It was not quite like this at the beginning however. In Disneyland’s very early days, Walt was appalled by the behaviour of some of the park’s staff toward visitors. The staff, many of whom had been hired by lessees, lacked training and were gruff and unhelpful towards visitors. Such behaviour was unacceptable to Walt who wanted to create an environment where people could forget the outside world and their troubles and be immersed in a magical experience. Unhelpful and discourteous behaviour are found abundantly in the outside world and therefore undermined the kinds of impressions he wanted to create. The only employees who exhibited the kind of behaviour Walt wanted were the attraction operators who had been trained by the company itself. According to Randy Bright, a Disney Imagineer: ‘What Walt really wanted were employees with a ready smile and a knack for dealing pleasantly with large numbers of people’. Walt told cast members that they should ‘always smile’ and that they should ‘turn the other cheek to everybody, even the nasty ones’. The Disney University was created precisely in order to inculcate the demeanor that Walt wanted to engender. According to the founder of the Disneyland University, one of the central elements of the early training approach was to introduce the principle that ‘[i]n addition to a “friendly smile”, we sold the importance of “friendly phrases”. Since then, Disney has developed seminars which introduce executives from a variety of organizations to its distinctive approach to human resource management and has publicized this approach more generally. These seminars may have been instrumental in the further diffusion of this aspect of Disneyization. Moreover, a number of management texts have emphasized this ingredient of the success of the Disney theme parks. Disney itself uses its training programme, which employs videos and talks on Disney’s past and traditions, to secure commitment to the company and its values. Such a commitment is likely to facilitate emotional labour. As the then director of Disney’s three-day training seminars for business executives from other companies points out: ‘You can’t force people to smile. Each guest to Disney World sees an average of 73 employees per visit, and we would have to supervise them continually. Of course, we can’t do that, so instead we try to get employees to buy into the corporate culture.’ Similar approaches to training are common at large companies like McDonald’s and Nike.Excerpted from Pg 109, ‘The Disneyization of Society’ by Alan Bryman