Ray Kroc

His philosophy was simple.

You must perfect every fundamental aspect of your business if you expect it to perform well.

He had a saying about competition.

You can learn all you ever need to know about the competition's operations by looking in its garbage cans.

And he wasn't kidding.

More than once, at two in the morning, Ray Kroc sorted through a competitor's trash to count out how many boxes of meat they'd used the day before.

Fred Turner shared this obsession.

He started working at the grill and now was in headquarters.

Together, he and Kroc transformed McDonald's from a collection of restaurants into a fine-oiled machine.

Turner spent months working with bakers to develop the exact perfect bun.

It had to be the right texture, the right height, the right color, and it had to be sliced all the way through so the grill man didn't waste time separating them.

It had to be packaged in boxes that stacked efficiently and kept the buns fresh.

It requires a certain kind of mind to see a beauty in a hamburger bun, Kroc wrote.

Yet, is it any more useful to find grace in the texture and softly curved silhouette of a bun than to reflect lovingly on the hackles of a favorite fishing fly?

It brought in the same obsession to everything.

McDonald's insisted that beef be 19% fat.

They developed a testing device called the Fatalyzer so operators could check their meat on the spot.

If a shipment failed, the whole thing was rejected.

Suppliers learned to get it right the first time.

They even made the system self-auditing.