Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets: Urinations From Inside the Fast Food Tent Read Online Free PDF Page A

be signalling with its growing number of interests in roast chicken, gourmet sandwiches, Mexican food, and specialty coffee – a case of putting some fresh eggs in a (big) basket of mature ones.
    There are infinite types of partnership, but to succeed they must have one thing in common. They must work for both sides. They must be win–win. As the Chinese proverb says, a good agreement is where both sides leave the table smiling. It is this aspect that bothers me about this growing practice. It’s not the usual Western way of doing business. The Western way is about winning, and gaining at somebody else’s expense.
    Legend has it that if you send a group of Western (male) executives to a business school and get them together in the bar after a long day, you can play a simple, entertaining game. Pick two guys, and make a mark on the floor between them. Tell each of them to try to convince the other, verbally, to come across the line. The results are astonishing. They will still be there next morning. Now, if you do the same thing in Japan, within five minutes the two guys will have an agreement. One will say to the other: ‘I’ll come over to your side if you’ll come over to mine’. There is no winner. Or loser.
    If you spend hours at your office, huddled with your lawyers, trying to find ways to screw your partner, it is not a partnership. It is a practice that will rule out a sustainable, healthy win–win relationship. Contrast two examples. For years, Ray Kroc had a handshake deal with many of his major suppliers. Included in those years are those where McDonald’s broke away from the pack and made itself the quick-service brand of the millennium.
    Now look at those fatheads in DaimlerChrysler. A while back they hit an earnings shortfall. In a moment of lunacy that only a German management team operating in the United States could come up with, they announced that all their suppliers would cut wholesale prices by 5%. No debate, no consideration of individual circumstances. Result? Chaos. Some suppliers refused to deliver and a red-faced climbdown followed. More important, partners who might have proved allies in a common cause were now enemies. A bank of goodwill was emptied at a stroke. A potential solution became another problem.
    As in life, so it is in quick service. You cannot fly solo. Partnerships work, but they need working on. Just think: if Burger King did make its own brand of cola, what would it be like? It might be like its coffee. An ugly, ugly thought.

8. Even the big cheese must budget
    W hat happens in America usually takes two or three years to reach England. As a Brit, it was, therefore, with a feeling of horror that I saw my first US-style stretch limo over here. It was parked in front of a four-hundred-year-old village pub, and looked like a cold sore on the face of Elizabeth Hurley. The stretch limo is universally associated with Hollywood and/or rappers and/or the trappings of corporate power in the United States, and I need to start by revealing my views on limos. Yes, I confess I have been inside several of them, but my ongoing position is that I would not willingly go in one today, even if it offered me the only escape route from a pack of wild dogs snapping at my genitals.
    More than a decade ago, as a newly appointed – and imported – CEO of Burger King, I inherited a wonderful assistant. She assumed that the new boss would be the same as the old boss and booked a limo to pick me up as I arrived at Orlando airport on an early head-hunting mission. Knowing no different, I got in the thing, which then proceeded about a hundred yards to the airport hotel where the meeting was scheduled. I could have got in the back, walked through the car , got out of the front door and had my meeting. I banned them for all corporate use.
    A couple of years later, we booked ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Schwarzkopf to speak at our annual convention. At the hotel, we were all on standby to receive the great