Is Disney's Denial Phase Over? Part 12

This is the 12th in a series of posts regarding missteps taken by The Walt Disney Company. You can navigate to Part 11 here.

Four years ago I wrote my first criticism of The Walt Disney Company's (specifically its Lucasfilm division) approach to filmmaking. I urged the company to create movies its customers wanted to see, rather than make the films its cast members wanted to make.

As I wrote then, "There is good news here for Disney. Most of those fans aren’t gone; nor are they combative by nature. They’re just waiting for something they want to watch."

Yesterday, according to this CNBC report, Disney CEO Bob Iger said the words many a fan has been waiting to hear.

"Creators lost sight of what their No. 1 objective needed to be,” Iger said at the DealBook Summit in New York on Wednesday. “We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.”

As I wrote a year ago, a company's center can't be any of its people or departments. The center of a company in a competitive environment must be its customers.

There has been plenty of publicly available customer data over the past four years to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Disney hasn't been paying close enough attention to the people who ultimately pay its bills.