styles. And, I think they've kind of debunked the original part of it, but the principle of it is still good. People like receiving information auditorily, sounds, like when you're reading and things are in reading texts visually, so you like seeing charts and pictures and things like. And, kinesthetically, which means you have to see and touch and things like that.
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So what I say is most important is when you're pitching is to make sure that you realize that your audience all has different styles. So don't just stop at showing one graph or XL spreadsheet or a chart. You need to tell the story. We're all connected through storytelling throughout history, right? So telling a story is a really key part of that, and bringing your audience in that you're pitching to basically try to put them in the end-user shoes.
I don't know if I told the story at the, at the, session last week, but I talk about how the founders of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? The first British version, they were selling it to the producers and in order to really bring it to life for them, they actually went and withdrew $10,000 or £10,000 and laid it on the table and actually played the game and moved the money to the person for each stage of the game, like, here's all this money and you're going to possibly win it!
They really brought it to life with their folks. So I tell people think about ways to bring your stuff to life beyond words. And again, don't skimp on that story because it's really important.
If it doesn't work for some reason, though, I say there's no bad idea, just bad timing. I told you the example about the Star Wars Intergalactic Food And Wine festival: my boss and I, we tried to pitch that at least 10 times to different leadership. Every time the leadership would change, we would pitch it again. We didn't know that they were busy building Star Wars Galaxy's End! We were unknown to that, but yeah, there's always a good time for another idea some other time. If it doesn't work and I say, just put them in the hopper.
So, I guess my message here is, keep your story-telling game high, and don't skimp. Make sure that you really, really bring that to life at the end, because that's a lot of work, right? You don't want to let work slide, and if it doesn't work, yes, it's nice failure to put onto your belt to learn for later. It’s a tough gig working that hard on a project and then, and then not pitching it right, you know?
PS: Right, right, to analogize to some of the folks I've talked to in maintenance, it's learning the new technology, for example, learning how to use an ultrasound probe, and you finally find a fault in a bearing, and you know the bearing is going to go bad in about two months. It's not enough just to report that you found XYZ. As you just said, tell the story, right? Explain what happened, explain what the technology is bringing to the situation, and bring what you just did to life for people. Especially if you're meeting some resistance, and people don't want to listen to it. If you've done the work, and there's no resulting action then was the work even done?
LK: Yeah, the fun thing that I would do, to disarm executives specifically is instead of pitching at a conference table – cause you know, when you sit behind the conference table, it's where decisions get made, it's like the gavel kind of thing – I would purposely get them out of that space and I would walk the walls with them.
And I wouldn't present the actual end thing first. I would start with the story on how we got there and I would bring them along the story. So by the time we got to the idea or the solution they were already bought in, because we justified it based on consumer data and based on the places that we went for ideation and based on how we developed it. I found that adoption and basically saying yes to ideas was much easier once they had that story.
And again, I had them stood up and walking the walls, so there wasn't time to sit down behind the desk. It was like, we're all in, all throughout the way. And what I also found is that they would build, they would not automatically say no, they would build and say yes, they would do the “yes-and” more to build the idea even stronger. So that's one suggestion I would make, is get get people out of that conference room setting.
PS: Well, let's hear some more stories from your Disney career too, a 30+ year career. You and I are both fans of EPCOT from the eighties, like you said, I miss the Kitchen Kabaret, I miss Horizons, I even miss the Exxon ride.
LK: Universe Of Energy! I worked there too! I could not wait to get there to wear the polyester outfits!! I was also a huge Star Wars and Star Trek fan, Star Trek, specifically, you know, they wore those uniforms. And, I remember I wore this outfit that was affectionately known as the potato sack. It was a tunic that had a little gray belt, and it's what we wore. If you went in between Horizons and the General Motors exhibit I'm forgetting what it was called.
PS: Communicore East? Communicore West?
LK: No, it was a predecessor to Test Track.
PS: World Of Motion!
LK: Yes, World Of Motion! And also we wore them when we worked at World Key Information, which was the direct video reservation system. And I loved wearing that outfit. Everybody else hated them outfit, I don't know why, I absolutely loved it.
I was a really lucky person. Nt only did I work, at some really great places, but I was lucky enough to work with some of the best leaders and people at Disney. And when I left, I don't miss the day-to-day political stuff, but I definitely miss the people that I worked with. I'd say 65 to 75% of the people that I worked with were as passionate as I was about that product. I don't know about you, but when you work for people that really love their jobs, it's such a better environment to work in. Nobody's complaining, and you don't have the naysayers, it's just a total pleasure, so I loved doing that.
