In the book Work in Progress written by Michael Eisner, published by Random House, NY, 1998, Mr. Eisner discusses his life and the people he has met in the entertainment world. Mr. Eisner is known for being CEO and President of Disney. While at Disney Mr. Eisner made great strides from bringing Disney back from the doldrums to creating wonderful animation to improving the theme parks to using video libraries to buying Cap Cities to gain ABC and ESPN and a multiple of things inbetween. The picture he paints is both Frank Wells and him were thinking about the long term of Disney and were very well rewarded with stock options that came in the money in the long term. On many different levels what happened at Disney was remarkable the pieces fell together and how much the goodwill the average person has to the Disney brand. Over the years, the management team tried to keep costs down and concentrate on the story for Disney is about storytelling. How well they do it over the multiple venues is a testament to the people who work there. The management team believed much of the work could be done in house as opposed to contract it out and the strong suit is the excellence of the brands and the exclusive content that Disney is in a position to provide.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, with a stock such as Disney the brand is great storytelling. If the storytelling quality goes down it is time to look at alternatives. The Disney company where there are multiple possible of cross selling and as long as it is done well, the experience will be terrific. One can imagine a cruise ship with a marvel comics theme or star wars or endless and execution within the creative design is easy to see if they are doing or it does not work. Disney has the potential to always be a work in progress linking the creative side to the financial side – as someone with goodwill to them, I want them to succeed, but every venture will not be storybook ending.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.