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The Founder (2016) – Seven minutes on strategy and execution

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The Founder (2016). Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/1/18/14286866/the-founder-review-michael-keaton-mcdonalds

There is a 7 minute segment in the first act of The Founder that acts as a great compressed example of strategy development and execution concepts, in which the McDonald brothers explain to Ray Kroc the story of their business. Among the concepts illustrated in this tightly edited sequence:

  • Product profitability analysis – leading to menu simplification and a focus on just hamburgers, fries and coke
  • Where to play – moving out of the full service drive-in diner space to target over-served customers (with implications on operating model costs)
  • How to win – speed of service, orders “ready in 30 seconds, not 30 minutes”
  • Operating model changes – removal of car hops (waiters and waitresses on roller-skates that bring food to people in their cars) which had represented an expensive non-value adding step in the value chain (in the context of their new target customer segment)
  • Lean process improvement – running kitchen simulations on a tennis court, pretending to make burger and fries to identify efficiencies and iterate on design.
The Founder (2016)

There’s even time for a comedy scene that highlights the importance of having a change management strategy in place, featuring the chaos over their failure to properly communicate their new system. Yells one irate customer, “What do you mean I gotta get out of my car?!”.

This is common sense, anyone can do it!

A well edited cinematic sequence can make anything look easy when it is difficulty in reality, to the point that even the movie script offers a concessional line by making one of the McDonald brothers say, “We are an overnight sensation, thirty years in the making”.1

The other point worth noting that is also illustrated in the movie is that knowledge and talent are not evenly distributed (no one can know everything about everything). The McDonald brothers seemingly aced one part of strategy development and execution with little effort, but arguably could have used external help with negotiating and reviewing their deal with Ray Kroc.

Footnotes:

  1. As an aside, the official McDonald’s Our History website credits a variant of this quote to Ray Kroc, “I was an overnight success alright, but 30 years is a long, long night”.
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Taking Lean Visual Management too far? An example from 18th century Scotland

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There are some ideas that are spoken of only in jest, that you later find out that someone had already implemented them over two hundred years ago.

The New Lanark cotton mills founded in 1786 used a unique visual management system to allow a factory manager to judge the behaviour of his work force at a glance. As Robert Heilbroner writes in his book The Worldly Philosophers:

Over each employee hung a little cube of wood with a different color painted on each side: black, blue, yellow, and white. From lightest to darkest, the colors stood for different grades of deportment: white was excellent; yellow, good; blue, indifferent; black, bad…. It was mainly yellow and white.

This small four-sided wooden block was known as a ‘silent monitor’ and was used by Robert Owen as a means of imposing discipline at his New Lanark Mills. Source: https://www.peoplescollection.wales/items/10456

The Scottish Maritime Museum further elaborates:

The superintendent was responsible for turning the [cubes] every day, according to how well or badly the worker had behaved. A daily note was then made of the conduct of the workers in the ‘books of character’ which were provided for each department in the mills.

As inappropriate as this sounds to modern ears, in the context of it’s time this system was intended to be benevolent in nature. It’s inventor, Robert Owen, devised it as he was strongly opposed to the use of corporal punishment as a method for imposing discipline. Far from being known as a tyrant, history has marked him as an influential social reformer of the industrial revolution dedicated to improving the lives of working people.

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Originally Posted on Linkedin Pulse (December 5, 2020): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/taking-lean-visual-management-too-far-example-from-18th-yu-tang-lee/
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