Chapter Content
## Chapter 3: The Milkshake Man's Revelation
In the year 1954, a seasoned salesman by the name of Raymond Crock, born back in 1902 and destined to pass in 1984, steered his vehicle into the parking area of a modest hamburger establishment called McDonald's. This eatery was the brainchild of two brothers, Richard and Maurice McDonald. Crock's journey to this point had been a varied one. He'd tried his hand as a musician, dabbled in property speculation, and peddled paper cups, before finding himself hawking multi-spindle milkshake machines. Had the mundane world of disposable cups not grated on him, he might have remained a comfortable middle manager. But that moment in the parking lot changed everything. He was utterly captivated by what he witnessed. Neither he, nor the McDonald brothers for that matter, could have foreseen that Crock would seize their concept and mold it into a global phenomenon. This marked the beginning of the most fruitful, intense, and triumphant chapter of his life.
What drew Crock in was the sheer novelty and operational brilliance of the McDonald brothers' restaurant. It was unlike anything he had ever seen â the most streamlined and efficient fast-food joint in the entire nation. No other place came close to serving food so quickly and with such satisfying results. The french fries boasted an outer crispness and an inner fluffiness that was unmatched. The burgers had the ideal balance of lean meat and savory fat. People were lining up to order, yet the wait was surprisingly brief. Other burger places were so slow that the food was practically cold by the time it was served. At McDonald's, they delivered their food piping hot. A complete meal â burger, fries, and milkshake â appeared within a remarkable fifty seconds.
For Crock, it was an electrifying moment of realization. "It felt like some modern-day Isaac Newton getting hit on the head with a spud," he later recalled. That very night, he envisioned a landscape dotted with McDonald's restaurants at every major intersection across the country. Initially, his thoughts centered on the possibility of selling milkshake mixers to this imagined empire. However, his genuine admiration for the restaurant the brothers had created was undeniable. At the age of fifty-two, he felt as if he had finally discovered his true purpose. Crock was an energetic and driven individual who had experienced the realities of war, played jazz piano, and chased fortune in Florida only to return to Chicago's harsh winter empty-handed. Determined to avoid the same financial struggles as his father, he worked tirelessly, much like a bee searching for pollen. After his unsuccessful Florida venture, he spent over a decade in steady, respectable jobs. But Ray Crock wasn't cut out to be a corporate drone. He had unwavering belief in his own abilities, a conviction akin to that of a poet or a painter. Restlessness was inevitable. "I wanted work that was about more than just a paycheck, something I could wholeheartedly throw myself into," he said.
A conventional business career was never Crockâs likely path. He quit school to serve as an ambulance driver during the First World War. Following that, he bounced between sales positions, supplementing his income by playing the piano. Fast-food experts John Jakle and Keith Sculle have observed that his unique blend of sales savvy and musical talent could have propelled him to success as a dance band leader. Crock was aiming for some form of achievement, but his aspirations were not precisely defined.
Rather than meticulously planning out his career, he focused on refining his skills, always prepared to capitalize on emerging opportunities. This approach led him from piano playing to real estate, from paper cups to McDonald's. At fifty-two, when he first encountered the McDonald brothers, he was seeking ways to reignite the dwindling sales of his milkshake mixers. His remarkable drive and industriousness allowed him to recognize the potential of McDonald's as a venture that far surpassed selling milkshake machines.
This narrative goes beyond mere lack of planning. Crock did possess some of those qualities. However, he exemplifies something different. Raymond Crock was what economist David Galenson might describe as an "experimental creator."
***
Many artists and poets, like Keats and Picasso, appear to possess innate talent. This creative archetype is well understood. They know precisely what they want to create, and they express it early â and magnificently. Galenson labels these individuals "conceptual creators." They tend to reach their peak before the age of thirty. Experimental creators are the opposite. They work incrementally, lacking a clear vision early on, pursuing only vague goals. They rarely feel like they have fully succeeded. Through practice, repetition, and learning from errors, they discover their objectives. Their work becomes their research. Experimental creators reach their zenith later in their careers. Picasso's most successful works, the paintings that fetch the highest prices today, were created in his twenties. Many experimental artists have not even started by then.
