My wife and I recently watched the American Experience documentary on Walt Disney. Being partial to Disney’s empire of fantasy — and having previously endured a biopic so poor it might have been produced by the rival studio — we approached it with both curiosity and caution.
What emerged was a familiar portrait, if not a predictable one: the debate over whether Disney’s genial public image masked a harsher private reality. But there was one matter beyond dispute: Disney demanded that his name symbolize excellence. His films were to be immaculate. Budgets were wrecked, deadlines pulverized, staff exhausted. It was the price of putting his name to anything. In this, at least, he was a fundamentalist.
This fierce devotion to craft was thrown into sharper relief when the documentary turned to the question of labor. By the time Disney’s studio employed 1,200 souls, the Great Depression had made misery commonplace, and war clouds gathered abroad. Workers struggled. One story lingers unpleasantly: a single mother, employed full-time, went without meals to feed her children.
Faced with a rising clamor for unionization, Disney convened a meeting. A wiser man might have said, “You have shown loyalty to my name; I will show loyalty to your needs.” Or, as a pragmatist, he might have realized that it was in his best interests to offer top compensation to retain and attract top talent. Instead, Disney — ever the autodidact in poverty and pain — lectured them on market forces. This was his business, they were being disloyal to him, and he would not indulge the sentiment. From a purely capitalist standpoint, one could almost admire the consistency.
And yet it struck me: if a man is prepared to sacrifice so much for the perfection of his product, then why not for the dignity of his workers? Disney took unbounded pride in placing his name on his films—a standard so high that mediocrity was treated as an act of treason. Should not the same fastidiousness apply to the lives of those who animated his dreams? Is his name not just as much affixed to them?
Excellence confined to the final product is a cheap counterfeit of true excellence. Those of us who trade under our own names must recognize: we are judged not merely by what we produce, but by how we produce it. To preside over a company where a full-time employee must ration her meals to sustain her offspring is not merely a business failure. It is a moral one, and it stains the name far more indelibly than a bad review ever could.
Nor is decency merely a strategy, a “do well by doing good” piety for the Chamber of Commerce circuit. One does not treat workers properly because it might yield a better margin next quarter. One does it because any alternative is disgraceful.
The memory called to mind another industrial titan: Milton Hershey. Touring a construction site in the thick of the Depression, Hershey observed the new steam shovels that could do the work of thirty men. He ordered them off the site, saying simply, “Hire thirty men.” Profit, he understood, is not always the highest good—despite the best efforts of several MBA programs to suggest otherwise.
I am not naïve about the differences in scale. I have a small business. I have no shareholders baying for dividends, no banks clutching at my collar. Perhaps even Hershey, presiding over an empire of sugar, could afford a gesture where others could not. But the principle remains intact.
Nor do I subscribe to the leveling nonsense of income equality. There is nothing ignoble about disparity of earnings when it reflects disparity of risk, effort, and ingenuity. The modern passion for envy parading as fairness leaves me cold. I do not argue that a janitor should be paid as a CEO. I argue merely that no full-time worker should suffer indignity or hunger at the hands of an employer who can prevent it.
Those who demand loyalty must be prepared to return it, and those whose names adorn their ventures must realize they are judged not only by their victories, but by their failures. To allow excellence in one sphere and squalor in another is not merely hypocrisy. It is failure of the most enduring and public kind.
In the end, the businesses we build, like the talents entrusted to the servants in Christ’s parable, are gifts from God, not monuments to ourselves. As Scripture reminds us, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (Psalm 127:1). It is not enough to craft something excellent; we must also be excellent. Those who labor alongside us are not merely cogs in the machine, but souls placed under our stewardship. To honor them is to honor the One who gave us the opportunity at all. And we should do so not reluctantly, nor merely as a cost of doing business, but joyfully—seeing in every act of fairness and generosity an echo of the God who first showed mercy to us. What bears our name must honor His name, or it is not worth building at all.
