Everything I Know About Business I Learned at McDonald’s

Dayan refused, the corporation disfranchised him. In response, Dayan filed a lawsuit, but the court ruled in McDonald’s favor. As Love wrote:” When [McDonald’s] needed to adapt Ray Kroc’s principles of fairness to a larger and more complex system, it was willing and able to bend. When it had to protect those principles from attack by those who ignored them, it was ready to wage war.”

McDonald’s would wage war publicly so that its significance was evident to all. “There were consequences to not adhering to the standard,” notes Burt Cohen, a retired senior vice president of licensing. And as Debra Koenig put it, “People needed to know that there were consequences to those consumer experiences, and every once in a while we would have to say goodbye to a franchisee.” This of course was never easy. As Debra reminded me, “You would wonder as a member of the corporation, did I warn them enough, did I coach them enough? Did I give them enough opportunities to hear?” Yet these kinds of decisions were essential to protecting the brand. “It was never personal,” Debra pointed out. “It was never about that executive in charge of those company stores or that particular franchisee. It was about the consumer experience, or lack thereof—and then moving forward to find the resolutions, whether that was improving the situation or saying good-bye.”

   As much as our instincts were to praise the good, we clearly focused on what wasn’t right. “No McDonald’s person that walks into a restaurant doesn’t walk in to critique,” noted Kathy May, who runs training at Hamburger University in Oak Brook. “We find what’s not right, even though there may be 100,000 things that are right.” I can remember spending time in the field showing operators and their staff what we called “dumpster diving” (a practice that was early on demonstrated by Ray Kroc himself), which meant looking in the wastebaskets and finding out what people were throwing out. While the practice was unsavory at best, it revealed the need always vigilant to what the customer was telling us silently about our food, and that led to many a review of basic operations in those restaurants where issues were discovered.

   This proactive stance was embraced at the top. As Ed Rensi explains:” I want to know the problems today. I don’t want pimples to turn into boils. Tell me the bad new yesterday. Good news I could wait six months for. Because good news isn’t a threat. Bad news is a problem. I always said this my whole life:“Do the hard things first, because the easy stuff gets really easy.” Nobody wants to do the hard stuff first.” We embraced tackling “the hard stuff” first. No heads in the sand. No wishing problems would resolve themselves. It’s that very standard that helped build McDonald’s, leaving competitors behind.

One on One with Fred Turner

      To this day, standards of the system are on Fred Turner’s mind, all the time. Even as the honorary chairman, it is held clearly as a passion. And there is nothing more critical that McDonald’s fries to our customers. As Fred and I sat and discussed fries, his concern over the latest dietary trends, and some subtle taste differences, I sensed a deep concern. His voice changed and his head dropped, and he actually got emotional, shedding a tear with me on this conversation.

   Taken aback, I realized the depth of this man’s passion for high standards. No wonder generations of McDonald’s leadership has been “obsessed” with quality. McDonald’s has a legacy of passion as exemplified by Fred Turner to this day.

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