Crock embodies the iterative, inductive traits of experimental creators. He held vague goals and had to work everything out along the way. He built his career in a manner similar to how many artists find their vision: gradually, with constant revision. He possessed creativity, not from great imagination but from meticulous observation of reality. What art historians Jakob Rosenberg and Seymour Slive said of painter Frans Hals applies equally to Crock: âIf he had to rely on his own imagination, he would have been lost and unable to proceed.â
Crock's career demonstrates continual growth, ambition, and perfectionism, as you would expect from a driven artist. As William Carlos Williams said of Wallace Stevens, a poet who blossomed later in life, "It is a sign of genius when an accomplished person can continually evolve, constantly improving their technique." Like Hals, and numerous other artists of this type, Crock worked with dedicated experimentation. His success was delayed and unexpected.
It might be challenging to perceive Crock as an artist. He couldnât paint or dance. He was not a composer or a poet. He was a manager who founded a fast-food business with global reach. But reflect on this observation by Warren Bennis, which Jack Goldman, the chief scientist at Xerox, clipped from a newspaper and kept displayed above his desk: "There are two ways of being creative. One can sing or dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish." Crock exhibited the second type of creativity. In his memoir, advertising pioneer David Ogilvy, another late bloomer, said, "Copywriters, art directors, and television producers are easy to come by, but the number of men who can preside over an agencyâs entire creative output â perhaps a hundred new campaigns every year â can be counted on one hand. Those rare trumpeter swans must be capable of inspiring." Crock belonged on that list: he created a business that was a pioneer in its field. And he inspired countless individuals who worked with him.
For Galenson's experimental creators, each piece of work is a test, a discovery. Rather than seeing each painting as a finished execution of an idea or an installment in a series of complete works, each is an experiment that yields results. These results accumulate and inform future endeavors. In this way, experimental creators gradually develop their vision and the techniques required to achieve it. Thatâs precisely how Ray Crock built McDonaldâs.
***
Crock entered the mixer industry while employed as a paper cup salesman during the Great Depression, from 1927 to 1937. Why would a man with such relentless energy and ambition remain in a stable paper cup sales job for ten years? He quit once during a dispute over pay, but he went back. Otherwise, it was a remarkably consistent period. He was "having so much fun selling" that the disputes with his boss didn't affect him too much. In fact, given that his life before 1927 had been so unpredictable, it's not surprising that he chose to dedicate himself to that job. His career had been highly fragmented.
Crock left school at sixteen and sold coffee beans door-to-door before enlisting as an ambulance driver in the First World War. (He didnât reach France because the Armistice was signed weeks later.) He then took a job selling ribbon novelties and claimed to be earning more than his father. He played the piano on the side and inadvertently got a job in a bordello. Selling ribbons bored him, so he joined the Charleston craze playing piano in a band, complete with "striped blazers and straw boaters." He then took a job monitoring the ticker tape and recording prices at the Chicago Stock Exchange. His parents moved to New York, and he was obliged to go with them, leaving behind his girlfriend Ethel. He and Ethel had hoped to marry, and now Crock was stranded without her, working as a cashier in New York. Eventually, the firm closed down, and he raced back to Chicago and Ethel. He and Ethel had been shocked by the move to New York, and they were now determined to marry.
Crockâs father insisted he get a real job. "A few days later I went to work selling Lily brand paper cups." As well as pounding the streets by day selling cups to soda fountains, Crock was playing piano for a radio station in the evenings. It was inconsistent work, especially while Crock learned the ropes, and paper cups were seasonal, so he did little business in the winter. In 1925, he decided to go to Florida and chase the real estate boom. He got off to a good start, but "just as I was getting into the swing of selling those lots, the whole business vanished." He had taken a leave of absence from Lily paper cups and rented some rooms in Florida. Now he was left with no work at all. Someone in his building heard him play the piano and got him a job.
