Ray Kroc

It's the same principle that Sol Price used at FedMart and Price Club.

Price knew that he was losing sales by not carrying every skew of the product.

He called it the intelligent loss of sales.

But he more than made up for it with simpler operations and more volume.

Fewer products meant less complexity, which meant faster service and lower costs.

Sometimes what you refuse to do matters more than what you do.

Kroc and Turner realized early that they needed a way to train the operators, not just to show them the basics, but to drill them until every detail became second nature.

So in the basement of one store, they set up their first classroom.

Prospective operators sat at desk armchairs among potato sacks and listened to lectures.

And at noon, they went upstairs and they'd worked the line.

They called it Hamburger University.

The first class had 18 students.

They were awarded a Bachelor of Hamburgerology degree with a minor in French fries.

And it sounds like a joke, but it wasn't.

By the time Kroc died, Hamburger University had trained tens of thousands of operators and managers.

It had a campus in Oak Brook, Illinois, with classrooms with the latest teaching equipment.

Its graduates were running McDonald's in countries Kroc never even visited.

The system was the product.

The training was what made it work.

People have marveled at the fact that I didn't start McDonald's until I was 52 years old and then became a success overnight, Ray wrote.