Word: kroc
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DIED. Ray Kroc, 81, founder of golden-arched McDonald's Corp. (1982 sales: $7.8 billion) and owner of baseball's San Diego Padres; of heart failure; in San Diego. Kroc, a milkshake-machine salesman, bought franchise rights to a California burger stand called McDonald's and in 1955 launched a fast-food empire that now numbers 7,000 restaurants worldwide...
...STORY is a familiar one in modern America. A small business with an excellent product becomes wildly popular. To keep up with outrageous demand, the owners eventually expand, mass produce, and create a "label." Things are never quite the same again. Witness the saga of Ray Kroc's old hamburger stand or Mr. L.L. Bean's barn up in Freeport. Steve's resisted the clutches of materialistic expansionism for several years, sticking it out in original digs in Somerville...
Successful corporations also have pantheons of heroes, who serve as role models. Like Henry Ford of Ford Motor Co., Thomas Watson of IBM or Ray Kroc of McDonald's, they "have great symbolic and mythic value within the cultures of their companies." Employees are proud to be connected with these magical figures, say the authors, and draw strength and courage from them. Mary Kay Ash, who overcame severe arthritis to found Mary Kay Cosmetics, uses that achievement to inspire her salespeople...
Even though exceptional individuals such as Ford, Watson and Kroc are rare, companies continually create new heroes. The members of IBM's "Hundred Percent Club," who have met their annual sales quotas, become office stars. Likewise, the McDonald's franchisee who cooked up the idea for the fast-food chain's bestselling "Egg McMuffin" breakfast sandwich in 1972 found his way into Ray Kroc's autobiography, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's, and has become part of company lore...
...Jock Whitney "epitomized, in a world of increasing egalitarianism, the vanishing patrician. "The era of the robber barons, that period of freewheeling economic exploitation that made the Whitneys rich, is over, says Kahn--wistfully, it seems. Hamburger sales under gold plastic arches make tycoons now. The world is a Kroc...