He learned a valuable lesson from this: the bar where he played had a fixed-price drink menu and a simple food service that "made a lasting impression on me." Itâs easy to look back and find these important moments in your life, but we shouldnât be entirely skeptical. Crock spent his career in the growing restaurant and food business. He played in bars, sold soda fountains, and visited kitchens. He was studying restaurants and becoming an expert in the developing style of simple service.
Florida didnât work out. Crock was playing in a bar that broke Prohibition laws and spent a night in jail when the bar was raided. Ethel was already lonely and miserable in Florida, longing to go home, and she was disturbed by this event. So Ethel went ahead to Chicago with their new child, and Crock worked his two-week notice with the band. He drove home to Chicago, and Floridaâs economy tanked shortly afterwards.
Crock was frightened by the way that the opportunities in Florida had collapsed like a rotten floor. With a child to support, he had to find something reliable. He gave up music and real estate and dedicated himself to paper cups. Crock was changing to an opportunity where his different talents and interests would eventually be given the chance to converge.
Experimental creators prefer the concrete, the real. That is Crock, who always persisted in learning the details of his business â nothing was beneath his notice. While selling paper cups, he met Ralph Sullivan, who had invented a new method of making milkshakes that made them thicker and colder than the old style. The lines went around the block. Crock began selling to Sullivan, happy to have a customer who needed a lot of cups. But he also saw the potential in Sullivanâs business, as he later would with McDonaldâs, and got his bosses to join with another client, Earl Prince, who ran an ice cream parlor, to go and see Sullivan. It was a major opportunity for both ice cream and paper cup sellers. Earl Prince was inspired and began selling a new kind of milkshake, and Crock started selling him many more paper cups, too. Prince then invented his own milkshake mixer â called the Multimixer â that was more efficient at handling the new, thicker drink. Crock got his employer interested and they became the distributors.
Prince offered Crock the chance to join him. Crock was keen, but Ethel was furious that he would leave a steady job for a "flyer" like that. It was the beginning of the end of their marriage. He faced more problems. His employer held the contract to distribute the mixers â and despite being uninterested in the business, refused to give it up to him. He cut a deal where he got the contract, but his employer got 60 percent of the business he was setting up. Crock had to extend his mortgage to buy his employer out. The importance of structuring the business properly at the outset was a lesson he had to relearn with the McDonald brothers, but which became central to the way franchising worked.
Crock also learned to find the right people for the right job. His paper cup employers had been the wrong people to involve in the milkshake mixer plan. When he set up McDonaldâs, he did so with the talented finance director Fred Turner. Most importantly, the Multimixers taught him about kitchens: selling them took him into thousands of kitchens. "I prided myself on being able to tell which operations would appeal to the public and which would fail." As was the case in Florida, where he paid attention to the simple service methods of the restaurants he played piano in, he had an eye for opportunity by looking at the details. Crock was accumulating experiences that he could not anticipate would be so life-changing later on.
The mixers also brought him luck. It was only because they bought so many milkshake mixers that Crock visited the McDonald brothers.
***
Ray Crock didnât invent McDonaldâs. Maurice and Richard McDonald did. Crock brought scale to their operation. Without him, it would have remained a family business, unknown to the world. Or, if the two brothers had somehow grown the business, they would, in their own words, have "wound up in some skyscraper somewhere with about four ulcers and eight tax attorneys trying to figure out how to pay all my income tax." With Crock, though, the McDonald brothersâ principles were rigorously turned into a global business. Itâs one thing to run a hamburger restaurant, quite another to create a global empire of consistent standards. The miniaturist and the muralist are both artists but of very different sorts.
The brothers invented the restaurant system that made McDonaldâs so efficient. It was their arrangement of the kitchen and their impeccably precise system that meant they could produce a hamburger and fries every fifty seconds. Ray Crockâs contribution was to work out how to franchise this business to make it work at scale, which the brothers had failed to do.
