Grinding it Out: The Making of McDonald's
1. What surprised me the most about Ray Kroc was that McDonald's was not originally his. He basically manipulated the brothers into franchising and stole their name/created a brand.
I admire his ability to turn a one store business into a fast growing enterprise, which is definitely not easy to do. Especially back then when restaurants like this did not exist yet.
The thing I admired the least was his sneaky ways of business and how he manipulated the brothers into franchising and basically went against their wishes.
He definitely encountered diversity and failure but his confidence and belief in his product and his persistence eventually took him where he wanted to go.
2. The competencies Ray Kroc exhibited that I noticed while reading are definitely initiative, persistence, problem solving, creativity/innovation, and quality management. I'm sure there are others but these are the main things that stick out in my mind.
3.The part that confused me was how he manipulated the brothers into signing the rights over to franchising. I guess confused isn't the right word but I just don't understand how someone can be such a good talker that something like this would happen.
4. I would ask him how to stay so confident in an idea, even when it keeps failing or people are insisting that it will not work. I would also ask what the secret is to finding good people to help you along your journey.
5. I think his opinion of hard work was his job previous to "founding" McDonald's. He was a sales man for an equipment company, Prince Castle, that was starting to fall due to competition. There is not much harder than selling an already failing product. Then, he went from being a hard working sales man to creating an empire. The drastic change of career and the hours needed to put into something of that nature are the definition of hard work.
Wow I did the same book lol I too was wondering about the whole charisma angle of how he pulled the company from under the brothers. It seemed almost fiction and I wonder if part of it is. The benefit of being a guy who ran an extremely success megacorporation is that you can kind of bend the truth and events to make yourself seem more powerful than you actually were I guess.
ReplyDeleteI liked your analysis, perhaps because you both questioned and appreciated Kroc's way of doing things. In addition to that, I'm curious as to how someone would betray their close family. If Kroc's goal was to become rich and powerful, then I doubt that he needed to go behind his brothers' backs in order to do so. Of course, I don't know the full story, so maybe he had intentions of correcting their course? Or perhaps he was so driven that family didn't matter to him.
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