Disney has experienced several layoffs this year and just recently came out of a voluntary retirement program.
“It’s extremely painful,” Dana Walden, president and chief creative officer of The Walt Disney Company, admitted during an appearance Thursday at the Bloomberg Screentime conference.
Earlier this week, Disney laid off a few hundred employees, mostly in areas like technology and human resources. This follows the introduction of a voluntary early retirement offer, itself coming after the elimination of several hundred jobs in July, largely at Nat Geo and Pixar, which also followed a series of layoffs of around 1,000 employees after the appointment of Josh D’Amaro as CEO.
“I think like all of our competitors in the same situation, and certainly all of our competitors in the technology sector, there’s a need to constantly evaluate how you’re structured,” Walden said today at the event.
She said Disney was a series of “astounding acquisitions” with a number of executives running their own businesses and P&Ls, which “didn’t make sense in the long term as the company scaled.”
“So we had to make decisions about centralizing and operating more like a TV company and not like a group of silos, and that forced us again to evaluate how many people do we need, how many people are so many that it prevents us from being agile and making decisions quickly,” she added. “I really don’t think that at this point in time we’re the company that’s going to be the tip of the spear when it comes to efficiency targets or layoffs.”
“Technology has set its sights on our business, and we need to survive, thrive and grow. That’s what we’re going to do,” she concluded.
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