To many, this makes Crock a plagiarist, or worse. He is sometimes presented as the man who stole McDonaldâs. "The brothers lost out on a fortune and had their legacy all but erased for decades because of going into business with Ray Crock. 'I remember him saying once, when I was a teenager, âThat guy really got me,â' recalled Richard McDonaldâs grandson Jason French." Itâs not clear, though, how that fortune would have materialized for the brothers without Crock. They had tried franchising the restaurant and it hadnât worked. Keeping track of the franchisees was too much: they were initially skeptical of working with Crock for reason.
The McDonald brothersâ nephew has claimed that Crock reneged on a deal to pay the brothers 0.5 percent of gross sales, an arrangement that would have made them much richer than they were. But the brothers disliked paying high rates of income tax and wanted simple lives without the complications wealth can bring. As Richard later said, "Taxes were killing us. We werenât kids anymore. We had three homes and a garage full of Cadillacs, and we didnât owe a dime to anyone. I have no regrets. Yachts on the Riviera were not my style at all." They sold to Crock for one million dollars each, after tax, payable in cash. This was a big demand to make of Crock at that time, worth about ten million dollars today. And they too reneged on the deal, insisting on keeping the original restaurant, against the terms of the contract. To maintain the idea that Crock conned the McDonald brothers you have to pass very lightly over the fact that it was his brains and effort that took the restaurant global, not theirs. The Daily Mail describes it like this: "After taking over McDonaldâs, Crock oversaw a period of staggering expansion." "Oversaw" is an understatement.
A recent biopic about Crock, The Founder, takes the same view that many critics have, presenting Crock as a rapacious businessman who outmanoeuvred the innocent, gentle McDonald brothers. Undoubtedly, Crock was unpleasantly competitive. He had a relentless focus that took little account of personal feelings. If he felt you were dishonest, he was done with you. But the film tilts at windmills. A rapacious competitor stealing an idea is a movie trope. The Social Network told a similar story about the origins of Facebook, with Mark Zuckerberg presented as the man who stole the idea from the Winklevoss twins. This elides the idea and the making, as if there is not an important distinction. As Zuckerberg says at one point in the film, "If you guys were the inventors of Facebook you would have invented Facebook." That distinction makes all the difference. As the real Zuckerberg said, "Writing code and then building a product and building a company is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about." Crockâs story is similar. The brothers invented the system; Crock invented the business. There is no credible alternative history in which the brothers got rich without Crock or someone else with his capabilities.
To see the two distinct contributions Crock and the McDonald brothers made, we need to put them in the context of hamburger history.
***
Like anything, hamburgers had to be invented and perfected. Walter Anderson, a grill cook from Wichita, Kansas, invented the modern method of cooking hamburgers. Before Anderson, hamburgers were loosely formed and held between slices of bread. Thanks to a combination of persistent tinkering and good luck, Anderson struck on the technique of pressing down on the burger patty with his spatula while cooking it on a hot grill. This gave the burger better shape and more uniform flavor. Anderson put these new hamburgers inside a bun. This made them mobile, perfect for the automobile age. It was the time of Henry Ford, the assembly line, and mass-produced consumer goods. People wanted to find the same product in every branch. As White Castle, the chain where Anderson worked, said of their restaurants, "The hamburger you eat is prepared in exactly the same way over a gas flame of the same intensity⊠the same standard of cleanliness protects your food. Even the men who serve you are guided by standards of precision which have been thought out from beginning to end."
