I don't have any idea how the makeup of the Disney+ executive team affects their programming. But at least as a phenomenon of executive behavior, this 100% aligns with my experience consulting with senior enterprise leadership at various companies.
Senior leadership at enterprises, in my experience, does very little collaboration. The CEO or the board make a choice to install a senior candidate in some senior position. That senior person drags behind them a retinue of trusted aides and associates, whom they busily install everywhere their reach allows. Most of their activity from that point on is trying to demonstrate that their team is the best, shitting on the remnants of whatever came before them, and forging non-aggression pacts with other people of their rank within the enterprise.
We often saw rolling waves of departures after a senior reshuffle, as departing senior execs took "their people" with them. Why stay if the next boss will consider your existence a threat to their ability to cultivate prominence and influence?
You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder. They're loyal, brilliant and quick. Startups that we celebrate on this forum exude this from all their pores.
When you start from scratch it's "easy" to create such an environment. You don't have random people going off and doing random things. Everyone is pointed, focused and hungry to get to the same goal.
If you don't, you run the risk of becoming lazy or hamstrung by politics and red-tape of people who want their rubber stamp to "show something for it". That's Intel vs ARM at the moment.
It's a fine balance. Obviously you don't want "yes men" but you want people who are willing to move as a unit.
I also agree it's terrible. Whole units are ousted because there's a new guy on top. People that gave sometimes decades to the company.
> You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder. They're loyal, brilliant and quick. Startups that we celebrate on this forum exude this from all their pores.
During a planning meeting, you decide that Bob should build new feature X. Bob says yes, and then never does it. Secretly, Bob only takes requests from Bill, because Bill hired him into the company and was also his fraternity brother.
You go on vacation and temporarily hand off your support responsibilities to your counterpart on another team. When you return, you find that your counterpart has jammed a half-finished feature into your code, making it unrecognizable.
Your skip lead leaves for another company. Within weeks, half of your division leaves to follow him. Your support burden triples and no one is left to tell you how undocumented legacy functionality was supposed to work.
If startups worked like corporate executives, there would never be a successful one. The entire MO of the executive class is zero attention span, zero focus, and zero memory.
It's this. In my experience (line manager), when a new C-level is hired, within two years, they've usually replaced 50% of the VP/directors that sit below them in the org. That's far too much churn for it to be because those particular VP/directors are brilliant - by extension, that would mean the outgoing VP/directors were not - except many of them went to work for the recently departed C-level! They can't all be brilliant and they can't all be useless, so we're largely left with cronyism.
To me, the difference between cronyism vs trusted VPs is simply whether they were successful or not in the long run.
And you're right, you lose _lots_ of brilliant talent when the helm changes hands.
I think what's helpful is to imagine you are that exec going in to a new position of a large org, 26,000 people, say Chief Marketing Officer. A few know you, but there are a lot of new faces who now have to call you boss and answer to your directions whether they agree or not. You now have to convince each major head that what you're doing is the right thing. How long does it take to build that level of trust? Typically years and a few large projects won. Some of those heads have been around for a long time and don't like the way you do things.
If you want to be effective, you don't have much time to figure out who is toxic, who is simply lazy, who resists your leadership. Some resist openly, but most behind closed doors by dragging things, sowing discord. etc etc. You clearly can't keep everyone - it doesn't do any good.
At a certain level trust and speed make up for brilliance. Just like hard work/grit can close a gap of genius.
Again, I agree with you - lots of good guys are lost. So many times at the detriment of the company, but that means the outgoing leader picked the wrong successor.
Separately I enjoy this topic. Its our human condition laid bare.
The person with the title of "Bob's manager", the person that hired him, the person that can fire him, and the person he will take orders from may be up to 4 different people.
> You need a team who you can trust to execute without looking over their shoulder.
A better solution, for the company, would be trusting the existing team.
Being able to engender trust and showing leadership seems like what an executive should be paid for.
The benefit for the exec is that installing their own team gives them a lot more leverage without needing those skills above - since it can be understood that a quickly-installed team will be quickly-uninstalled if you stop getting paid, leaving the company with a void.
This is very high risk for the company and seems to me like it only comes about through poor management and nepotism.
To add to this, this isnt just the case in business.
This quasi-feudalism is a nash equilibrium common to most large organizations, from business to politics to NGOs. Its simply a decently effective way to act that will result in stability in power
It only makes sense in the broken prisoner's dilemma-esque world of broken corporate culture. Where politics rule, the illusion of radical change is more important than the outcome, etc.
