Page 110 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Everything I Know About Business I Learned at McDonald’s

By growing up in a standards-enriched system, we were able
to rise to each new challenge again and again. Take the late Jim
Cantalupo, a 28-year McDonald’s veteran who came out of
retirement to return to the company as CEO, and who Fred
Turner today still describes as “so outstanding.” Jim’s back-
ground in architecture gave him “a sense of what is a good-look-
ing store, and what does it take to have a good-looking store,”
Fred notes. “Jim had a background in accounting, coming in from
the financial end, but he gained his McDonald’s experience in the
line positions.” He had enough of an aptitude for it and also an
interest in it. He had a tremendous aptitude for marketing and
also operations as well. By the time he was in the chair as the . . .
CEO of international, he had an operational background and an
operational backbone and an operational marketing acumen,”
Fred notes. Having a field operations background “is a real
strength at McDonald’s. The top management team [must have]
80
that base of experience; it makes a huge difference when you
don’t have it and you see a lot of problems developing. I could
see that in McDonald’s China, when it didn’t have a sufficient
number of strong operations-based and operation-experience-
based people in the senior management. . . . That previous team
. . . could speak Mandarin, [which] was great with the govern-
ment, great with the press, great in getting companies interested
in McDonald’s; [they] did some great stuff but just didn’t relate
to operations at all.” Things turned around, Fred says, when the
company brought in an operations person skilled in training and
with an aptitude for McDonald’s standards.
Standards were always dictated by delivering the best possi-
ble customer experience. And no matter how widely these stan-
dards set forth by McDonald’s were spelled out, there were times
that a franchisee or a manager running a company store did not
live up to them, despite the level of one-on-one coaching and
mentoring. It was always interesting to me to see just how high