The McDonald brothers perfected these standards of precision: they were building on an established model. There are many aspects of the hamburger process that they improved â but many are fundamental. It was one of Crockâs franchisees who discovered that gas cookers (rather than the electric fryers used by the McDonald brothers) were cheaper and produced a better French fry. This was so important to the McDonaldâs process that cooking with gas became an important phrase in their culture. "When somebody was cooking with gas around our place it meant he was doing everything right." White Castle, unknown to McDonaldâs, had discovered that years earlier. White Castle also discovered that paper cups were easier to use than China ones before McDonaldâs did. White Castle expanded their market by targeting women, who traditionally saw diners as male places, just as McDonaldâs would later have a marketing breakthrough by targeting children.
The brothers, and Crock, were part of a chain of innovators that created the modern fast-food restaurant. Fast food started with the addition of soda fountains to shops in the 1880s, which started selling sandwiches and soup. This spread to department stores and railway stations. During Prohibition, saloons converted into luncheonettes. In the 1920s, lunchrooms opened near streetcars and subways, to appeal to commuters. As cafeterias developed in the mid-century, assembly lines were introduced, with customers pushing their tray along a counter. This was especially popular in California, a hub of fast-food development. The cafeteria model allowed hot meals to be served as well, not just sandwiches.
Then came the diner, modeled on dining cars and sometimes built inside old railroad carriages. With automobiles came highway diners. Here the fundamental aspects of modern fast-food chains were developed: busy grill cooks and scuttling waitresses serving customers on the go-go. As drive-ins flourished, they hired car hops, pretty young women who took driversâ orders and brought them their food, often on roller skates. This model was slow, and the food was often cold. And it meant that teenage boys with no money loitered in the car parks to watch the car hops, putting off family trade and dropping litter.
By the time the post-war consumer boom began, fast-food restaurants were a well-evolved model, ready and waiting to be perfected by the McDonald brothers and Ray Crock. The brothers did two things that made them successful: they installed the golden arches, so visible from a car they are universally recognizable to toddlers today, and they produced a burger, fries and shake every fifty seconds, with no need for car hops. For years, McDonaldâs advertised a guarantee of hot food.
The McDonald brothersâ redesign of the fast-food kitchen was so exact that they controlled the number of steps employees took between each item of equipment. For something like that to scale, someone had to figure out how to make franchising work. This was the problem Ray Crock solved. So successful was Crock that, in 1980, the courts formally recognized the idea of business format franchising as distinct from product franchising â that is, a model in which a franchise licenses the whole way of doing business, not just the menus. It took Ray Crock to find the right people to run the franchises and to instill the McDonaldâs way of doing business into them.
Walter Anderson had tried to profit from his insights about cooking hamburgers, but, like the brothers, he needed a business partner. He opened three restaurants but lacked capital. He partnered with Bill Ingram, a real-estate agent. They created the White Castle model. By 1931, they were the biggest chain of the time with 115 restaurants. As Crock later did, Ingram gave the operators instructions about everything, including "how to dress, how to speak." Still, it was difficult to maintain standards. Good operators were entrepreneurial, but the business relied on consistency. It is difficult to run a Henry Ford-style assembly line with so many different operators in different locations. White Castle used frozen burger patties as one attempt at standardization, a compromise on standards. They never franchised, and still donât, which helped maintain control but limited growth.
White Castle was innovative, as McDonaldâs later was. Just as McDonaldâs franchisees invented menu items like the Big Mac and branding like the Ronald McDonald character, so too a White Castle operator named Bob Wian created the first double-decker burger, known as Big Boy. Still, Ingram refused to franchise. And so, until someone combined that exactitude and creativity with a workable franchising model, those sorts of innovations remained in small, not major, chains. The McDonald brothers were not the visionary types to achieve that: for their success to scale, they required Ray Crock.
Crock revolutionized the way franchising was arranged in restaurants. Rather than give out franchises to areas or regions, the usual practice at the time, Crock franchised individual stores. In this way, McDonaldâs made much less money than it might have done. Territorial franchises pay more and pay quicker. But Crockâs approach gave him control. "Once they sign, they are going to conform and we are going to hold to it they do conform." No one who failed to live up to Crockâs standards got a second franchise. Thatâs how you create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish. And it worked: only one franchisee failed in the first thirty years of operation.