Cronyism makes no judgment on the qualifications of the cronies. It's just almost always bad because chances are your friends don't have the right set of skills and qualities to be in the position you give them.
Whether this is good or bad depends on the executive. If they are smart, focused on the right goals, and clear communicators, then it benefits the company and staff overall even as it displaces and pisses off some people.
But if they are just turf building or resume-padding, then it is essentially exploitative behavior and hurts the company. It’s extremely difficult to tell the difference at first, just based on staff moves.
BTW this is true of startups too. They fail all the time even if the founders act like strong startup leaders in superficial ways. Theranos is probably the biggest example recently.
Not really... I mean sure you can make an argument about the mechanics of a business being the same. But how you do actually position an organization to build products that people actually want to buy? That is a non-trivial problem that has very different answers depending on industry, depending on maturity of both the company and the industry itself, depending on sales model and competitive landscape. Successful business leadership needs to make the right strategic decisions and that is not a trivial problem.
> But how you do actually position an organization to build products that people actually want to buy?
I wish that mattered, but I'm not sure it does. Many (more than half?) of all US business are either in non-competitive fields or have semi-locked in customer bases. These companies are effectively money-trees, they could do almost anything and never actually lose enough money to need to fix themselves.
Imagine AT&T gets a bad CEO. Or Comcast. Or Ford. Or GE. Or WalMart. Or CVS. Or UnitedHealth. Or ExxonMobile. These companies basically can't get into major trouble, no matter how many bad calls they make in the next 5 years.
If you are starting something new from scratch, then you have to worry about product (a new company, or a major new product in a new market, etc). But unless your doing that, your leadership-types often never have to learn anything about the business itself. They can pretend every business is just an identical spreadsheet of numbers, and even if they're wildly wrong, they'll almost never get punished for it (internally, or even by the market at large).
This is probably where MBA types get that impression from in the first place.
> Successful business leadership needs to make the right strategic decisions and that is not a trivial problem.
I wish this was true. But my experience has been that this is not nearly true enough. Terrible leadership can hang on for decades and never really get in any meaningful trouble for it.
You say business is about building products, but it really isn't.
Business is about making money. Building products is only useful insofar as it enables selling products, which is one way to make money (possibly one of the hardest).
So the question becomes, "how do you position an organization to make money?" - and that has a bunch of different answers depending on many factors. Some of these answers are generic cross-sectors and some are not, and recognising the difference is where the much-maligned MBA types can fall short.
It's unpopular because you're doing harm by perpetuating this behaviour. Lots of things make sense when viewed from the right context (f.e. genocide as a "solution" to world hunger), but that doesn't tell you anything about why it's seen as undesirable behaviour.
If I'm going to be the CEO and you (as a board member) are going to expect me to meet these goals over the next few quarters, I need to be able to hire the people I know can do it. It's not in your, my, or the company's interests to give someone already working there enough slack to fail before replacing them and threatening my ability to meet these milestones.
I've been working at a multi-national corporation for the last 5 years (and a little more) and your description fits perfectly with what I observed. Also, sometimes the execs leave a couple of years after they start/initiate a new project (before it finishes) presumably using that as their achievement point (although the project they started isn't even finished and eventually fizzles out once they move to the new company) in their CV to their new employer. After seeing that for 2-3 times, I realized that some of these upper management people only start these overly-ambitious (impossible) initiatives just to gear up for their eventual move.
This. At nearly every company I have worked at, some reasonably charismatic C-Level / VP spins up a ambitious initiative which is promised to be a game changer. It looks great on paper and usually contains words like 'change management program' and 'rolling thunder'.
Underneath the fancy slide show is the formula for success, which usually looks like 'Magic + ? = Profit', with the ? being a bunch of tough sledding that inevitably turns into a death march. By the time the death march comes to a head, the executive have moved on or been replaced.
I was once working with a sr exec who was told by his boss: "you're not picking enough fights." They weren't fighting hard enough, pushing for enough change, pissing off enough of the old guard by changing the company's way of doing business. Their boss could tell because people weren't screaming.
The other reason you bring your own people in at very senior levels is because, when battle lines are drawn (do X or Y, where X is better but Y has a collective millenia of man-hours already sunk in), a sr exec has to know their reports have latched their careers to them, and not the rest of the company. Because if that's not the case, the sr exec has no chance at all.
