In 1957 Walt Disney painted a map highlighting the major business areas of the corporation and specifically the value creating interrelationships between them. The Disney films with their style-defining characters and pictures constitutes the core of the Disney business system. Right from the start also future development opportunities were included in Disney's map and functioned as strategic guidelines for expansion thereby.

Tood Zenger argues in an article in the Harvard Business Manager (August 2013, p. 66ff.) that companies often lack a fundamental theory presenting Walt Disney as a brilliant expection hereby. As long as one stuck with the own theory of the corporation within Disney, business was going well. As soon as one deviated from it, the strategic positioning started to dilute.

In fact, it is a good mental exercise for executives to lay down and visualize the theory of one's own corporation. How should the central business mechanism actually work? Which theory stands behind the applied strategy?

http://www.harvardbusinessmanager.de/heft/d-102577530.html