McDonald's Conquered the World Because It Abandoned Its "Personality": The Movie "The Founder"

Why can't I bring myself to like the "founder" Ray Kroc?

After finishing the movie "The Founder," a strange feeling remained.

Ray Kroc, the protagonist of this film, is undoubtedly capable.
In fact, it is rare to find a person who has "changed the world" as much as he did.

If it weren't for him, McDonald's might not have become a global brand. In fact, we benefit from the system he created on a daily basis.

And yet, I cannot bring myself to praise him wholeheartedly.

That is where the interest of this film lies.

In a typical success story, the audience grows to like the protagonist through their passion, effort, challenges, and contributions to society.

However, "The Founder" is different.

Ray achieves great success by encountering McDonald's.
But in the process, he strips McDonald's of its "personality".

And it is this "stripping away of personality" that transformed McDonald's into a global empire.

What Ray was looking at was not the "hamburger"

At the beginning of the film, Ray is working as a salesman for milkshake mixers.

His sales are not going well.
It is difficult for him to sell even a single mixer.

That is why the abnormality of receiving an order for six mixers from a shop in California stands out.
Moreover, when he confirms with the shop over the phone, he is told, "Six was a mistake. We need eight."

The hustle and bustle of the shop can be heard over the phone.

At that moment, Ray catches the "scent of success."

What is important here is that Ray was not just impressed by McDonald's hamburgers. Of course, their hamburgers are delicious.

However, what he truly reacted to were the following elements he saw inside the kitchen.

• Turnover rate

• Reproducibility

• Speed

• Operations

In other words, he wasn't looking at 'delicious food'.

"A system that could be replicated nationwide" is what he was looking at.

So, to put it extremely, the product might not have even needed to be hamburgers.

He was consistently looking for an "imperializable structure".

The McDonald brothers were artists of system construction.

On the other hand, the McDonald brothers had a completely different perspective from Ray.

They were not mere restaurant owners. Rather, they were closer to engineers or designers.

One of the most impressive scenes in the movie is when they draw the kitchen layout on a tennis court and have staff move around to verify it.

• Where people bump into each other

• How many steps they need to take

• Where there is waste

They observe these things thoroughly.

Furthermore, Dick McDonald looks down on the whole scene from a stepladder, waving his hands to conduct.

It is just like an orchestra conductor.

This kitchen is not just a workspace.

When the movements of each individual mesh together, a massive groove is born.

Moreover, the McDonald brothers never tell their employees to 'try harder'.

Instead, they try to create a 'structure that allows for natural, fast movement'.

This is where their aesthetic lies.

The McDonald brothers were 'designing human behavior' to make delicious hamburgers quickly.

The Revolution That Eliminated 'Wait Time'

McDonald's was revolutionary not just because it was cheap and fast.

The McDonald brothers believed that 'wait time is the biggest cause of lost profit'.

Therefore,

• narrowing down the menu

• eliminating waitresses

• getting rid of tableware and putting hamburgers in paper bags

they perform a thorough subtraction.

In fact, when Ray first received his order, he couldn't help but ask,

Is this all there is?

Up until then, restaurants had a certain 'ritual' consisting of:

• plates

• knives and forks

• customer service

and the like.

However, McDonald's eliminated that ritual.

In other words, they reduced the 'distance between ordering and eating' to the absolute limit.

What's more, it is interesting that self-service was not accepted at first.

Customers did not want to get out of their cars.

So, the brothers took inspiration from Hollywood production, held events, and designed it so that people would naturally get out of their cars.

Here, too, they were thinking not about 'how to explain it,' but...

about 'how to move people naturally.'

The 'stripping away of personality' performed by Ray Kroc

The most impressive thing while watching this movie was how Ray stripped the 'actual face' of the person from McDonald's.

The original McDonald's had a character with a face on its sign.

It contained the founder's philosophy, local character, and human warmth.

In short, it was still 'someone's shop.'

However, after it was franchised, only the Golden Arches remained.

The personality disappeared, and only abstract symbols remained.

I think this is very symbolic.

Ray did not deny the philosophy of the McDonald brothers.

Rather, he understood the excellence of that system better than anyone else.

He simply removed the 'personality' in order to expand that philosophy to a global scale.

Because things with personality are difficult to replicate.

Conversely, the more depersonalized something is,

• Easy to recognize,

• Easy to standardize,

• Easy to permeate the world.

And in reality, what conquered the world was not a 'store with a personality,' but a 'symbol that lost its personality'.

McDonald's was the prototype for modern giant systems

The structure that dominates this world applies directly to modern giant corporations as well.

For example, Apple provides the same UI and the same experience everywhere in the world.

Starbucks also prioritizes a 'space where you can feel at ease anywhere' over the individuality of a local coffee shop.

Amazon has pushed the concept of 'not making you wait' to the extreme.

Furthermore, NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services have become 'infrastructure' that transcends personality through de facto standardization.

The larger they become, the more their faces disappear.

Yet, ironically, that depersonalization is precisely the condition for permeating the world on a global scale.

Ray Kroc intuitively understood that structure.

Conclusion: 'Symbols that have lost their personality' rule the world

'The Founder' is not just a success story.

It is a story of how 'ideals with personality' are converted into 'depersonalized symbols'.

And what is terrifying is that this conversion actually 'succeeds'.

McDonald's did not conquer the world because it made the best hamburgers.

It permeated the world precisely because it became a 'symbol that belongs to no one'.