Walt Disney

Walter Elias Disney was born on 5 December 1901 in Chicago and died on 15 December 1966 in Burbank, aged sixty-five, of circulatory collapse caused by lung cancer. The founding crisis of his career came in February 1928: his distributor Charles Mintz refused a budget increase, revealed that he owned the rights to Disney's successful character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and had already hired away most of his animators. Disney lost the character and the staff at once.

What he did about it was create a replacement with Ub Iwerks. The first Mickey Mouse short, Plane Crazy, could not find a distributor in May 1928. The third, Steamboat Willie, was made as the first post-produced sound cartoon, and the synchronisation of picture and sound was novel enough to make it a sensation.

What was Disney's Folly?

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He began it in 1934, and the industry consensus was that audiences would not sit through a feature-length cartoon and that it would bankrupt him. It ran three times over budget at 1.5 million dollars, and became the highest-grossing film of 1938. The pattern repeated: a five-week animators' strike in 1941, triggered by financial pressure and his own management style, permanently damaged his relationships with the staff who stayed and sent several to found a rival studio. Disneyland opened in Anaheim in July 1955 and was drawing over 20,000 people a day within a month. In late 1965 he announced the Florida project, including EPCOT, which he intended as a functioning experimental city rather than a theme park. He died a year later, and it was built as something else.

Disney is dominant Ne, and every major decision of his career is the same move: an idea nobody has asked for, pursued past the point where sensible people stop. Sound on a cartoon. A feature-length animated film. A theme park designed as a single continuous environment when amusement parks were fairgrounds. A planned city. He was not improving an existing product at any stage; he kept proposing a category that did not exist.

The auxiliary Fi is why the output has a consistent character across four decades. There is a fixed personal conviction underneath it about what an audience should be given - sincerity rather than knowingness, craft rather than economy, a complete world rather than a gag - and he enforced it obsessively. It is also why the strike wounded him so deeply: he understood the studio as something he had made out of a shared belief, and the discovery that his animators saw an employer was not survivable as a relationship.

Why did Disney keep betting the company?

Because Ne does not experience the downside as vividly as the possibility, and tertiary Te was strong enough to build the machinery each time but not to restrain the impulse. Snow White, Disneyland and the Florida purchase were all financed by putting nearly everything at risk. The inferior Si is the standing criticism - a man who could conceive anything and had comparatively little patience for the accumulated realities of payroll, labour relations and the people actually doing the drawing, which is exactly where 1941 came from.

ENTP is the most common alternative, given the relentless innovation and the showmanship. The difference is the auxiliary. Ne with Ti produces someone who dismantles and argues; Disney's decisions were driven by a settled personal conviction about what audiences deserved, held with something close to moralism, and he was notoriously resistant to being argued out of any of it.

ENTJ is occasionally suggested because he built an enormous corporation. But the businesses existed downstream of the ideas and were frequently poor commercial decisions at the time they were taken. His brother Roy supplied the financial structure; Walt supplied the thing that had never existed.