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None of Us Is as Good as All of Us
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None of Us Is as Good as All of Us

How McDonald's Prospers by Embracing Inclusion and Diversity

Patricia Sowell Harris
Wiley, 2009
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Editorial Rating

6

Recommendation

McDonald’s statistics tell the story of its impressive business achievements. The company serves 58 million customers daily at 32,000 restaurants in 118 nations. It employs 1.6 million people, and had 2008 sales of more than $70 billion. That’s a lot of “secret sauce.” Through its vaunted Hamburger University, which opened in 1956 in an Illinois restaurant basement, McDonald’s teaches store managers, owners and operators how to do things “the McDonald’s way.” Author Patricia Sowell Harris is in charge of diversity at McDonald’s. She must be doing a good job, given that Fortune magazine cited McDonalds as the number one company for diversity two years in a row. Though Harris’s book is, by nature, promotional, she does a good job of explaining how diversity works at McDonald’s, why a diverse workforce is important and why it makes good business sense. getAbstract recommends her lessons on equitable employment to CEOs, as well as to human resource personnel, and training and hiring managers.

Summary

McDonald’s: A Slow Start on Diversity

In 1955, when Ray Kroc founded the McDonald’s Corporation – based on a hamburger restaurant owned by the original McDonald brothers – he envisioned the company as a “three-legged stool”: the firm, its suppliers and its franchisees. If one leg failed, the stool would topple.

Although he didn’t understand the need for diversity at first, eventually Kroc came to see that to sell more hamburgers than anyone else, he would need to make McDonald’s as diverse as possible. He particularly needed to match his workforce to the minority communities where some of his restaurants were going to be located. Once Kroc was convinced, he put his training and educational staff to work to support his diversity effort. He made sure everyone on McDonald’s managerial staff supported the campaign and understood how to lead a workforce made up of people of many different backgrounds. The company became a beacon of diversity.

Using a career-building model established by its “minority and women owner/operators network” McDonald’s now has employee networks for African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, gays and lesbians, young professionals and working ...

About the Author

Patricia Sowell Harris, McDonald’s global chief diversity officer, has spent more than 30 years with the company. Working Mother magazine called her one of the U.S.’s “Top 10 Diversity Champions.”

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