Page 23 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Introduction

you know I’m not an educated guy. And I didn’t follow the news
perhaps as much as I should have, so I wasn’t really up on cur-
rent events. Once your head is stuck in McDonald’s, it’s like you
can’t get it out, you know. So anyway we’re down in Califor-
nia. And they’re bringing in speakers like the ex-prime minister
of England. I’m in over my head—I know that I don’t belong in
this group. So I was asked, ‘How come you don’t ask a ques-
tion?’ I responded, ‘I guess because I can’t think of one to ask.’
And I was told to ask a question tomorrow. But I had none. So
it was brought up to Fred Turner, the CEO at the time, who
says, ‘You know we bring our guys out and you know we want
them to participate like the Coca-Cola guys. I said the Coca-
Cola guys all went to Harvard and Yale. Your guys went to HU
[Hamburger University, which trains thousands of McDonald’s
employees].’” Maybe it embarrassed the top executives that
regular guys like Frank didn’t ask questions. But we were who
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we were. And we delivered where it really counted—on the
restaurant floor, with sales and customer satisfaction. We
weren’t cut from the same cloth as those at the Ivy Leagues, but
because of what we achieved eventually even Harvard Business
Review began to pay attention to us, as you will read later in
these pages.
Fred Turner has always said that the whole is greater than
the sum of its parts, and that pretty well depicts McDonald’s.
And yet, the sailing was not always smooth. In an organiza-
tion where there are big egos and big personalities, everyone
didn’t always get along, and there were plenty of petty quib-
bles. And there were also some hard times. Every operator was-
n’t guaranteed to be the biggest and most successful one. Every
company person did not make officer. As former vice president
Willis Smart recalled to me: “It is not necessarily a place for
everyone. If it is for you, it is a great place to be, and it gives
very average people an opportunity to accomplish incredible