1. Where does the leadership at McDonald’s fall on the Leadership Grid in Exhibit 11.4? Explain your answer.
2. What are the benefits of a corporate leadership strategy?
3. As a leader in the first years of McDonald’s, what kind of power did Ray Kroc have?

D o you want fries with that? This ubiquitous phrase is heard by nearly 50 million people in more than 119 countries each day. McDonald’s has achieved the status of one of the most recognizable franchises across the globe through a mixture of successful marketing, consistent service and products, and strong leadership.
Ray Kroc was a visionary leader. He saw the potential for standardizing an efficient, systematized restaurant model and replicating it across the country. He began as the distributor of the mechanized milk shake maker, the Multimixer. At the McDonald’s hamburger stand in California, Kroc saw a restaurant that used not one, but eight Multimixers and served a record number of people in the shortest amount of time imaginable. He proposed the idea of opening up several such restaurants to the brothers Dick and Mac McDonald, and in 1955, Kroc opened the first McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Illinois. The rest is history.