The Making of McDonald’s
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Ray Kroc
Notes
I stressed the importance of making a good appearance, wearing a nicely pressed suit, well-polished shoes, hair combed, and nails cleaned…“The first thing you have to sell is yourself. When you do that, it will be easy to sell paper cups.”
“You’re not going to get it free,” I said, “and you have to take risks. I don’t mean to be a daredevil, that’s crazy. But you have to take risks, and in some cases you must go for broke”…I believe that if you think small, you’ll stay small.
I refused to worry about more than one thing at a time, and I would not let useless fretting about a problem, no matter how important, keep me from sleeping.
I believe that if you hire a man to do a job, you ought to get out of the way and let him do it. If you doubt his ability, you shouldn’t have hired him in the first place…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…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.
There is a cross you must bear if you intend to be head of a big corporation: you lose a lot of your friends on the way up. It’s lonely on top.
…business will expand to tax the facilities provided. In other words, if you have a few extra feet of griddle and an extra fry station, or if you install one more cash register than existing business requires, you’ll be challenged to put them to use.
Back in the days when we first got a company airplane, we used to spot good locations for McDonald’s stores by flying over a community and looking for schools and church steeples. After we got a general picture from the air, we’d follow up with a site survey. Now we use a helicopter, and it’s ideal.
“I believe that if two executives think the same, one of them is superfluous.”
He never did expense reports – no one gets rich on expense reports and doing them is a poor use of time.