When Ray Kroc joined the McDonald brothers, the business went from a single location in San Bernardino to the largest franchise in history. At its peak, McDonald’s was a symbol for America and freedom: on January 31, 1990, Russians lined up in Pushkinskaya Square for hours to taste the first fast food sold in the Soviet Union. Some spent four days’ wages for a Big Mac, cheeseburger, apple pie and a milkshake. 30,000 customers passed through the doors on its first day. And one of my clients, Wayne, was there. Less than two years later, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. But Wayne saw the end of communism from behind the French Fry broiler: he told me stories of women lining up in blue jeans, then handing the jeans off to other women in line so they could look American. “There is a lesson to be drawn from this for the country,” teacher Tatyana Podlesnaya told Francis X. Clines of the New York Times, who was also there. “What is killing us is that the average worker does not know how to work and so does not want to. Our enthusiasm has disappeared. But here my meal turned out to be just a supplement to the sincere smiles of the workers.” That’s the power of great business: to be an example to the world. And Kroc made that happen. Kroc is usually touted as the Great Systemizer: the guy who created all the systems and processes that made McDonald’s scalable. But his real gift, in my opinion, was closer to the communist ideal: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” Kroc didn’t force McDonald’s employees to split tips; the real currency behind McDonald’s, which earned 28.11B in its best year, was ideas. And Kroc was the collector and implementor of ideas. When one McDonald’s employee had a great one, Kroc would ...
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