It's Hobbes' leviathan: you are your org, and vice verse. Gotta make sure everyone acts like it.
I was at Disney for almost a decade (possibly at the division ultimately responsible for Disney+, but I’m not positive - it’s hard to keep up with all of the changes and renaming) and this is 100% what I observed there. Over and over.
The ineptitude of the decisions that resulted from this were often hard to believe. And getting ahead was really a matter of getting in good with a new exec long enough to put you in a good position to move upwards to a different part of the company (or elsewhere).
This is sound advice that I can definitely get behind. However anecdotally it's not what I've observed to be true. In my above mentioned example, the people with the most and strongest relationships throughout the org were not the most upwardly mobile, nor was there a correlation with positive attitude.
Rather, aligning yourself with the correct (choose wisely) new executive and being a yes-person even to things that you know might have long-lasting negative impacts on the company (and thus your peers) was too often the winning strategy. Even then, it's navigating a political minefield, and one misstep could spell disaster.
The approach tends to put personal gain ahead of the well being of the company. I've seen too many people get ahead by setting vast fires and then walking away. That's not something I can get behind.
What you have described sounds like the MacLeod principle which I read about in the Ribbonfarm posts about the Gervais Principle [0].
I thought it was analyzing satire, then the more I read, it was gospel. Then I found out the author worked where I was at one point (large enterprise) and it all made perfect sense. Internal re-orgs made sense, acquisitions made sense. I didn't agree with how they played out but they were understood.
That is a great 101 - the idea of stakes, rational trades at each level, middle management's self-preservation... it's all great.
That said, that article should come with a disclaimer: "sociopaths" act unconsciously, not consciously. Purposefully trying to implement the lessons of that series is dangerous.
I don't think the author of that intended the clinical definition of sociopath, at least when I read it I thought of it as "enterprise corporate person out for themselves."
Seen that a few times. In software shops it usually seems to look like a few process changes which change what "good" performance looks like, derailing promotions and other career advancement for people not in the know for the new normal. Coupled with asymmetric expectations e.g. loud criticism of other teams forcing them to move to the new normal while vocally defending their own team. Usually people who were on their way up just choose to leave at this point rather than slog it out.
The best move I've seen in a senior reshuffle is to setup a 1:1 with the new leaders, I've done this with leaders up to 3 managers up. They like the initiative, and it gives you a chance to find out which projects they like, and which they want to end, and what they want to see come talent review time.
I can nod to probably 90% of this just in my own experience working for a large corporation. We get a lot of mid-corporate turnover and it every time one takes over it seems that we quickly find things being changed for no reason, only for it to happen again in 6-24 months when the next passing of the baton occurs.
IIRC we're on our fifth or sixth vice president in the 15 years I've been there and the tiers immediately below that have turned over similarly with people promoting in and out from other opcos, or even from competing companies.
It has never made sense to me. One would think you'd want consistency for long-term plans, only replacing someone if they retire/are horribly ineffective.
I saw one terrible VP be replaced by a smart and humble VP who made gradual change.
The second guy came in, worked to understand the problems, made a considered plan, sold it to the team, and gradually started rolling it out. And he was totally defeated by red tape, bureaucracy and process.
The first guy who'd come in and broken everything in one fell swoop had to convince his bosses that radical change was necessary just that one time, when he was new and there was no history. He got the green light easily.
The winning strategy for the VPs in that company was to put all their eggs in that one basket. If it worked, they came out smelling of roses. If it doesn't they go find a new gig. But playing the long game didn't work.
> only for it to happen again in 6-24 months when the next passing of the baton occurs.
And each one comes up with a revolutionary plan that has to be completed in that period and you end up with 6 layers of half finished 3 year plans. Each half finished plan makes the next plan harder to accomplish.
Occasionally the plans are even good, just not achievable in the time frame required.
The "a new broom sweeps clean" saying goes back some time. All new leaders want to be visible, and what is a more visible action than a change of guards?
Sometimes I was hoping that this change will come sooner than later. Most notably after a change from a capable CIO to a person who replaced the goal of the company from devops to 1970s application silos.
I've seen it several times with takeovers. There is usually a lot of talk about how the existing team is the greatest asset, that they didn't know how much they were getting. Then within six months they are all gone and replaced with the friends of the new CEO.
