The View | Here’s what the Big Mac really shows us about corporate culture
‘It is the story of hubris in large organisations where there is much chatter about listening.... while the reality is that only the people at the top get a real hearing’
Whether or not you have eaten one of the world’s most popular fast food offerings you will almost certainly know of the Big Mac burger. It was a name with resonance even in Hong Kong before the McDonald’s franchise was launched here, as Murray MacLehose, the Governor who initiated the Sino-British talks on the transfer of sovereignty, was somewhat affectionately known as Big Mac.
Far less well known was the Big Mac’s inventor, Michael James “Jim” Delligatti, who died recently at the age of 96. He ran one of McDonald’s more successful franchises in Uniontown, near Pittsburg and came up with the idea by the simple expedient of listening to his customers who told him they were looking for a bigger burger.
That’s not bad by any standard but what the McDonald Corporation is less keen to talk about is that when Delligatti came up with the idea it was more or less dismissed out of hand. After all he was a mere lowly franchisee from one of those rust belt towns and it was a well known fact that all the best ideas came from McDonald’s mercurial big boss, Ray Kroc.
Following the success of the Big Mac, McDonald’s publicity machine denied the company had been lukewarm over introducing the bigger burger but no one at HQ was magnanimous enough to pay Delligatti a single cent for his innovation.
I consider myself to be something of a student of the McDonald’s business and have followed it over many years; knowing how things work over at the Golden Arches I am far more inclined to believe the Delligatti version of events than anything that comes out of the mouths of the master franchise holder.
This is not to belittle Kroc’s extraordinary achievement or dogged hard work as he set out to transform a company founded by the McDonald brothers. They made a pretty decent hamburger but failed to see the business’s potential. Kroc knew better although he was neither a cook nor a food specialist but he was a brilliant opportunist.
