Assignment 13A - Reading Reflection No. 1

Assignment 13A – Reading Reflection No. 1

I read Ray Kroc’s Grinding it Out: The Making of McDonalds.

·        What surprised you the most?

o   I think the thing that surprised me the most was how the company’s first core corporate heads came to be hired into the company. All of them, especially June Martino, were hired by Ray Kroc based off his gut-feeling that had been built through years of experience as a salesperson. Nowadays, having a job in corporate, especially as head of a department, requires a very impressive work history, years of work within the company, and rounds of interviews. 

• What about the entrepreneur did you most admire? 
• I admired Kroc’s work ethic the most. Even though, personally, it was a bit much since it encroached on his personal life in terms of resulting in an unhealthy relationship with his first wife and daughter, his work ethic was one of the most impressive ones I’ve read or heard about. His determination and passion towards growing the McDonald’s business was also admirable. One can say he literally dedicated his entire life to McDonald’s. Through this book, I could see that he was meant to be a businessman, and he was a really good one who was willing to take the biggest of risks and remain headstrong whenever things never went as he planned.
• What about the entrepreneur did you least admire?
• The one thing about the entrepreneur that I didn’t like and did not admire was the way he handled the people in his personal life, more specifically his wives. I personally didn’t like the fact that he divorced his first wife, who he had developed a strained relationship with, because he found another woman he loved and had only known for a few days to two weeks and wanted to marry that second woman, only for her to make the decision to stay married to her current husband. I also didn’t like how he married another woman because he only grew fond of her after a few weeks and then divorced her as soon as he learned that the second woman he fell in love with decided to divorce her husband to marry him. At the very least, I did like the fact that he made sure that both his ex-wives were financially sound when he divorced them.
• Did the entrepreneur encounter adversity and failure? 
• Ray Kroc definitely encountered adversity and challenges, the first of these challenges coming from his previous job selling cups as a salesman under Lily Cup. However, it was because of this adversity and these challenges that started his journey on expanding the McDonald’s business. If he hadn’t quit as a salesman at then Lily Tulip Cup and went on to sell Multimixers, he wouldn’t have learned about the McDonald brothers and been inspired to expand their business. Even during the expansion process of McDonald’s, he ran into problems with constructing buildings to suit the setting and demographic of the place they were building restaurants in, finding ways to finance construction, and even talking with the McDonald brothers about approving the new building design because it was part of their contract. In the end, he did overcome all of these changes and made McDonald’s a very successful business.
• What competencies did you notice that the entrepreneur exhibited?
• I think his competencies lie in his exception salesman skills and his natural abilities as a businessman. Ray Kroc did not have a problem going up to people and talking to them, and his persuasive skills were also impressive, not to mention that whenever he did sell a product to a client, he was good at maintaining a good, stable relationship with them and have them trust him.
• Identify at least one part of the reading that was confusing to you. 
• I didn’t find much to be confusing about the book, but whenever something about finding funding for the company, especially in its early days, that was when I found myself to be most confused. It was when money started to be thrown around, especially really big amounts of money, that I became confused because I don’t yet understand transactions like that and how they operate.
• If you were able to ask two questions to the entrepreneur, what would you ask? Why? 
• If I were to ask two questions to the entrepreneur, the first would be how he maintained his personal life, because the majority of the book was about his work life. Before reading the book, I thought that I would’ve seen more about his personal life, but there was very little about it mentioned in the book other than when his wives were mentioned. I would also ask what it was that kept his determination going when he began to reach an age where it would be difficult for him to work and even to move around and walk.
• For fun: what do you think the entrepreneur's opinion was of hard work? 
• I think that Ray Kroc’s opinion of hard work was that it required a lot of risk in order to gain and maintain a high level of success. He also mentions that “happiness is not a tangible thing,” and that it is a “byproduct of achievement.” I do agree with this opinion of hard work, because a person could work hard to reach a goal, but that doesn’t guarantee that the goal can be reached. Hard work consists of rounds of failure before being successful. I also agree, to some extent, with what he said about happiness being a “byproduct of achievement,” because a person can’t be happy or be in a happy mindset all the time. It takes a lot of control over someone’s own thought-processes and emotions to make the most out of a bad situation, and that having that control or gaining that control takes a lot of practice and work.