Page 86 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Everything I Know About Business I Learned at McDonald’s

Not for Everyone
Did everyone buy into the McFamily? No, not everyone. A lot
of that sense of family boiled down to shared values, and if you
didn’t share those values, than you no doubt were not a good
fit at McDonald’s. One staff member at the Oak Brook campus
office distinctly recalled a new employee who after a couple of
days on the job stood up at noon, and proclaimed, “You are all
nuts!” and never returned. Others who couldn’t give their all to
McDonald’s core values—about the customer experience, the
commitment to talent, honoring business ethics, giving back to
our community, growing the business profitably, striving to
improve, and believing in the three-legged stool as the premise
of the McDonald’s system—either were asked to go or left on
their own.
Sometimes the relationships between corporate and franchisee
get strained, which may seem like somewhat of a contradiction.
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“We are so helpful to franchisees, so understanding and caring,”
one Oak Brook executive said. “But it flips when we have to be
the standards enforcer.”
Every family has its own set of issues where someone feels
slighted or another is angered. Like other families, some hard
feelings still remain. Despite that, no ex-employee I spoke with
had a bad word to say about McDonald’s, which was obvious
to me when I met 2,000 other McVets and Evergreens at the
2008 Worldwide Convention. Even those who had been let go,
or laid off in a restructure, still showed a passion for the system.
They may have harbored resentment or frustration with a par-
ticular individual, but they still seemed to relish the time spent
within the system, as a rule. You would be hard pressed to find
anyone within the McFamily who doesn’t value the system and
the foundation of those relationships between owner/operators,
suppliers, and company employees.