Free Sample
Enjoy a free taste below with an excerpt from Chapter 3 of Everything I Know About Business I Learned at McDonald’s.
“The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.” – Ray Kroc
Those of us with ketchup in our blood, the ones who rose through the ranks and were turned on in a competitive way, had a saying: Never be satisfied. And we weren’t. This statement spoke volumes about McDonald’s culture. We were always looking to beat yesterday’s sales, cut energy expenses, increase our customer counts, lower costs to the stores. We were driven to be faster, cleaner, better. The best of us were always on the lookout to exceed expectations.
Ray knew from the very beginning that high standards would set the company apart, as he told the McDonald’s brothers on the Dictaphone tapes: “Our policies, our sound way of doing things, is paying off. And we have the respect of top notch people. I now know of four 15-cent hamburger deals being Henry’s, Carroll’s, Chef Burger, and Golden Point. And heaven knows how many more there will be. And they are going to be run loose as a goose. Those fellows are going to do any doggone thing they want to do and the owners of the name are just going to let them do anything they want to as long as they are getting money out of it. It will be survival of the fittest. And I am just as sure as I am sure that I am dictating this sleeve that we are going to be the top of the list of the fittest.”
McDonald’s has always been a results-oriented company. “We were continuously looking for a better way to do things, and then a revised better way to do things, and then a revised, revised better way,” Fred Turner is quoted in saying in McDonald’s Behind The Arches, written by John F. Love.
So it went without saying that company executives sought nothing but the best. Golden Arches lore has it that Ray Kroc once closed down an underperforming restaurant that was dirty, understaffed and poorly run. It was finally verified to me by Tom Dentice, retired executive vice president. “Ray pulled into the lot and the lines were all the way out to the flagpoles.” As the story goes, Ray jumped up on one of the outdoor tables and said to everyone, “I’m Ray Kroc, I own McDonald’s and this restaurant doesn’t meet our standards: It’s terrible and I’m embarrassed, so I’m closing the store.” Nobody would dispute the sentiment behind the tale: Substandard was unacceptable, and that has always been the case. Fred Turner remembers one store in Florida in particular: “They were a mess. Everything was screwed up. Ray had a fit. Kicked the metal door closed. He went out and slammed it with his foot. He was so mad he couldn’t see straight. Everything was wrong. He couldn’t live with it.”
One story about Ray’s legendary standards was told to me by Ed Rensi, retired President of McDonald’s. Ed recalls touring stores with Ray Kroc. “We go into the first store. Ray walks up to the counter and gets a cheeseburger, a small fries and a strawberry milk shake. We go sit down and I am eating, I think I had gotten a bag of fries. So we are eating and eating and he says to me, Ed, I want you to go over there and take all the food in the bin and throw it out. This food is awful. I said OK, and he goes no, I’ll do it. He walks over and asks to see the store manager. The store manager comes out and he says, ‘I am Ray Kroc, and I want you to take down all the prices on the menu board.’ The manager says, ‘Why?’ And he says, ‘Because your food is not worth anything. It doesn’t taste good, it’s dry, old. So the manager starts taking the plastic pricing pieces out. And I say to Ray, ‘What did you tell him?’ He said, ‘Ed, are you proud of this food?’ I said, ‘No, not at all.’ He said, ‘Well why didn’t you do something about it?’ He said, ‘I did something. Never walk by a problem. Fix it.’”
And all of us lived by those words. Don Horowitz, retired executive vice president and chief legal counsel, told me of an incident early in his career when he and his wife Judy happened to be headed toward a reception when they stopped into a McDonald’s on the way. The front lawn was full of litter. The two of them began picking up the garbage, even though they were both dressed for a formal event. “The manager never did know who those two well-dressed folks were that decided to clean his front lawn.” Don laughingly recalled. I wonder how many corporate attorneys would have emulated Don’s approach to such a situation.
Those who rose within the system believed in the same philosophy as Don, and that’s no surprise as it was engrained in the system from day one. “Ray set high standards even before he could afford them, and I respected him for that,” says Frank Behan, a former zone manager.
Many of those standards had the ability to become an indelible print on our values. Willis Smart, former regional vice president and now an operations vice president with Dunkin Brands, told me with vivid recollection his experience with McDonald’s emphasis on standards. “On my first trip to the corporate office, I was maybe 23 at the time…I remember walking into the Plaza building [at the Oak Brook headquarters], and I hadn’t been through the building before. We were walking to the elevator, and I absolutely never forget, there was this guy on his hands and knees scrubbing the thresholds of the elevator, which were either gold or polished brass. I never forgot that. I get goose bumps even now, thinking about how hard we worked to run an A-store, and we were doing it because it was just the way we were raised in the company.”
And Frank wasn’t alone. Bob Weismeuller, a retired vice president and now CEO of Fazoli’s said, “I always felt from the day I started, this ‘fanatical attention to detail.’ The attention to details, to take care of the consumer everyday, every time to focus on the customer.” Adds former Division President Debra Koenig: “McDonald’s is pretty strong about making sure that the brand promise was intact in every experience”…