McDonald’s released its Double Big Mac, and I couldn’t resist. As a health-conscious person, I made a special order to remove the middle bun. The result was astonishing: a mind-blowing composition of double patties separated by salad, pickles, and tomatoes in the middle, along with the pronounced taste of the famous Big Mac sauce.
It reminded me of my first year in college and how I became a member of McDonald’s team that opened the first restaurant in St. Petersburg, Russia back in 1996. It was not as grand as the opening in Moscow, where the mile long lines were taking up to six hours (ours were just an hour or two), but we did have a mayor of the city and a mini anti-American protest.
The six months I spent there were a great way to introduce myself to the internals of one of the best management systems in the world. The emphasis McDonald’s placed on training and developing its employees is unmatched, with thousands of Hamburger University alumni sharing their knowledge across tens of thousands of restaurants in over a hundred countries.
John Love, the author of Behind the Golden Arches, pointed out in 1987: “With more than 500,000 people on its payroll at any one time, McDonald’s is easily one of the largest employers in the United States.” But, Love adds, “Its impact on the U.S. work force greatly exceeds its current employment, because it trains so many high school students for their first jobs.”
McDonald’s, being a food chain, might not be a very good role model for other industries. But the key concepts would apply to any organization. What amazed me, in particular, and what I think was the key to its success, was the unique fusion of standardization and unstructuredness.
Each step of crew work was perfectly standard and constantly reviewed. Among McDonald’s inventions, Ray Kroc names the french fries computers “modifying the frying time to suit the balance of water to solids in a given batch of potatoes… Dispensers that allowed us to squirt exactly the right amount of catsup and mustard onto our premeasured hamburger patties… the Fatilyzer, a simple but precise testing device that an operator could use to analyze meat right in his store. If it was more than nineteen percent fat, he would reject an entire shipment“
At the same time, in his book Grinding It Out Kroc says that “It has always been my belief that authority should be placed at the lowest possible level. I wanted the man closest to the stores to be able to make decisions without seeking directives from headquarters…. I maintained that authority should go with a job. Some wrong decisions may be made as a result, but that’s the only way you can encourage strong people to grow in an organization. Sit on them and they will be stifled. The best ones go elsewhere. I knew that very well from my past experience with John Clark at Lily Tulip Cup. I believe that less is more in the case of corporate management; for its size, McDonald’s today is the most unstructured corporation I know, and I don’t think you could find a happier, more secure, harder working group of executives anywhere.“
PS: the goose didn’t get to taste the Double Big Mac despite his demands
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