> drags behind them a retinue of trusted aides ... shitting on the remnants of whatever came before them
My first exposure to that idea was the process of re-mything after a regime change, as described in The Chalice and the Blade (Riane Eisler). Yesterday's godhead, deity, creation myth, ledger of debts was obviously deeply wrong. Appropriate, subvert, coopt, as able, all the narratives and levers of power. Utterly obliterate the rest.
Then there's The Prince, of course. Sage advice that usurpers should immediately behead any potential challengers, lest they organize and rebel, covertly or overtly, at some future date.
Same as it ever was. I'm only ever surprised, nay disappointed, when someone doesn't clean the slate. They're either not very good, non-serious, or worse.
Some cyberpunk stuff abuses the word "feudalism", but within companies rather than on the tramped ground under them, I do think it makes more sense? We have lords, retainers, a CEO who's monarchy is somewhat conditional, etc.
This was sort of true at the grunt level for me. When we would get new application managers at my last company we'd also get new team leads who's primary job was to remain loyal to the manager (rather than, say, lead the team).
There are definitely nice people (some of them are even very nice), but they'll never make up for all the bad ones. With people as with things, it's much easier to destroy than it is to build.
Some years ago I used to feel the same way about the world. I was so broken inside that I couldn't see any light. But things can change! The only meaningful thing I can tell you is: don't lose hope!
Go out, go running, do things you like to do, learn more everyday, get a job you like or work hard to get there one day... And if you're crippled by depression go to a psychologist and get cured, it's possible, just don't fucking lose hope!
I am not clinically depressed (and do all the expected things besides - meditating, walks, etc). It must be said I never said there is no light, there's plenty!
What I disagree with is the good outweighing the bad (in other people, in aggregate). As fortunate as my life has been, it just isn't what is there to see.
Not agreeing with the poster of above comment, but you are right about that. I think this percentage varies across countries, societies and cultures. But I guess its a controversial topic to explore.
If this riles you up so hard, wait till you hear about this good old invention of mankind called war, or its sibling genocide. The only problem with your narrative of vile men with this one would be that animals sometimes do it too, without much care given.
How Disney and Netflix run their streaming services and their strategy for them couldn't be more different. Disney+ was always supposed to be a poison pill for the industry, everyone will try to compete against it and bleed out money perpetually.
Other way to think about it: to Netflix, streaming and content is the product. To Disney (especially with the promotion of Chapek over Mayer), it's just a marketing expense for Disneyland.
However, COVID really threw a wrench in that strategy. So it's going to be interesting to see how they attempt to pivot now that shareholders expect it to be the future of the company, whereas internally its literally a ghost town built by the lowest bid contractor.
To Disney (especially with the promotion of Chapek over Mayer), it's just a marketing expense for Disneyland.
I think a better way to say this is that Netflix is in the content business, but Disney is in the intellectual property business. The parks are just one aspect of that difference, and Disney’s by necessity is a long-term strategy.
To put it another way, Baby Yoda alone is going to be making more money for Disney 20 years from now than Netflix’s entire 2020 slate of programming will be for them.
Then why can't I easily purchase a Disney+ subscription? The main thing I don't understand why, as a Canadian aboding in Cyprus, I see: "Sorry, Disney+ is not available in your region" instead of a call for a credit card number and email address.
It's an EU country! You know what Netflix shows me on an incognito browser?
"Unlimited movies, TV shows, and more. Watch anywhere. Cancel anytime."
It's 2021 and the internet has been around long enough. How is the company this poorly managed?
Can't drive to a Disneyland from Cyprus, duh. No point marketing to people who are unlikely to buy the profit making product.
Serious answer, probably just lack of launch partner or people on the ground to help Disney navigate the local laws and distribution (which may include plopping down some servers in a data center).
Funny thing is Disney+ is available in south east asia via Hotstar for ~$10 a year with some deals from mobile carriers. I'm not really sure how they made money with that pricing.
In fairness it took Netflix a long time to grow internationally. I waited years for it to come to Israel. Disney+ hasn’t been around nearly as long. International viewing rights agreements are complicated.
> So it's going to be interesting to see how they attempt to pivot now that shareholders expect it to be the future of the company, whereas internally its literally a ghost town built by the lowest bid contractor.
I think it's pretty clear from their last shareholder news release. 18,000 Star Wars expanded universe spin off series & movie trilogies, coming right up! Not that I'm really complaining :o)
Disney always knew how to produce content, so producing more content isn't unexpected. Since this is HN, I'm more interested in how they'll scale their engineering systems.
On one end, you have Netflix practically leading the field with the best of the best engineers and practices.
