How McDonald's Hamburgers Changed The Business World Globally

When I was a kid my family had a home in Kennebunk Beach, Maine; we would spend weekends in the late spring along with the summer there.  My brother and I would caddie at Webhannet. For whatever reason one of the founders of Mc Donalds liked my brother and would ask him to shag balls. He'd only hit about 30 balls and would give my brother ten bucks!  Ten bucks back then could actually buy a lot. That was when penny candy existed (just before the dollar became toilet paper when we abandoned any link to gold).

I was thinking about those times this morning and said to myself, "McDonalds really figured out how to idiot proof business."  They realized that an assembly line approach had to be reduced to timing and precision to achieve fast food service with high quality. Back in those days the hamburger was 15 cents and the cheeseburger was 17 cents.

McDonalds was the first food chain to create systems that took the human element of judgment out of the equation.  It doesn't matter what business you are in you have to create systems and monitoring of systems to achieve a consistent result  McDonald's realized that left to human decisions they would fail not just in speed of service but also in cost controls. No matter what you do you have to reduce the human element of inconsistency out of the equation and create monitoring systems that give you the truth not fluff.

Employees will always tell you that everything is fine, yet the reality is they will tell what you want to hear. Create systems, daily reporting and monitoring and you will soon see that certain people are horribly incompetent and need to terminated. On the other hand you will see the cream rise to the top.

When the dust settles thank the founders of McDonalds they changed the world one burger at a time.

                        Written by Brad Richdale copyright 2011 all rights reserved