Page 40 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Everything I Know About Business I Learned at McDonald’s

experience. Those in construction ask how they can help with
the look and feel of the restaurants. And those in operations
press to learn what they can do to work with the restaurants in
better executing and planning. “This is my one takeaway of this
organization’s success,” Mike said.
Owner/operators found the spirit of trust worked both ways.
“Based on their reported sales they paid their rent and service
fees,” noted John Cooke. “There was very little auditing by the
company.”
In my own region, we conducted very few audits on operators,
and when we did, rarely did I ever find any major discrepancies.
Anything we did find was usually the product of an oversight in
recordkeeping rather than cash theft. Even in the scarce instances
when I suspected foul play, I found nothing. It was a tribute to
the honesty in how our operators conducted themselves.
Trust and faith were also prevalent on the vendor side. As Peter
10
Grimm told me: “I think back all the years I have been involved
with supply chain, it’s almost impossible to remember any inci-
dent where anyone we were involved with ever got in trouble
because they did something under the table or off the books. And
when you consider the volumes or amounts of money that is
involved in some of these transactions, that is a staggering thing.”
Honesty and integrity continue to play a big role in the com-
pany’s values and core principles, as current CEO Jim Skinner
told me. “One only has to look at the paper today. Every day
there is someone going to jail because they couldn’t control
themselves, and so you have to ask yourself, were they genuinely
honest people with integrity before they were there?” he pointed
out. “It is a big factor with me, and if I find people that are deal-
ing from the bottom of the deck or have motivation other than
the system motivation, and all of that, and do just disingenuous
things, to me that’s a deal breaker.”