In Grinding it Out, Ray Kroc tells the story how he build the McDonalds Empire. It is fascinating to read how he, at the age of 52, came across a fast food Drive in and made it into the fast food chain in the world. The McDonalds brothers had a smooth running fast food operation but they weren’t looking for any franchising. They were just happy with this one Drive in. Kroc per sued them to go big and from that moment the success story starts. What I found fascinating about this story:

• The age of Kroc. He was relatively old (52) to start something new but his energy and drive is really motivating.
• That said, his arrogance can be annoying sometimes. In the book he doesn’t elaborate on any mistakes. He is always right. He claims that it isn’t interesting to read about his mistakes but I would say you can learn a lot by mistakes.
• The book was published when Kroc was still alive (1977) and McDonalds didn’t even expand international yet! Little did Kroc know at the time that it would be much bigger now.
• It’s funny to read how he sees McDonalds also as support for the community. But lately it only helps people eating themselves to dead. Once it was an example of a great American product. Now it’s associated with bad and unhealthy food.

All in all it’s a nice read but I would like to have seen more about the standardizing process. How he took this one McDonalds restaurant and changed the operation so it can be easily be copied by other McDonalds restaurants. There is some of that in this book, but not nearly enough. One downside, my McDonalds cravings were really kicking up reading this book but so far I have restrained myself. It is after all, bad food.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 at 9:32 pm and is filed under books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.