Welcome to How Leaders Lead, where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Okay, before we go too far, I got to make a little confession. Like when I was the CEO of Young Brands, my team and I would do what we called McDonald immersion days. We just went into McDonald's restaurants for the whole day and observed all the smart things that they were doing. Then, we'd figure out how we could make those smart ideas work at KFC, Taco Bell, or Pizza Hot. That's just how much we admired McDonald's. These days, McDonald's is still at the top of their game, and I'm honored to have McDonald's president and CEO, Chris Kymchinsky, joining me today. As you'll hear in this conversation, Chris really understands what's happening in the real world. He's not the kind of guy who's just locked away in an office, lost in data and paperwork and big picture strategies. In fact, he believes that your strategies really don't count for much unless they're actually showing up in the day-to-day operations of your business. When you listen to this conversation, you will learn a lot about how to take a smart strategy and then actually make it memorable and easy for everyone to implement . So here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Chris Kymch insky. Chris, I understand both you and your wife went to Duke, and I've seen in your office you actually have a bobblehead of Coach K. I got to ask, if you ever met Coach K, and if so, what have you learned about leadership just watching him in action? Yeah, well, Coach K, as you know, is an icon. You can't go to Duke, certainly during my area, without knowing Coach K. And I was fortunate when I was there in that we went to the final four every year. We won the National Championship my senior year. So Coach K is someone I've always had a ton of respect for. And it's about how he leads. And he's a leader that always talks about being honest with his players and that his job is about how do you make his players better, but he does it through honesty and through feedback. The other thing that I always thought was a great way about Coach K is that he adjusted his coaching style to his players. So as opposed to a coach who says, this is the way I do it, and the player has to conform to me, Coach K had an opposite approach, which is it's my job to figure out what works for that player. And I, as the coach, have to adjust my style. So he's somebody that I've admired and respected. And it was only until maybe a couple of years ago that I actually was able to meet with him. He had his own interview radio show on SiriusXM. And he asked me if I would participate in his SiriusXM radio show, which was a huge treat for me and really cool to just share some of what I was doing, but also get his advice on stuff. And yes, I have the Coach K. Bobblehead in my office. And I've read the Coach K books and I use Coach K quotes and anecdotes with my team and they're all thoroughly sick of hearing about Coach K. You know, I've heard that McDonald's goes through three billion pounds of potatoes a year, which is enough fries to make 22 round trips to the moon if it was laid end to end. Now, how many pounds of fries do you think you were responsible for eating this past year? Oh boy, I certainly eat a fair share of them. I'll tell you that I eat our french fries almost every single day. They're that good. What that adds up into pounds, I don't know, probably more than I'd like it to though. And it's a constant battle, as you know, when you're in these jobs, one of the occupational hazards is you're constantly surrounded by great tasting food. And so I have to also balance it with a pretty regular exercise routine so I can keep eating those french fries all the time. Yeah. Well, you and I have that in common. You know, on a serious note, I know that you go to McDonald's at least five times a week. What's a store visit look like for you? When you go into the store, what do you try to accomplish? I think there's a few different things that I'm trying to do. One is to try to just make sure that what we're talking about from a strategy standpoint, how is that actually translating into the restaurant? And is there a good connection between what we are hoping and trying to get accomplished at a strategic level at the headquarters, is that actually what's happening in the restaurant? We have an expression that we use here all the time, which is it's not real if it's not in the restaurants. And so when you're out in the restaurants, you're actually trying to see what's happening in reality versus maybe what somebody's showing you on a PowerPoint when you're sitting back in the headquarters. So that's one thing that I'm certainly trying to do. I think a second thing is to just bring some energy to the team there and some appreciation. These are challenging jobs and anytime that I can show up at a restaurant, I want it to be a celebration. I want it to be something that's positive. When I'm going in, I think a lot of times there's this perception of I'm going in to inspect it. I'm going in to find problems or see what's not working. And it's actually the opposite. I'm going in to find examples of things that are going great so that I can put a spotlight on where people are really doing great work and have that be something that inspires and goes through the rest of the system. Because those I find are much more motivational to focus on the good stuff as opposed to kind of just nitpicking and saying, well, this could be better. This could be better. There are other people that will do that in the organization. So that's a second thing, bringing energy. And then the third is I'm going in and listening for ideas and the people that are in our restaurant, whether they're the customers, whether they're our franchisees, the crew people, they're the source of so many great ideas. And so to hear from them, what are the problems, what are the opportunities? And as you do enough of these things, you start to get some pattern