Dowagiac’s “educational dream” will be delivered Wednesday, Aug. 31, at 7 p.m. at the middle school Performing Arts Center, where a comprehensive process began Feb. 28 with a keynote address by “The Disney Way” author Bill Capodagli.
According to Superintendent Dr. Mark Daniel, “We’ll be laying out a sequence of programming that hopefully will make us one in a hundred.”
Capodagli ended his Monday evening introduction with the tale of the bully Tom Sawyer, who with proper training became a valued 30-year Disney employee.
Through his keynote, Capodagli stressed developing a “Dowagiac dream,” or collective vision in the days of storyboarding that followed at Southwestern Michigan College in partnership with Dowagiac Union Schools, the City of Dowagiac, Borgess-Lee Memorial Hospital and SMC.
It would take hard work and perseverance, the Michiganian promised, because there is no “instant pudding.”
“We have to train the daylights out of our people, give them the tools to succeed and get out of their way so they can become the best employee, teacher or nurse that they know how to be,” said Capodagli, who also espoused creating a culture that isn’t short-sighted.
He ripped “short-term stupidity of living for today” as a “virus” infecting the economy and “one of the root causes of the economic situation” in which the nation remains mired months later.
“Consider this,” Capodagli said. “The average tenure of a CEO on Wall Street was 12 years. Today it’s less than five years. General Motors has had three in the last 18 months. Instead of thinking for the future, Wall Street expects these new CEOs to have a strategy in place in their first 100 days in office. Instead of investing in the future of their product or service, they’re manipulating their costs, eliminating training and jobs, ignoring new markets, research and development and compromising quality, all for the next quarterly earnings report.”
Contrast that with Walt Disney acquiring 29,000 acres in central Florida for his World theme park — of which still less than 35 percent has been used.
“It’s worth well over $1 million per acre,” he said. “Short-term mentality would dictate selling off a big chunk of this land for profit. But Disney realizes they need to continually exceed your expectations. To do so, they need to continually add on.”
As for education, “Today, nationwide, for every 10 freshmen entering high school,” Capodagli said, “only seven will graduate. Four of those will go on to college, but two of those need to take some sort of remedial reading, writing or math to succeed in college. Of the 10 who started, only two are qualified. It’s costing universities and colleges over $6 billion to correct that. The three who don’t go on to college cost you as businesses close to $20 billion to train those students. If we as a nation are going to be competitive in this next 10 years, we need to change things we’re doing in education. What we’re doing is not working. The fact that you have a community concerned about this that has come together to look at ways of solving this, I applaud you.”
“Walt Disney didn’t think of managing as getting work done through people. Instead, managing was developing people through their work and at the same time having fun,” Capodagli said.
He also said, “Policy manuals are one of your biggest obstacles or barriers to customer service you’ll ever run up against” and that “story is so important” to any organization serving customers, to go beyond meeting expectations to solving problems and “fulfilling dreams.”