Crock prioritized standards over money. He wanted to find the best talent, to create the strongest network of individuals in his business. That way, when growth came it would be reliable. He had an individual leadership style, learned from past experiences. He worked through inspiration, with dedicated followers. And he applied the methods of experimental artists. Galenson argues that experimental artistsâ ideas emerge from the work. Leonardo, for example, said: "Those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience." Crock also worked with the experiential method:
There is a certain kind of mind that conceives new ideas as complete systems with all of their parts functioning. I donât think in that âgrand designâ pattern. I work from the part to the whole, and I donât move on to the large scale ideas until I have perfected the small details. To me this is a much more flexible approach⊠You must perfect every fundamental of your business if you expect it to perform well.
The result of this mindset is that McDonaldâs was built on many attempts and many failures. As John Love says, "The key ingredient of Crockâs management formula is a willingness to admit failure and to admit mistakes." This combination of perfecting small details and being willing to admit mistakes is exactly like Galensonâs archetypal experimental artist, Paul CĂ©zanne, who never placed a stroke of paint without thinking about it carefully but had something of a disregard for his own paintings.
In the foreword to Crockâs memoir, the business professor Paul D. Paganucci described Crockâs life as "a long apprenticeship." That is exactly what an experimental artist goes through â and it is the model for understanding the late blooming of Ray Crock. Galensonâs ideas are applicable beyond artists. It is a model for late blooming in all sorts of careers. CĂ©zanne is the archetypal experimental artist, but his example can be followed by any late bloomer in any walk of life.
CĂ©zanne did not even formulate the central problem of his career until he was in his mid-thirties. He then worked steadily at developing his solution to that problem â "searching for a technique" â for more than three decades, and arrived at his most important contribution towards the end of his life.
It was after this long experimental life, searching for a technique, that CĂ©zanne transformed art, developing Post-Impressionism. He discovered what he was looking for one canvas at a time. He had to search for his artistic vision painting by painting. Once he discovered his big idea, it took constant work to make it real, to perfect it. You do not have to be CĂ©zanne to follow Galensonâs strategy. You can change the way an industry works using the experimental artistsâ technique, whether you are an artist or accountant, a painter or a programmer. As CĂ©zanne practised on every canvas, trying to find the way to change Impressionism, you can practise in every job, every email you write, every meeting you attend, every project you complete. Galensonâs insights apply so clearly and accurately to Crock that we can see this as a general model of late blooming. Crock changed fast food just as much as CĂ©zanne changed painting: he was an experiential artist of the business world. Like CĂ©zanne and other experimental artists, he took a long time to mature into a major new vision of the way things could be done. The fact that fast-food franchising is now ubiquitous can be largely credited to Ray Crock, who never worked in fast food before he was fifty-two.
***
The McDonald brothers were also late bloomers and had a long apprenticeship of their own. They moved to California from New Hampshire in 1930, when Maurice was twenty-eight and Richard was twenty-one. First, they worked as odd jobbers in the movies. When they realized no preferment was coming, they set up a movie theatre. It was the middle of the Great Depression; the theatre flopped. In 1937, now aged thirty-five and twenty-eight, they opened a food truck at a racetrack. The business was seasonal, and they eventually decided to open a restaurant. All the banks they went to refused them a loan because the brothers had no collateral. In 1940, one manager at Bank of America saw something in them and took a punt, saying he had "a hunch that McDonaldâs is going to make it big." And so they opened their first drive-in.
It was a hit, but people were waiting twenty minutes for their food. Car hops were expensive and inefficient. This wasnât a problem. Customers werenât complaining. "But our intuition told us they would like speed." This instinctive sense of what the customer wanted was a trait they had in common with Crock. Their drive-in was a barbecue restaurant, but they realized that 80 percent of sales were hamburgers. So, in 1948, aged forty-six and thirty-nine, eleven years after they started the food truck, they closed the restaurant down and reinvented the whole process.