recognition and then bring those back and get some people here at the headquarters or maybe in some of our markets to figure out how do we actually bring some of those ideas to life. All makes sense to me. You've been CEO of McDonald's since November of 2019. Describe the business you took over and the status of the business today. Yeah, it was a business that was performing well. We had had several years of good performance, but we were just in the beginning stages of what I would describe as sort of the digitization of our business. This is a business that was largely either came to the drive-through. You walked in the lobby and you did an order at the counter. Maybe it went sat in. Maybe it did take away, but it was a business that was largely what I would describe as an analog business. And we were in the very early stages of bringing digital in with a global mobile app for us, starting to do delivery. And then what happened through the pandemic is the pandemic just turbocharged the delivery side of our business. Now, over a third of our transactions are what we would describe as a digital transaction happening either on an app, maybe happening through a new barit or a door dash or happening on one of our kiosks that we have in the lobby. So we're now, we have a very different sort of relationship with the customer. We're in the past. The customer was almost always going to be interfacing with the crew person who 's going to be taking their order. And now you have a third of your orders where there's a different interaction. You don't have a crew person who's smiling and having that good back and forth with the customer. It's happening in a digital context. So we've had to think a little bit about how do we continue to make sure that we're able to provide as distinctive an experience when you don't have that personal element to it. And that's been one thing that we've thought about. The second thing for us that we have seen as a big change in this is we have tried to just dramatically simplify our business. And we had over time, I think allowed for a lot of complexity to creep into the business menu as an example where we got much more complicated on menu. COVID in the pandemic required us to flush out a lot of that complexity out. And we saw significant benefits from that from both the crew satisfaction standpoint, customer satisfaction. So that's another thing where we are much more focused on just about core menu and driving our core menu as opposed to doing limited time only or we call them LTO s, doing all sorts of one off things. We're focused on driving our core brands, our Big Macs, our McFlurries, our chicken nuggets. Because we think there's a ton of growth in those. And then I'd say the last thing is just the business is different around the employee expectations. I think through the pandemic and also what's going on more broadly in society, there's just a different expectation about the role of the company, the role of purpose in why an employee chooses to work at a particular place and having that be much more front and center and talking about it in a much more overt way is a different part of the company as well. So it's an exciting time to be at McDonald's, but it's one where for 65 years we were defined by Brooks and Mortar and now increasingly we're defined by a digital experience and we're all learning kind of through the process of how to make that change. >> How have you had to adapt to that yourself as a leader? How have you gotten yourself up to speed on the whole digital revolution? >> I don't think I'm ever going to be at a place where I am a technology expert . What I always try to keep going back to and what I do think my training allows me to do is to focus on what's the consumer problem that we're trying to solve. And one thing I've seen that can happen with technology is a lot of times organizations can get excited, captivated about a technology for technology's sake and lose sight of is there actually a consumer problem that we're trying to solve here? Are we just coming up with a new technology because we can and because a few people in the organization get excited about it and think it's neat. So that's what I try to do is almost being as ignorant as I am about some of this technology and everything that goes on in a way is an asset for me because I can ask the questions that a customer would be asking and then testing is my team able to do that. So I end up, I'm just asking a lot of questions and then I think the other thing that I try to do and this gets back to what we were talking about earlier is let's see how it actually works in the restaurant. And so we've had to get much more adept at faster cycle times where we still like to think of ourselves as being relatively innovative company, but we've had to take that up 2x, 3x and how do we test and learn much more quickly and whether it's at an individual restaurant or maybe we'll take a region that will do this, but we've had to get a lot faster of, okay, let's go put this up on the app. Let's go see how customers respond to it and then let's change it tomorrow or let's change it a week from now and just getting in that mindset of rapidly innovating has been another thing that I've had myself to get comfortable with but also get the organization thinking about. You know, before taking over as CEO, you were the president of McDonald's USA leading close to 15,000 stores in the United States, that's a huge job. But what's something about becoming CEO that took you by surprise? There's a lot of things that take you by surprise. I think this job as CEO is about as different a job as any other job I've had. When you're going up through kind of the ranks of an organization like a McDonald's, going from running a region to then going and running a larger territory to then going and running a market, those jobs aren't that different. Your scope is just getting a little bit bigger. You're managing more people. There's another zero or two on the end of your P&L statement. But the job is pretty similar. And then you go and you become CEO and I would say my job went from being probably 90% internally focused and 10% externally focused to now probably being about 50/50. 