Page 49 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Honesty and Integrity

Maintaining Integrity with Consumers
When Jim Cantalupo returned from retirement to lead the com-
pany as CEO, McDonald’s had lost some of its luster. Having
acquired Boston Market, Chipotle, and Pret a Manger, McDon-
ald’s had taken its eye off the fries, many people felt. Jim brought
with him the mission to refocus the company on its core values.
To Fred Turner, who was instrumental in bringing him back to
the fold, Jim had one directive: “Fix the food.” And that meant
restoring the food to the quality and standards that had made
it a trusted brand with consumers.
It was a moment Jeff Stratton hasn’t forgotten. “Fred called
a bunch of us together in a conference room,” including current
CEO Jim Skinner, Jeff told me. “Fred was livid with us, and he
was livid because of the small incremental changes that we had
made over the past four to five years that ultimately ended up
in an unacceptable product, in his opinion, being delivered to
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the consumer, and he wanted it fixed.”
This meeting was held on Friday, October 1, 2003, as Jeff
recalled: “Fred said, ‘If any of you really care about this, I will
be at the Innovation Center tomorrow morning, Saturday morn-
ing. If you would like to join me, I am going to go to work on
repairing this food, and I would really like your help.’ Obvi-
ously, we were all there. And it spurred the food team.”
This original Food Improvement Team, in true McDonald’s
style, deployed the three-legged-stool approach: a mix of owner/
operators, suppliers, and corporate staff, all the partners—
people who cared about the company and maintaining integrity
with customers. “We pulled these guys together and we asked
them their opinion about the food. And guess what? Their’s was-
n’t much different than Fred’s. It started with buns, meat, ingre-
dients, procedures, and, five years later, that food team is as
strong and as passionate and as crazed about making our food
even better, and we now have teams all over the world.”