Page 91 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Standards

goes, ‘no, I’ll do it.’ He walks over and asks to see the store man-
ager. The store manager comes out, and [Ray] says, ‘I am Ray
Kroc, and I want you to take down all the prices on the menu
board.’ The manager says, ‘Why?’ And [Ray] says, ‘Because your
food is not worth anything. It doesn’t taste good, it’s dry, old.’
So the manager starts taking the plastic pricing pieces out. And
I say to Ray, ‘What did you tell him?’ He said, ‘Ed, are you proud
of this food?’ I said, ‘No, not at all.’ He said, ‘Well, why didn’t
you do something about it?’ He said, ‘I did something. Never
walk by a problem. Fix it.’”
And all of us lived by those words. Don Horowitz, retired
executive vice president and chief legal counsel, told me of an
incident early in his career when he and his wife, Judy, happened
to be headed toward a reception when they stopped into a
McDonald’s on the way. The front lawn was full of litter. The
two of them began picking up the garbage, even though they
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were both dressed for a formal event. “The manager never did
know who those two well-dressed folks were that decided to
clean his front lawn,” Don laughingly recalled. I wonder how
many corporate attorneys would have emulated Don’s approach
to such a situation.
Those who rose within the system believed in the same phi-
losophy as Don, and that’s no surprise, as it was engrained in
the system from day one. “Ray set high standards even before
he could afford them, and I respected him for that,” says Frank
Behan, a former zone manager.
Many of those standards had the ability to become an indeli-
ble print on our values. Willis Smart, former regional vice pres-
ident and now an operations vice president with Dunkin Brands,
told me with vivid recollection his experience with McDonald’s
emphasis on standards. “On my first trip to the corporate office,
I was maybe 23 at the time . . . I remember walking into the
Plaza building [at the Oak Brook home office], and I hadn’t been