It’s now official. Mickey Mouse is The Incredible Hulk’s father-in-law.

This week Walt Disney acquired Marvel Comics for $4 b. Disney  began when Walt Disney drew some sketches in 1928 in a rat-infested warehouse office in California (Mickey Mouse was inspired by a real mouse that eat some of Disney’s lunch crumbs). The Walt Disney Company bought the comic book company that had entered bankruptcy in 1996 when comic books no longer were sought and  bought by kids, and later emerged from it.    

Then, suddenly, movies based on Marvel comic book characters drew huge box offices. For example: (with the date and box office figures) Blade 1998 – $131 m., X-Men 2000 – $296 m., Spider-Man 2002 – $822 m., Incredible Hulk 2008 – $263 m., and so on…. Marvel tried to make some of its own movies, but generally was not successful — its core competency was in inventing some 5,000 comic book characters, not in making movies. Disney was great at making movies, and bought Pixar for animation skills, but perhaps lacked the soaring imagination of the Marvel comic book artists. 

It is remarkable that adult viewers sometimes find imaginary comic book characters like Spiderman more realistic than the ‘real’ characters that appear in Hollywood scripts.  

A management lesson  is, I believe, the following:

One of Gary Hamel’s four ‘boxes’ that define a business is called STRATEGIC ASSETS. (The other three? Customer interface; Value network; Core strategy). There are companies that have utterly failed because they have been unable or unwilling to fully exploit a key strategic asset. These are prime targets for acquisition, because those strategic assets may be the missing piece in the puzzle for another company, such as Disney. Business opportunities arise when entrepreneurs see value in places where others do not.

Case study: K-Mart, a discount department store, in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. A hedge fund operator named Edward Lampert bought K-Mart for a virtual ‘song’ for only $300 m., after it went broke. Why? Lampert spotted K-Mart’s strategic asset: The real estate value (not listed at its proper value on K-Mart’s balance sheet) of its many stores, in shopping centres across the U.S. Lampert sold off K-Mart real estate, used the money to buy Sears, changed the holding company name to Sears (more respected), then relaunched K-Mart and Sears. Essentially, Lampert bought K-Mart with part of its own strategic assets others failed to see, and that historical book-value balance sheets failed to reflect.