As far as my tour guide years, I will never forget them because like I said, I was wearing a plaid vest and helping people on rides. There was one tour where it was a rich guy who owned a shipping line and he had meetings all week, and he wanted me to entertain his teenage kids. So we played video games and rode the little boats and ate hamburgers whole week long. I had a tour with Rick Dees, Disco Duck, he would broadcast from there in the morning, but he didn't want to go to the park, so all we did was play golf. I basically played golf for a living all week long.
It was a really great gig. And when I hit the marketing area, I was involved in a lot of great events. The millennium event was one of the biggest, best things that I had done at the time and what we pulled off for that with Tapestry Of Nations and Illuminations, it was just so cool to be a part of that because we had the most people we’d ever had in Epcot, like 85,000 to 90,000 people in the park and everybody was just happy and getting along. It was just such a great thing to be a part of.
The next decade I was involved in opening the Hong Kong park, which was amazing. I spent three months over there helping them train, design-thinking. I was part of the opening team for Shanghai Disneyland and everything caved in there, we didn't have enough resources to do what we needed to do, but man, we pulled that off.
I don't know if you are a big Disney fan, but if ever see a special event at Disney, there is this group of people in the background that are working feverously to get this thing done. And like you said, it's operations, and it's marketing and it's people who don't normally work together or don't normally see eye to eye, all having to work together. We have to get this one job done, and to see it come to life is like the most amazing thing, because it's a wonder of the world, watching the Disney event machine do something, not only are there the most talented people in the business doing it, but it's what we end up pulling off, you would never know the struggles we have in the background. When you see the end, you know, you see the TV show that we put on, or you see the advertising, whatever, you'd never realize the struggles, but it was a pleasure being involved in that stuff.
When we were at Shanghai, we were about 10 minutes from the Tron rollercoaster, and so at lunch, we would bolt down there and we had a buddy of ours that would put us on the Tron coaster. So we got the ride the Tron coaster every day, every day, it was so great. What a great experience, plus, like I said, I worked with some of the most. people, I actually partner with some of them. Now I work with a group called the Magic Makers Group, which is a bunch of former Disney executives. All of this, this level of expertise and people that I work with is, when we go in and we help someone be more Disney-like, and we help people have a better customer service experience, these are people that change the business, that are helping these other people change their businesses, and it's just a huge pleasure.
I'm a lucky guy, I get to work with some amazing people, and now that I own my own company, I get to choose those people, so I don't have to work for people that drive me crazy anymore! I don't have to work for dispassionate people! I work for people who believe in what they do, and it's just, it's a pleasure man, all across the board.
PS: There's a lot of folks who like changing plant jobs once in a while, because, they just want new challenge in a new industry, they'll go from like, say a food processing to high-tech back to pulp and paper. And it's that kind of seeking out like-minded people to make the job experience that much better.
LK: It's a really great thing. Actually. My sister-in-law who is one of my best work friends, her name is Emily Nichols, who you should put on your roster to interview. She is a double engineer, chemical engineering and structural engineering, I believe, and she worked on the plant floor for Quaker and for things like that. And now she basically teaches technical people, more human skills and she just, she loves it. It's a really perfect niche for her because she's so outgoing. And so she was always that person on the floor that was over enthusiastic and, you know, trying to get people going.
It only takes one, you get one person to be enthusiastic like that, and it's infectious around everybody else. That's why I always say positive thinking and open-mindedness is really important because it's hard to come up with ideas when we're our brain is in that state. You know, if we start thinking positive, then possibilities are endless, so let's exhaust those possibilities. And then we can go back to our ideas and they say them, but at the time, let's just think of as many as we can first before we go destroying them, you know? I think actually the people at the Leading Reliability conference really liked that, that the part about, I taught about cultivation and greenhousing, and that is, we have a tendency to naysay ideas right out of the gate, and we think we're being helpful. But if we're together trying to solve a problem, let's just agree to stay in that abstract space for whatever amount of time, and then after we make that list, then we can make choices. Let's not cut the stuff off right as we say it, you know? We don't know where it's going to lead to.
PS: The exercise you ran, it left an impression on all of our teams. We were put in small groups and told to think of, what was it, how do you get an elephant to jump out of an airplane? One person had to talk about how that was possible. And the other person had to talk about reasons that it was not possible, and there was, there was a real morale drop in the room the more all the negativity came out. Then you reversed it and said, okay, now be more positive, and suddenly the whole room started buzzing.
