Page 185 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Communications

good marketer would, take advantage of the various mediums
available, from podcasts to blogs, to spread a story.
Conventions, retreats, dinners, and other corporate gather-
ings are the perfect vehicles for storytelling, as well as legacy
building. As Jeff Stratton told me: “In a lot of our communica-
tions you will get a lot of the heritage, a lot of our things like
conventions, the managers speaking of their experiences that we
are doing all over the globe. We never conduct one of those
without talking about Ray and Fred. We never talk about sig-
nificant communication pieces going out without talking about
the focus on the core of our business and the roots of our busi-
ness. We built a very strong foundation.” Willis added further
to Jeff’s comments: “If you want to build a service culture in the
organization, you have to do storytelling so that people under-
stand what it is that gets rewarded.”
And, as Jeff pointed out, the legacy building serves to foster
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relationships, even among people with whom you have never
worked directly but who benefit from the work you do. “A lot
of those people that were at the McVeteran’s event helped us
[build a foundation],” Jeff told me, referring to the McDonald’s
alumni organization that met at the April 2008 convention. He
added this example: “I said something to one of our older vet-
eran operators when I was there. He called me over; I didn’t per-
sonally know him very well. I knew of his restaurants. He called
me over just to say ‘thank you,’ for the momentum of the busi-
ness and the focus, because he had been out of it and coming
back and seeing that he was just blown away. I then said to him,
and another veteran operator, something I have heard our exec-
utive team say before: ‘We stand on the shoulders of those that
have gone before us, and the fantastic foundation you have built
for us, so I thank you. So it’s very important to me that we pre-
serve that legacy.’”