Page 112 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

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 presi-
dent of licensing. And as Debra Koenig put it, “People needed
to know that there were consequences to those consumer expe-
riences, and every once in a while we would have to say good-
82
bye to a franchisee.” This of course was never easy. As Debra
reminded me, “You would wonder as a member of the corpo-
ration, 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 execu-
tive in charge of those company stores or that particular fran-
chisee. It was all 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 div-
ing” (a practice that was early on demonstrated by Ray Kroc