Their efficiencies make White Castleâs system look weak. Everything was custom designed. The grills were bigger and easier to clean and held the heat better. All kitchen items were bespoke. They visited candy companies, pretending to be writers, to find better machinery for cutting burger patties. Everything was focused on "speed, lower prices, and volume." In their own small, charming way, they were just as ruthless as Crock. They wanted to be millionaires and nothing was left to chance. As well as cutting most items off the menu they added French fries and milkshakes. The new system became popular with families, especially children. Staff were told to be nice to kids, a marketing ploy McDonaldâs used throughout the twentieth century. The division of labour was intense: there were grill men, French fry men, milkshake men. Revenue jumped 40 percent â and the old restaurant had already been successful. By the mid-1950s, the brothers were making $100,000 profit and driving new Cadillacs every year. (The average car trade-in time was two years by 1960.) That is something in the order of a million dollars in modern money. Their new system had worked. In their mid forties and early fifties, the brothers were starting to make the money they had dreamed of. Crock was not to be their only imitator. People travelled to see this new restaurant and replicated it back home.
George Clark, founder of Burger Queen, once said, "Our food was exactly the same as McDonaldâs. If I had looked at McDonaldâs and saw someone flipping hamburgers while he was hanging by his feet, I would have copied him." Crock was not a copycat. Essential to his work at McDonaldâs was a constant eye for marginal gains. Like Galensonâs experimental artists, he saw everything he produced as a chance to improve. He had to make the McDonaldâs system work in non-desert climates and incorporate efficiencies discovered by franchisees. Where others copied the system, Crock finessed, expanded and improved it with his relentless eye for detail. It was Ray Crock whose background and personality equipped him to turn a lucky break with a small family business into one of the twentieth centuryâs financial titans.
Crock could have been one of those copycats. The brothers gave him an extraordinarily detailed tour of the kitchen. He knew their system inside out. Nothing was stopping him from setting up on his own. But he saw it all differently. "The idea never crossed my mind. I saw it through the eyes of a salesman. Here was a complete package, and I could get out and talk up a storm about it." Crock knew his ability. He was not the man to build a kitchen. And he knew his comparative advantage. The brothers were not the people to get out and talk up a storm about McDonaldâs. This was not just Crockâs learned ability in sales. He had an intensity about McDonaldâs that was quite unsettling. There was something evangelical about his devotion. As he wrote, "The French fry would become almost sacrosanct for me."
Among the first things he noticed was that, unlike other drive-ins with their car hops and loitering teenagers, there was no litter in the McDonaldâs parking lot. This mattered not just because Crock was obsessive about cleanliness, but because he could see a new market in this fresh and friendly model. He once said: "Iâve made up my mind that all hamburger joints had jukeboxes, telephones, and cigarette machines and that your wife wouldnât go to a place with leather-jacketed guys and smoke-filled rooms." For the man who had previously moved into the paper cup business because "paper cups were part of the way America was heading," this was a moment of realization. This was part of the way America was heading. He lost his temper over one item of litter in the car parks of early franchises. Small transgressions were "gross affronts" to Crock, as if he had found litter in a shrine. The reason for his anger was simple, it just wouldnât drive most people to the inordinate lengths of work and attention it drove him to: "Perfection is very difficult to achieve, and perfection was what I wanted in McDonaldâs." He sounds like the artist Bridget Riley: "My goal was to make the image perfect, not mechanical⊠but perfect in the sense of being exactly as I intended it."
The golden arches are often described as modern icons with their mesmerizing power. For Crock, the whole enterprise had that quality. Even in retirement, he watched the local McDonaldâs through binoculars from his house and called the franchisee to give him hell when he saw standards slipping. He had learned on his first visit that the brothers "lavished attention" on their French fries, and he continued to lavish attention on everything about the business whilever he was in charge. What sounds fatiguing to most people was energizing to Crock. "For me, work was play."
