Dana Walden Addresses Disney Layoffs: “Technology Set Their Sights On Our Business”

Disney has gone through a number of layoffs this year and is just coming out of a voluntary retirement program.

“It is extremely painful,” admitted Dana Walden, President and Chief Creative Officer of The Walt Disney Company.

Earlier this week, the Mouse House laid off a couple of hundred employees, largely in areas such as tech and HR. This come after it introduced a Voluntary Early Retirement Offer, which itself came after several hundred jobs in July, largely across Nat Geo and Pixar, which also followed a layoff round of around 1,000 employees after Josh D’Amaro was named CEO.

“I think like all of our similarly situated competitors, and certainly all of our competitors in the tech industry, there is a need to constantly evaluate how you’re structured,” Walden said at the Bloomberg Screentime event.

She said that Disney is a series of “amazing acquisitions” with a number of executives running their own individual businesses and P&Ls, which “didn’t make sense long term as the business evolved”.

“So, we had to make decisions around centralizing and functioning more as a television business and not a group of silos, and that required us again to evaluate how many people do we need, how many people are so many that it’s actually keeping us from being agile, speed of decision making,” she added. “I really don’t think in this exact moment we’re the company that is going to be the tip of the spear around any kinds of efficiency targets or layoffs.”

“Technology set their sights on our business, and we must survive and thrive and grow. That’s what we’re going to do,” she concluded.