Interviewer: I feel like over the last three or four years, every six months you guys are cutting people and restructuring.
Dana Walden: I think that’s probably an exaggeration.
Interviewer: But it’s not just Disney. It happened at Warner Bros. Discovery. It happened at Paramount. I’m just wondering, how are there still people to fire? And how is there still restructuring when you’ve already fired thousands of people?
Dana Walden: Wow. The snarkiest possible version of this question.
I would start with this: we’re not firing people every six months.
I think, like all of our similarly situated competitors, and certainly our competitors in the tech industry, there is a need to constantly evaluate how you’re structured.
Disney, along with core Disney, is a series of amazing acquisitions. So we had to make decisions around centralizing and functioning more as a television business, rather than as a group of silos.
And that required us, again, to evaluate: How many people do we need? At what point do you have so many people that it’s actually keeping you from being agile and slowing down the speed of decision-making?
I really don’t think, in this exact moment, that we’re the company that’s going to be the tip of the spear around any kinds of efficiency targets or layoffs.
It is extremely painful. We’ve exited colleagues who I’ve worked with for most of my career.
In many ways, it is a harsh reality.
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