Page 176 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Everything I Know About Business I Learned at McDonald’s

nessperson. It didn’t matter if it was construction or Paul Schrage
in advertising helping at an operator meeting, you knew they were
all about the same thing, and you learned so much.”

Open Communications
Even the look and feel of the home office in Oak Brook says that
McDonald’s is a company that values the exchange of ideas.
There was an open-door policy—literally no doors on offices—
a feature that was ahead of its time in the 1970s, and, that with
very few exceptions is still prevalent to this day. This environ-
ment encourages collaboration and communication between
everyone. And it demonstrates the transparency both of the
company and in the relationships between stakeholders.
It lends itself to the type of communications that can be so
effective in informal meetings. In the book Good to Great, Jim
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Collins relates to the effective use of these meetings: “The good
to great leaders made particularly good use of informal meet-
ings where they’d meet with groups of managers and employ-
ees with no script, no agenda or set of action items to discuss.”
These informal sessions, called “town hall meetings” for large
groups, can be particularly effective, as Collins notes.
That openness was evident in the company’s earliest days, right
on the restaurant floor. The openness of the original red-and-white
unit design, dubbed a “fishbowl” because it allowed customers
to observe the kitchen, communicated to the public that the
kitchens were spotless at a time when the 15-cent hamburger was
novel, driving many folks to question the quality of the product.
Later, as a regional manager, although I did add a conference
room with a door, I embraced that openness in my own office
with that open-door policy, which encouraged the staff to pop
in for a chat if I wasn’t already meeting with someone. That
accessibility is still apparent today, as I discovered during a