Then you have Disney with makeshift off-the-shelf solutions assembled and aligned by multiple siloed armies of overseas contractors that rotate out every year as their contracts expire and some very expensive vendors.
> On one end, you have Netflix practically leading the field with the best of the best engineers and practices.
I don't really think users will care at all about this, though. They just want high quality content. The users and the their dollars will flock to the high quality content.
Netflix is feeling like H&M "fast fashion" where they churn out a bazillion low quality shows to throw everything against the wall and hope something sticks to keep people subscribing.
Meanwhile the entire field is getting diluted by other platforms popping up and customers are getting fatigued enough to pay for premium content only (HBO/Disney/ESPN) and then pirate everything else, imo.
I think the technical quality does matter though. Everyday people may not care about how "cool" the Netflix engineering is, but they certainly care about the end product.
For example, over the holidays I watched 3 different streaming platforms:
BBC iPlayer - occasionally cut out and dropped back to main menu requiring me to find the program again.
Amazon Prime - often had buffering problems requiring me to manually lower resolution (on a 150Mb/s connection...)
Netflix - No problems, hit start on a movie and watch it to the end.
This kind of thing does get remembered; I certainly ended up watching a heck of a lot more Netflix than any other platform.
Quality content is important, and lack of it is a reason to quit a service for sure.
I haven't had any issues with the service of Disney+, so they're at least doing good enough (on my devices, on my home network).
On the other side of the spectrum, Apple TV on my devices takes about 8 attempts to start a stream, including a reboot. They would have to have a big exclusive that I really wanted to see for me to use that again.
Smallish differences in how long it takes to get a stream started (including browse/search time) probably drive long term behavior, when content quality is similar enough though; because I'll tend to use the service that gets me into watching something I'll enjoy sooner; and when the same content is available on multiple services, I use the one that's faster to get started.
Money affords a certain amount of incompetence.. Disney has nearly $20 billion cash on the balance sheet. Their product might never be as well designed and efficient as Netflix's (and I very much enjoy the Netflix technical blogs that lay out the complicated engineering to shave ms off of latency and compress things 1% better) but they don't really need to be if they have Pixar + Star Wars + Marvel + the Disney Vault and a streaming service that works well enough to launch those titles.
>On one end, you have Netflix practically leading the field with the best of the best engineers and practices.
They may have the best engineers but content wise all I hear are complaints. Mediocre shows and cancelling shows after one season if specific metrics aren't good enough. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Disney acquihired bamtech to run DSS. My understanding is that it's not a full contractor house as described here, though I don't have insight into the contractor:fte ratio.
Technically it feels the same to me. Content-wise netflix is kind of a dumpster buffet, with a tons of meh stuff and a couple of really nice things. Disney has less content, but almost no low quality fluff.
Yes. Where ‘quality’ just means halfway decent original programming that I can stand to watch for a half hour or so. I am having trouble finding that ‘quality’ on Netflix lately, for example.
Even tho Disney+ isn’t available to me in Singapore. Looking via a VPN there wasn’t anything I wanted to watch? While Netflix has tons of stuff me and the wife watch together.
> Disney has less content, but almost no low quality fluff.
I mean, if you count all the content they own and you already saw before on cinema or other medias then you're right.
But after paying 1.5 years for Disney+ I think I'm paying 120 dollars a year just to watch Baby Yoda. I cannot find any other content over there really worth the Disney+ membership price.
On the other hand it's really hard for me to decide what to watch on netflix because of the amount of content I'm interested.
> I mean, if you count all the content they own and you already saw before on cinema or other medias then you're right.
If you don't count that then Disney+ probably isn't for you. It's ideal for parents who want a bunch of good kids movies and shows. Mandalorian, although it was the "killer app" is an outlier. The rest of the original content I've watched on there is almost literally advertisements for Disneyland. Just buy a membership for a month and watch Mando.
The television content is mixed on Disney+ It’s for children so I may not have the best perspective but most of it is kind of weak. The marvel is star wars stuff is strong and they have the Disney movies, including the n-th straight to video sequels you never heard of.
I thought Mandalorian was the definition of low quality fluff personally. Only saw season 1. Weakly designed fight scenes, several filler episodes with pretty poor plots (most egregiously the prison one), and my personal least favorite, the super ai droid that 360 no scopes everybody, dual wielding pistols. I've asked a few times why people thought it was good and most often the answer is Baby Yoda (on HN).
