Page 102 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Everything I Know About Business I Learned at McDonald’s

that they’ve got to have confidence in what we’re producing,’
and we’ve kept it that way and we’re going to keep it that way.”
Both Ray and Fred’s penchant for standards are evident
throughout the company. Take, for example, Hamburger Uni-
versity. Founded in 1961, this state-of-the-art facility is the first
of its kind in the fast-food industry. It includes teaching rooms,
multiple auditoriums, and special equipment rooms as well as
rooms to promote team integration. What’s more, Hamburger
University runs labs where managers learn to improve their
game. McDonald’s is considered the nation’s largest training
facility—surpassing even the U.S. Army! Training occurs at
every restaurant in every region at all levels. And more than
100,000 McDonald’s employees have traveled to Hamburger
University in Oak Brook, Illinois, which trains 5,000-plus stu-
dents each year; in addition, there are six other such facilities
worldwide. And just a few miles away from the Oak Brook facil-
72
ity is McDonald’s Innovation Center, where, among other prac-
tices, a store anywhere across the globe can send in its receipts
for a given day so that experts can run through the orders dur-
ing that time period and analyze how to quicken the pace so that
customers are better served while the product maintains its qual-
ity. “Good enough” is never acceptable—a team, and an indi-
vidual, can always do better. And McDonald’s puts the resources
to drive that performance increasingly up. As mentioned in the
book In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters, Fred Turner cre-
ated a “no-excuses environment.”
Another example of continuous improvement over the years
is the use of suppliers and vendors to collaborate with the com-
pany at improving its systems for delivery and product quality.
As mentioned in John F. Love’s book Behind the Arches, “In
their search for improvements, McDonald’s operations special-
ists moved back down the food and equipment supply chain.
They changed the way farmers grow potatoes and the way com-
panies process them. They introduced new methods to the