Getting Stuff Done, the Bob Gurr Way

Bob Gurr has built a lot of things that had never existed before. You might be familiar with some of them.

The Monorail

The Haunted Mansion’s Doom Buggies

Autopia

The WEDWay Peoplemover

The Matterhorn Bobsleds

King Kong from Universal’s Kongfrontation

The Sinking Pirate Ship from the Treasure Island Casino

Mr. Lincoln

The list goes on.

It’s been a stellar career and the 92-year-old Gurr seems to be spending this decade of his life taking a victory lap. One of Walt Disney’s original Imagineers, Gurr is now making the rounds, sharing his knowledge and stories and even trying to get to the heart of what makes other creative people tick with his YouTube interview program, The Bob Gurr Show.

In a talk this weekend at Garner Holt Productions in Redlands, California, Gurr leaned into the nitty gritty of getting large-scale projects done, plumbing the depths of his experience working with Walt Disney and, later, casino owner Steve Wynn. He held very few punches back — describing the long abandoned Disneyland PeopleMover track alternately as “the world’s largest sunshade” and “the world’s most expensive leaf catcher” — but also showed genuine affection towards current creative innovators, such as Garner Holt, himself, who was in attendance and served as MC for the event: people who manage to keep moving forward in an increasingly bureaucratic industry.

Winding through some delightful anecdotes, Gurr made several strong points about completing projects that are not only relevant to theme parks but also to any enterprise trying to innovate.

1. Don’t attack creative people.

Walt Disney was well known for not offering effusive praise. The absolute highest compliment you could get from the man was, “That should work just fine.” At the same time, neither did Disney come down hard on things that he didn’t like.

As Gurr pointed out, Disney knew that there was an extremely important rule about working with creative people which was to never criticize their creativity.

“If you do, they will be a little bit less creative the next time.” — Bob Gurr

Disney’s method, as described by the legendary Imagineer, was to suggest looking at the product from a different angle or to consider a different idea in conjunction with what was being presented. This allows the artist to take their idea and “churn it back into the soil” to use as a sort of fertilizer with which to grow an even better product. It gives the work a new depth and bolsters the artist’s confidence — spurring them on to bigger and bolder ideas — rather than diminishing the work and their creativity.

2. Don’t let the MBAs take control.

I will be gentler here than Mr. Gurr and suggest that trained business people can be useful in facilitating the project you might be working on. Funding, support from other teams, and political haggling; these are all things that an MBA might help with. But, as Gurr pointed out in an unsubtle way when the MBAs start making decisions and getting between the creator or engineer or artist and their final product, you are in trouble.

Budgetary constraints, timeline constraints, these are valid and need to be set early on in the process, but then the experts of the product should be left to make it.

And speaking of the early part of the process…

3. Bring the smart people in at the beginning, not to fix what’s gone wrong by the end.

From Disney, Gurr learned to set firm and aggressive deadlines and then put your best people on the job right from the beginning. Use this intellectual power to plan, as best it can, for as many crossroad-style decisions as can be foreseen in order to make sure that your answers to the questions posed by those crossroads are still leading you toward that deadline.

Planning up front is how Disney used to get major attractions built in months rather than years Disneyland itself, built in less than a year, is an interesting example. Every decision pushed the project towards its July 17, 1955 opening. It still needed a lot of tweaking and was barely holding together on that day, but the bones of the park were solid and the gates opened because no decision was ever made that would’ve allowed them to not.

4. Measure out your needs and give them to the staff in bite-sized chunks.

In the late ’90s, a show was being put together for the Mermaid Lagoon area of Tokyo DisneySea that would feature, as a climax, a massive mechanical Ursula — the Sea Witch, that extended out over the audience.

It became clear to Imagineering that they did not have the resources to fabricate the massive figure; so they put it out to bid. Garner Holt Productions won the bid and, in the spirit of wondering if they had gotten in over their heads, Holt reached out to Bob Gurr, by then an old friend, for advice.

What they realized early on, according to Gurr, was that the plans submitted by the WED designers were filled with hundreds of miscalculations.

Realizing that going back to Disney with that many corrections would likely shock them into overwhelmed inactivity, what Gurr did was tell Holt to push the requested correction requests back to WED Enterprises in small increments while then working on parallel plans for other parts of the design. (It didn’t hurt that Disney had reached out to Gurr earlier for help on the project and he already had some designs to work from that the company had rejected.)

By keeping the flow of change steady and manageable, the project moved relentlessly forward all the way to completion.

5. Avoid meetings with more than three people whenever possible.

Once a meeting’s attendance grows to over three people its goals are likely to change from working on a project to explaining the project. It’s not unreasonable to present plans and updates to a larger group of stakeholders, but the actual work of the piece of the project you’re working on, according to Mr. Gurr, requires a certain level of intimate knowledge that is rarely held across more than a few people.

In other words, if you’re affixing a giant Ursula head to a pivoting gimbal, the lighting designer probably has very little he can tell you that is helpful.

6. Summarize what you’re trying to communicate on a single piece of paper.

Bob Gurr did several large-scale projects for casino mogul, Steve Wynn. Wynn’s Chief Financial Officer at the time used to come into meetings not with a sheaf of papers bursting out of a briefcase, but with a single piece.

Keep in mind the previous rule that suggests that larger meetings are about explaining things, rather than working on them. The CFO needed to make his message understood clearly to people without a depth of knowledge about finance.

As Gurr said, “If you can’t fit it onto a single piece of paper, you can’t explain it.”

7. Consider soup at Mimi’s.

By way of introduction, Garner Holt told a story about his earliest encounters with Mr. Gurr. He had reached out to the famed Imagineer, found him in the phone book, called him up, and discovered a man who was generous with both his time and experience.

Later, after Holt had transitioned from enthusiastic fan to industry professional, he reached out to Gurr for advice and consultation. When he tried to build a contract and pay Gurr, Gurr always had the same response,

“Buy me a bowl of soup at Mimi’s.”

It became an ongoing joke between the two men, that no matter how insistent Holt was about paying his mentor, Gurr only wanted a bowl of soup from Mimi’s Cafe in Los Angeles.

Later Gurr responded to this by talking about retirement and taxes and not wanting to file paperwork, but the real story became clear in the last few moments of Gurr’s talk. When asked about what sparked him to become the innovative, sometimes revolutionary, artist that he was, instead he talked about speaking to other creative people on his YouTube talk show.

He described wanting to sit down and ask them what it was that inspired them, what their spark was, and what caused them to see the world from the point of view of a creator. And, at that, Gurr teared up, wiped his eyes and the talk was over.

Take it from Bob Gurr, if someone is beginning a career in your industry, and is ready to grow, don’t gouge them for the aid of your experience, consider nurturing them for the price of a bowl of soup at Mimi’s.

At 92, Bob Gurr comes with as much experience as someone in his industry — an industry that he helped define — could have. Sharp, funny, and insightful the man holds generations worth of experience and loves to share it and we are all lucky that he does.

Did you enjoy this story? Check out my new theme park podcast!

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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times