Reviewing the Autobiography of Ray Kroc

Recently I finished the autobiography of Ray Kroc, "Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's", on audio-book. If you haven't heard of him, he is a man who saw the possibility of a small restaurant chain of fast food burgers started by the McDonald brothers. He is a man who made it onto TIME Magazine's list of top 50 people who contributed to the modern American way of life. He is a man who believed in putting in hard work.

The way the story is spun in the book is really captivating. I already knew how Mr. Kroc discovered and bought McDonald's later in life, but I was really struck by the entrepreneurial toughness he had to essentially tie down all his financials at the age of 35 to a business venture centered around flipping burgers and frying spuds. Although, that is not entirely accurate, since the center of Ray's vision, even from the beginning, was on his customers.

That commitment to the core of what would set his business apart from competitors, that willingness to take risk, and his ability to group a variety of people together for a common cause are all aspects of Ray Kroc I want to emulate. However, I am not so sure of his bounding trust bordering naivete nor of his faith in capitalism bordering on fanaticism, both of which he speaks openly in this book.

The book comes off as very candid. It goes from focusing on the family struggles of a man who did not hesitate to bury himself in work, to the many hurdles McDonald's had to jump over to become as strong as they did. The former covers Ray's first wife's disagreement over risking his livelihood as a salesman on McDonald's, to his meeting the love of his life in a married woman, to his divorce, to his rejection from the married woman, a shallow second marriage, and into his eventual third marriage to the love of his life. The latter covers the initial struggle to optimize McDonald's quality, then how to standardize and grow through franchisees, then how to innovate and plow ahead through legal, financial, and human capital challenges.

How come Ray Kroc was so successful? The book would have you believe it was due to hard work, maintaining principles, and dreaming big. It doesn't come off as corny either because or Ray's humble beginnings and style of prose.

Of course, it overall paints him and McDonald's in a good light, which is somewhat refreshing compared to most recent literature. They both did and do a lot of charity and community work, after all. I wasn't exactly sure about his position on responsibility to the environment, though he was a Republican and this book was written for the 1970s, so that's understandable. I would like to ask him about that, though, if he were alive today.

I'd also ask him if he thought replacing workers like cashiers with machines was a good idea. But that's neither here nor there.

The book and story are a solid 8/10 - it made me want to eat and cook more burgers.