Page 56 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Everything I Know About Business I Learned at McDonald’s

Fred has always believed that the operators, those closest to the
customer on a daily basis, are the ones who can best help to feed
and nurture the system. And that belief continues to this day.
“The three-legged stool. I loved it. I grabbed it. I ran with it.
It said a lot to me,” Fred said to me recently. “It highlights the
important role of the suppliers. Then you have the company
people. But under the company people, you had the employees
of the licensee. Managers and supervisors. Company people
working with key people with the operator.”
Case in point: Chicken McNuggets. What do they have to do
with relationships? Plenty, as Ed Rensi reminded me. Especially
when you add in a solid dose of strategic leadership.
“Relationships are all about trust, and sometimes when you
are dealing with strategic leadership, and Fred used to say this,
and I attribute this to him, and it is the single most important
characteristic of McDonald’s even to this day, that Fred Turner
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was an unbelievable strategic leader,” Ed told me. “And he nur-
tured his relationships.” Ed described the Chicken McNuggets
program, of which he was head of product development. Fred
asked Ed if he had the right people working on this project, to
which Ed replied, “Well, hell, yeah. We have the best people in
product development.” But Ed realized that he didn’t have the
best people. Because of Fred’s personal relationships with Herb
Lotman, a primary meat supplier, and Bud Sweeney, who devel-
oped McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish, as Ed recalled, “when Fred said
‘Go make me Chicken McNuggets,’ they holed up in a room,
that’s all they worked on, and it was because of Fred’s relation-
ship with those people. And he said ‘Trust me,’ and they did.” As
Ed pointed out, the strategic leader has to say at some point:
“Trust me and follow my lead. You may not know exactly how
this is all going to work out, but trust me.” Ed continued, “Fred
was a guy that invested a tremendous amount of trust in people,
and therefore people trusted him. He was a man of his word.”