Images of Change

Course Project: Managing Organization Change

Week 2: Change Images

Part two of our project requires us to analysis the images of change within the two organizations that were selected. My two companies were Disney/Pixar merger and Kmart/Sears merger.

Disney and Pixar were both successful companies in their own right. However, when Disney and Pixar merged in 2006, Disney expected to revive its weakening animation division which was once the company's crown jewel.

Competitors like Fox, DreamWorks and Animation “had eclipsed Disney at the box office, as had Pixar, whose movies Disney distributed prior to the purchase” (Shaw, 2013). Robert Iger, Disney’s CEO, recognized the weaknesses that Disney was going through and told the New York Times, “I want to return Disney to greatness in this area, and this was the way to do it fastest” (Shaw, 2013). Iger felt that the merger between Disney and Pixar “significantly enhances Disney animation, which is a critical creative engine for driving growth across our businesses” (La Monica, 2006).

Pixar was originated as The Graphics Group, which was part of the computer division of Lucasfilm that was born in 1979 with the employment of Dr. Ed Catmull. He attended the New York Institute of Technology and was head of the Computer Graphics Lab (Pixar, 2012). After locating to Lucasfilm, the team worked on creating the predecessor to RenderMan, called REYES (for "renders everything you ever saw") and established a number of critical technologies for CG, which included particle effects and various animation tools. In 1986, Steve Jobs purchased the CG division from George Lucas for $5 million and Pixar was born. Pixar employed about 44 and invested an additional $5 million into the company.

For more than nine decades, Walt Disney has been well-known in the area of family entertainment. From modest beginnings “as a cartoon studio in the 1920s to today's global corporation, The Walt Disney Company continues to proudly provide quality...