Good sense from McDonald’s

Kim Warren — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:32:42 +0000

A great review of What McDonald’s Can Teach Us About Recovery from an insider involved from the turn-round after 2002. I’ve noted before how Starbucks walked blindfold into exactly the trouble that McD had to dig itself out of, and this short piece makes some great points about how they did it.

It’s quality of growth that matters, not quantity.
Fix and drive the business model, don’t reinvent it.
“It’s the system, stupid!” - i.e. the system that delivers performance, not manipulating ratios or firing magic bullets, and needs intensely detailed measurement and tracking – tedious, but essential.
Work the plan – in detail.

Not ‘transforming’, not sexy, but great common sense. Many organizations would do well to follow similar principles.

McKinsey ‘business system’

Kim Warren — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:04:17 +0000

McK gives useful short videos in its ‘enduring ideas’ series. The latest I’ve viewed on the business system is a helpful reminder of the old value-chain concept, though it is disappointingly qualitative, even in the ‘How to conduct a good analysis’ section. In fact, value-chain is a better term for what the video describes.If the term ‘system’ [as dictionaries suggest] means a group of interacting, interdependent elements forming a complex whole that behaves in some way, then an adequate system description of a business would show how the system’s performance changes over time. In fact, I’m not sure the term ‘system’ has any meaning in the absence of the passing of time?

The old value-chain may help show how costs and activities are traded off between parts of the system, but says nothing about how that system will perform over time.

Talking about strategy » business system

Good sense from McDonald’s

McKinsey ‘business system’