The Sherman Brothers
The Business Wisdom of Mary Poppins
by Stuart A. Smith III
The Room Where the Songs Were Written
Most business owners encounter some disappointment when they exit their business. While some bad decisions are easily pinpointed, the more subtle truth is that thousands of small choices were never given the attention they deserved — until the final accounting. Results are written long before the deal closes.
The 1965 Academy Awards offer a useful parallel. Mary Poppins received thirteen nominations and won five Oscars that night, including Best Original Song and Best Original Score for Richard and Robert Sherman — their only competitive Academy Awards. It was also the first Disney film nominated for Best Picture, though that award went to My Fair Lady.
The outcome that night mattered less than what it affirmed. Disney had built something durable — music that served story, character, and audience, and that would hold up for generations. The Shermans understood that distinction. In an interview a few years after the movie's release, what comes through isn’t chaos or inspiration run amok, but a disciplined creative process — open to surprise, yet firmly bounded by Walt Disney’s vision.
The Shermans experimented. They listened. They followed surprising threads. But they never lost sight of the frame. Creativity was encouraged — but only insofar as it advanced the larger purpose. That discipline gave the work both energy and coherence.
That’s the insight business owners often miss. Enduring outcomes don’t come from optimizing around a single moment — whether it’s an awards ceremony or a transaction. They come from disciplined processes that allow flexibility within clear constraints, applied consistently over time, long before anyone is keeping score.
The Work Starts Before Anyone Calls It Work
By the time a song is recorded — or a business is sold — the truly important work has largely been done. Not because it was planned that way, but because the decisions that mattered most were made gradually, in the background, when attention was pulled in multiple directions.
That work rarely looks like preparation. It shows up as ordinary choices repeated over time: how authority is exercised, how capital is deployed, how disagreements are handled, and whether standards are enforced when no one is watching.
Most business owners don’t lead with “I’m building durable value.” They fight their daily battles — and let reasonable, momentary judgments harden into habit: We’ll clean that up later. That’s not urgent yet. Let’s not overcomplicate things.
Those statements don’t feel consequential when they’re made. Over time, they quietly shape the arc of the business.
The Shermans didn’t become disciplined when Mary Poppins was greenlit. Their discipline was already in place — expected, practiced, and reinforced. The film’s release was an event, a culmination of their work; it revealed what the room had been producing all along.
Process Is Invisible — Until It Isn’t
What stands out in the Sherman Brothers’ interview isn’t inspiration or mythology, but how their discipline actually showed up: a commitment to doing the work in places no one would ever see — often before anyone knew what the final song would be.
No fanfare. Just daily, workmanlike effort that made everything else possible.
They weren’t optimizing for the moment of performance. They were investing in the conditions that made performance possible.
When good process is working, it attracts little attention. Progress can feel uneven, and milestones are hard to see. Yet value is building — because the process is chosen with care, refined, and set in motion long before results are visible.
Habits — whether good or bad — don’t disappear. They accumulate. The Shermans understood that. They treated their habits as infrastructure, not background noise. Left unattended, habits define the process. Set by design, they become the structure that holds when pressure arrives.
The difference isn’t visibility. It’s intention.
What Disney and the Shermans Actually Practiced
Walt Disney didn’t rely on inspiration or taste to carry the work. He set direction early, protected the process, and enforced standards long before results were visible. He understood that if discipline slipped at the outset, no amount of brilliance could rescue the outcome later.
The Sherman Brothers met that standard in equally practical ways. They did their homework, worked within constraints, argued productively, revised without sentimentality, and collaborated closely with other creative areas. Good ideas weren’t preserved for their own sake. They were disposable if they didn’t serve the larger purpose.
This wasn’t creative mysticism. It was operating discipline.
And the lesson isn’t musical. It’s behavioral.
What This Kind of Discipline Requires
Discipline is seldom glamorous. It doesn’t announce itself as progress, and it rarely delivers immediate reassurance. It requires choosing standards before there is evidence they will pay off, holding to them when pressure mounts, and resisting the urge to trade clarity for speed.
It also requires restraint: allowing some things to remain unresolved while the underlying work takes shape, living through periods where effort feels disconnected from visible results, and trusting the process before it proves itself.
Most people don’t struggle with understanding this. They struggle with living inside it.
The Shermans embraced this way of working. Disney insisted on it because he knew the alternative. In business, that expectation is often absent. If discipline isn’t imposed early, it gets deferred — until the moment when it’s no longer optional.
By then, the room has already done its work.
The Sound Tells You Everything
You don’t need to see the room to know what happened there. The sound tells you everything.
The Disney team behind Mary Poppins took what the Sherman Brothers once described as “kiddie stories” and created a phenomenon. Released in 1964, the film became the highest-grossing movie of the year, earning twice the box office of Goldfinger.
That result wasn’t accidental. It was earned.
The magic of the film lies in its construction: a story that entertains children while engaging adults, shaped by imagination and experimentation — but always inside a disciplined frame. Creativity wasn’t unconstrained. It was directed. Ideas weren’t indulged. They were tested.
That’s why the result holds up. You can hear it in the music and see it in the story — even decades later.
If you’re curious, listen to the Sherman Brothers’ interview at the end of the Mary Poppins album on your favorite streaming platform. What comes through isn’t nostalgia, but disciplined work — shaping and revising ideas long before anyone was listening.
By the time results are visible — whether in a film or a business — the work has already spoken.
You don’t need to see the room. The outcome tells you everything.
© 2026 Stuart A. Smith III. All rights reserved.
