Page 31 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

1 Honesty and Integrity:

All in a Handshake

It’s not what you do but the way you do it.

—Ray Kroc

It seems only fitting that honesty and integrity is
our first chapter. As Don Thompson, the current president of
McDonald’s USA, told me: “It’s foundational. Everything is built
off of that, and if you don’t have that one right, you can’t move
to the other principles.”
Ray Kroc put honesty and integrity at McDonald’s very core,
going against the grain in the food business. In the 1950s and
1960s, an era when the industry was rife with kickbacks—
where fast-food chains expected a percentage back from the sup-
pliers selling goods to franchisees—Ray would have none of it.
He expanded on the topic of honesty in a speech to a business
school in 1974: “Whatever you do, don’t prostitute yourself and
do something for money. It’s got to be in your heart and your
soul. You’ve got to sleep with it and eat it, and it’s something
you can’t live without.”
Advocating a system of honesty and integrity—and demanding
the same from corporate, franchisees, and vendors—Ray and Fred
Turner devised a system whose stakeholders could expect a fair
shake. And in many ways the company was ahead of its time.
From handshake agreements to the company’s ombudsman pro-
grams to the no-walls/no-doors layout at the initial and subsequent

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Copyright © 2009 by Paul Facella. Click here for terms of use.