Crockâs most important ability in building McDonaldâs was talent spotting. As a young man, when he had moonlighted as a radio pianist, one of his jobs was to find acts to fill airtime. He picked out a young comedy duo who later became one of the most famous comedy acts of their generation. This ability to spot talent served him well throughout his career. During his time as a salesman, he was focused on finding and nurturing the right people. He became famous at McDonaldâs for his demanding, insistent attitude. Top executives were issued with a small packet containing a nail file, comb and brushes. It wasnât just the parking lots. Everything had to be speckless. That was the level of attention he paid to his people. Some leaders might tell you itâs important to look smart. Ray Crock bought you a nail file and a comb. Twenty years earlier, when he was selling paper cups, he had imbued the same spirit of neatness into his team: "I stressed the importance of making a good appearance, wearing a nicely pressed suit, well-polished shoes, hair combed, and nails clean. 'Look sharp and act sharp,' I told them. 'The first thing you have to sell is yourself.'" Crock was an instinctive manager who knew that morale and unity are essential to a well-functioning team:
I had about fifteen salesmen working for me then and we had a fine spirit of enthusiasm percolating among us. After work we would get together and talk shop, batting around ideas about how to sell more paper cups. That was fun. I loved to see one of those young fellows catch hold and grow in his job. It was the most rewarding thing Iâve ever experienced. I wasnât much older than any of them, and some were older than me. But I felt like a father to them.
Supposedly, this is how he created so many disciples when he ran the McDonaldâs corporation. He wasnât an overbearing manager â he provided a well-defined atmosphere of ambition, enthusiasm, hard work, and purpose. Once he found the right people, and put them in the right conditions, he let them run. "I believe that if you hire a man to do a job, you ought to get out of the way and let him do it." (He had several rows with his managers over the years, all of them at root caused by the fact that he felt like he was not given the freedom due to a high performer.) This was the spirit he brought to corporate headquarters but also to selecting the franchisees. Especially in the early years, it was Crockâs dedication to finding, nurturing, and then freeing the right talent that made McDonaldâs a success. In an echo of Henry James, who said the only recipe for writing a great novel was to care very much for the cooking, Crock once told the New York Times, "McDonaldâs people take the hamburger business just a little more seriously than anybody else." He was looking for people who cared. "We want someone who will get totally involved in the business. If his ambition is to reach the point where he can play golf four days a week or play gin rummy for a cent a point, instead of a tenth, we donât want him in a McDonaldâs restaurant." That was the secret to his success. No matter that he was dealing with hamburgers, he persisted, insisted and progressed through his career with the intensity of slow-growing experimental artists. Ray Crock took this so seriously that a sign hung above McDonaldâs executivesâ desks that read:
NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE.
TALENT WILL NOT; NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT.
GENIUS WILL NOT; UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB.
EDUCATION WILL NOT; THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS.
PERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION ALONE ARE OMNIPOTENT.
Supposedly, this is a quotation from Calvin Coolidge, but was often printed in newspapers anonymously as filler before Coolidgeâs time. Of course, these homilies are not true. The world is full of failures. Ray Crock got lucky. He found a restaurant that had perfected the efficient kitchen system and was ready to be expanded. But getting lucky doesnât mean having it easy. Without his personal qualities â his cleanliness, agonizing insistence on every detail, willingness to experiment, to do what it took to get things exactly right, to nurture future talent rather than chase profits; his instinct for what the public would go for; and his energy â Crockâs luck would have run out. Many other fast-food entrepreneurs had mixed backgrounds like he did. Dunkinâ Donuts was founded by a door-to-door salesman; Wendyâs by a busboy. Harland Sanders founded KFC very late in life after having been a farmworker, mule handler, railway fireman, unqualified lawyer and doctor, insurance salesman, tyre salesman, and gas station operative. Something of the variety, the need to hustle, the way they had scrambled around to find their niche actually helped these people. This inefficient preparation, their approach to their careers as experimental artists,