I'm not sure this is really true, because ultimately Netflix is also a poison pill bleeding money perpetually.
Netflix loses money and is still funded by considerable debt, ever year. Streaming and content aren't so much the product, the subscriber number is the product and what shareholders continue to tolerate more cash burn for. Netflix will, if it ever hopes to become cash positive, probably have to diversify into other forms of IP exploitation, because otherwise it is hard to see how. They are unlikely to be able to radically increase revenue (though they will absolutely do what they can to increase ARPU with price rises and higher tiers). They are pretty much tapping out in subscriber growth without significant increases in content spend. They have significant competition and long tail content generally performs badly, so they won't be able to reduce spend much.
When they say "It’s not something that Chapek and his team can really fuck up, especially as shareholders and people within the company look to it as a core part of their future," I agree, but I read it differently. In theory, it's not possible to fuck up Disney+: Just take content from the Disney Vault, price it appropriately, and slowly convince families to transition away from their expensive DVD collections to streaming. It's an exploitative and rude business model, but solid and time-tested.
But, that said, the circumstances have shifted following The Mandalorian's success. Now, Disney+ has a new baseline for not failing: It must produce a new Mandaloranian-level hit every season. This suggests that, like Fox's TV programming in the 90s and 2000s, Disney+ will have to invest in many risky experiments in order to continue being worthwhile, even though the bulk of their subscribers only care about the shows currently being milked.
Doubtful. People, especially ones with kids, were subscribing to Disney+ before The Mandalorian. There's no baseline, either. Even the new, terrible live action films make obscene amounts of money. The only surprise was that "Solo: A Star Wars Story" didn't make boatloads of money. If people will pay cinema ticket money to see Disney films, people will pay for Disney+.
I don't think the back catalog play works anymore. There are too many competing services with strong pipelines of compelling new content. The back catalog approach is very low value add, so you can't charge enough for it to make it viable these days.
As I child I remember seeing back to the future so many times on VHS. And now, my kids have seen Moana dozens of times as well Princess and the Frog, Cinderella and many classics.
the back catalogue can keep the children buys for years. Especially thru COVID induced school closures with working parents needing to breath.
But you're also not having to pay to produce the back catalog, and the cost of the streaming infrastructure scales well. Every person who stays subscribed because their toddler wants to watch Moana for the 53rd time is free money.
The first rule of trading: never get married to a position.
That includes consolidated equity ownership of corporations that you have outsized controlled over.
Anyone that derives their confidence from your perpetual participation is playing by a completely different and ineffective set of rules. Investors that need constant placating need to grow thicker skin or get out of the market, employee opinions about the executive's ongoing participation have never mattered they aren't part of the conversation.
Side complain about Substack. The damn font is so badly kerned and is difficult to read with poor contrast. Every time I come across a Substack post, it’s eye bleeding to read anything on there. Am I crazy or the letter spacing is messed up?
I think everyone uses a “reader mode” on the internet now. The “Accept all cookies” followed by “Subscribe to our newsletter” dialogs made that people don’t even try.
Or they’ll be even more awesome as Disney’s technical abilities are integrated and leveraged in their theme parks. People pay good money to visit the parks for a reason. You can’t get that experience any other way.
Is that a joke? Parks brought in 25 billion for Disney in 2019. People aren't going to stop going to Disney parks because covid existed. I'm not a Disney fanboy by any means but the experience at their parks is truly something unique and fantastic especially for children
People keep saying this, but all evidence from each time lockdowns have slightly lifted is it's not true. If anything, those who have been lucky enough to keep their jobs during the pandemic (often the ones more likely to go on holiday anyway) are going to be more likely to take those big trips once the vaccine has been distributed.
I bet it's due to most people getting Apple TV+ for free (you get 1 year with the purchase of an Apple device on which you can stream). So the churn is 15% of the people cancelling before they have to pay.
Senior leadership at enterprises, in my experience, does very little collaboration. The CEO or the board make a choice to install a senior candidate in some senior position. That senior person drags behind them a retinue of trusted aides and associates, whom they busily install everywhere their reach allows. Most of their activity from that point on is trying to demonstrate that their team is the best, shitting on the remnants of whatever came before them, and forging non-aggression pacts with other people of their rank within the enterprise.
We often saw rolling waves of departures after a senior reshuffle, as departing senior execs took "their people" with them. Why stay if the next boss will consider your existence a threat to their ability to cultivate prominence and influence?