Creativity Quote by John Hench

A quiet office gripe, delivered with the softness of a eulogy. John Hench is talking about a studio culture that calcified the minute its singular connective tissue disappeared: Walt Disney. The surface meaning is mundane workflow - nobody crosses departmental lines anymore - but the sting is in the implied diagnosis. Bureaucracy has replaced curiosity. Silos have won.

The line "Only Walt did that" turns a management habit into a mythic trait: Walt as the roaming eye, the human hyperlink. Hench, a lifelong Disney artist and designer, knew how Disney’s power operated not just through decisions, but through presence. Walking from Animation to Imagineering before those categories were even stable, Walt enforced a kind of creative permeability. His movement signaled permission: talk to people you’re not supposed to talk to, steal the best idea, break the org chart.

Then Hench pivots: "I was very fond of him, really". That "really" matters. It sounds like someone anticipating skepticism, aware that fondness for a boss can read as nostalgia, propaganda, or Stockholm syndrome. It’s also a small act of self-protection: tenderness offered with a qualifying shrug. Underneath is ambivalence - admiration for Walt’s galvanizing charisma, and an unspoken awareness that the machine kept running by becoming less personal, less volatile, less daring.

Hench’s intent isn’t to canonize Disney as a saint. It’s to name what gets lost when a visionary’s informal, cross-pollinating habits aren’t translated into structure. When the walker is gone, the walls feel higher.