LK: I have very good examples of Disney of where we overturn that. If I have just a quick second to tell you, back in, I think it was the late 2000s, we did an event called What Will You Celebrate? And it was basically around bringing your celebration to Disney. One of the things that we did during that promotion was, we gave away a night at the castle suite in Cinderella castle. Now, if you were aware, there was never a castle suite at Cinderella castle. And it was because the 20 years that we tried to put a castle suite in there, we would always get back from operations, merchandise, whatever, all the reasons that we couldn't do it. We had whole binders full of reports on reasons from the engineers to whoever telling us how we couldn't do it.
Well, we got everybody together. At one point we were like, okay, we need a really big piece for this promotion. We know that we can't do this based on all this stuff, so we're going to put this away now and let's just talk about how we could do it. And we wouldn't let anybody say how we can't because we told them we already have the data there. We had two or three sessions, and what, six months later we had a castle suite. That was a huge, huge thing to overcome, and actually it was one of the most popular promotions that we had done, and it always garners a lot of media, which is the reason we did it.
And we were giving it away! We weren't selling it. So it was just fun to listen to the people who got the opportunity to do it, because it was just such a cool thing. So the impossible is possible. I'm telling you right now, it's hard for you to think about a future state where you know that you have achieved that, but you have to actually imagine that future state in order to get there.
And of course all the, you know, all the people who have changed businesses have done that. They've imagined a world that we were not thinking of yet, right?
PS: Correct, and for everyone listening, who has been told “no” to your reliability program in the past, or whatever technology you want to do, the next meeting you have, tell them to put those binders aside. Like Lee said, we have the data on why it's not possible. Let's focus on what's possible.
LK: Yeah, and let's just spend a little bit of time, you know, remember at the beginning of the session, I did that when I call the How To Be’s, this is how I'd like you to behave in the next hour. I find that when I, when I facilitate a group of adults and I say, hey, I would love for you to behave this way, we're going to put away the nay-saying, we're going to put away this, we're going to do it later tomorrow. No problem. We'll give you an opportunity to do it, but for now let's just be in this space. And it works! It really works, it's worked for me for the last 10 years, at least.
PS: Well, let's end with your passion for eclectic music. What's on your radar these days?
LK: So, I have a DJ feed that I do every week. I started it because it served my own creativity. You know, my job is to bring creativity and get people out of their creative shelves, but I need to also keep fresh input. So, back in the day, when I worked at Future World, I used to host these amazing parties and I'd always have like nightclub level music going on at these parties. And I started bringing my stuff portable to parties that I didn't host. I knew they wouldn't have good music so I’d just bring my stuff there. I ended up deejaying weddings and stuff like that until about 2007.
When COVID hit, we were stuck in our houses and I was like, well, I want some creativity. So I bought a DJ controller and I started messing around with it. And then my buddy was broadcasting on Twitch. He's like, you should do something on Twitch, and so I started a Friday night DJ show and it's been two years. Every Friday I get together probably about 20 to 40 people of varying walks of life, and what I do is I play really familiar music in a different way. So I troll the internet for different mixes of different styles of music. And so I will mix together Bollywood music with dubstep music, with heavy metal, with whatever, and I basically find a beat to all of it. It's basically like going to a nightclub, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
I preach a lot about getting fresh input, so when I invite you to join us, I want you to shed your purism, put that aside and just be open. And I just tell everyone just dance like nobody's watching, right? A lot of people will put us on in their backyard while they sit around and enjoy the sunset. A lot of folks will do that while they're finishing the rest of their weeks at work or something like that. So it's a really great audience and it's a fun gig.
My wife Sarah is our chat moderator. Her name is Pickles Beat, so she makes sure she keeps the chat going. And, I play some trivia graphics in the background and stuff like that, so it's a lot of fun. Every now and then we have theme nights, I've had a couple of movie thing nights where I will play movie soundtracks in like dance house versions of movie soundtracks. New Year's Eve is always popular because I DJ for six hours, and do Happy New Year across four different time zones.
You talked about the inspiration report, that is a monthly thing I do with a Disney friend of mine named Shawn, and basically we gather together 15 different things happening out in the world in a new innovative way. And what I ask is people just come in with an open mind and understand the principle behind what they're doing, and maybe they can apply it to whatever it is they're working on. It's just basically a way to inspire people to think differently.