Page 195 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Communications

straight-laced, formulized structure, outsiders looking into the
organization are always amazed at the allowance and encour-
agement of creativity. It’s been said by many, that McDonald’s
is really a “tight-loose” type of organizational structure in many
ways, a structure that again owes itself to Ray Kroc, Fred
Turner, and others. Don Horowitz had this to say about this
phenomenon: “Ray was a guy who always listened to a new idea
and to . . . how you could do something better, and God knows,
we thought we had a good formula, and we were doing things
right.” Still, through communications, Ray went all out to make
the system even better.
And this style was not lost on Fred Turner who, in turn,
adopted many of Ray’s qualities of leadership himself. “Fred
encouraged people to try new things,” said Don. “Fred’s question
always was, ‘How are we going to do it differently—how are you
going to include this and do it better?’ And early on that [Fred’s
165
asking this question] meant that many times you were not taking
enough risks. Well, if someone says that to you, that gives you a
certain amount of freedom in terms of taking some risk.” Risk
taking was permeated in the culture, and we were constantly
encouraged to articulate our ideas as a way to think plans through
so that the best ideas had a real shot at becoming a success.
No ideas or programs went without challenge. Such deliber-
ations made the process arduous, to be sure, but it also made
the company stronger. Think of Paul Schrage’s view.
In his role as McDonald’s chief marketing executive, he was
directly responsible for the advertising and marketing of the
organization. But, in order to advertise on national media, he
needed the approval of the operator organization, called OPNAD
(Operators National Advertising fund), to spend those funds.
That meant investing a huge amount of effort to “sell” to the
operator community the business logic for a particular campaign.
And just to make it more difficult, every store in every region did
not necessarily share the same response . . . so many operators