50% of my time is internally focused, but 50% of my time is externally focused and whether that's interfacing with investors, media, NGOs, you name it. That's been one thing that I've had to sort of get comfortable with because honestly, the part of the job I loved was the day to day being in the restaurants, waking up every morning and seeing what the comp sales report was. And it's just it's a different cadence, a different set of activities. So that's been one big change. I think the second thing for me is in some of the jobs below the CEO, you kind of take culture for granted and the culture is just there. It's sort of around you. And so your job is operating within the culture. When you become CEO, the CEO sets the culture. If the CEO is not setting the culture, nobody else is going to set the culture. And so I've had to spend a lot more time just thinking about what do I want the culture of McDonald's to be? What parts of the culture that we've historically had do we want to celebrate and raise up? And maybe what parts of the culture do we need to change? And that's been just another fun thing to think about is culture and values and how we make that something special and unique to McDonald's. What are you trying to bring to the company that's new on the cultural front? I'd say there's a few things for us. One is certainly around risk appetite and McDonald's is an organization where we would love to test things. And part of the strength of the company has been we will test and test and test and refine and refine and refine until we get it perfectly right. And you see that operationally in our restaurants where we just love to get into the details. But that approach that culture doesn't work in this much more digital like I was describing earlier, rapid innovation environment. And when you are rapidly innovating, there is more risk attached to that. So how do I get the organization more comfortable with risk? There's been one area that I've spent some time and it's a process that's going to take several years. But that's something I think the second thing for me is one of the benefits of McDonald's is we have 40,000 restaurants in close to 120 some odd countries. We have a lot of reinventing the wheel that happens all across the globe where even though our business is very similar, we're selling burgers and french fries pretty much in every market where we operate. We had a tendency to always want if you were running a country, I've got to come up with my own solution. And we celebrated the innovators who were coming up with their own local solution. What we didn't celebrate were the people who were able to shamelessly steal from others. So how do I get this organization to actually see it as a good thing, to see it as a strength of I don't need to come up with the solution. Most likely the solution already exists somewhere in McDonald's around the world. My job as a leader is first to go see who else has already encountered this and have they come up with the answer and bring that back and be celebrated for that versus feeling like I have to come up with a unique answer that only I can see and nobody else is doing. Those have been two areas that I'm trying to get the culture to just adapt or evolve a little bit. That makes sense. It's really tough to get people to wipe out not admitted here and take somebody else's ideas. But if you celebrate that, more and more people do it because that's the way you drive behavior change. Let's face it, your life is just too important to delegate to someone else. That's why I'm so passionate about self coaching. If you're new to this concept, I put together a free self coaching guide that will walk you through the principles of how to become a great self coach to really find fulfillment in your life and career. You can get it at takechargeofu.com/guide. This free guide will give you a simple plan you can follow to kickstart your self coaching journey. This guide will help you become the very best you you can be. Get in at takechargeofu.com/guide. You started in your role unexpectedly with your predecessor being let go for conduct resins and you were named CEO almost immediately after. What was the biggest challenge coming into a job in such a surprising fashion? I'm sure you were loving your job as CEO of the U.S. business and here you are now. That's pretty jarring to have that change. Oh, it was huge. I never expected to be CEO of McDonald's. When I came to McDonald's, I came here. I was recruited by Steve, my predecessor, and Steve was only a year older than me. I came here never expecting to be CEO, but excited about being part of this great company and excited about the industry and what I thought was possible here and being perfectly happy to do that for the rest of my career, but not as the CEO, but as somebody who's on the supporting cast. As you said, I got a call on the weekend telling me about the change and asking me to be the CEO and it was quite a shock. I needed to remind the company about the importance of values and actually highlight that the reason I was here in this job is because of how seriously we take our values at our company. No matter whether you're the fry cook or whether you're the CEO, we're all held to the same standard and that people through this change could actually take some comfort from the fact that there aren't different sets of standards. We're all held to the same set of standards about McDonald's and I tried to turn it into a celebration of our values. Ray Crock, when he founded this company, Ray and he had a partner, Fred Turner, they had a very, very clear sense of what they wanted McDonald's to stand for. They wanted it to stand for our people and our customers. They wanted it to be an inclusive company. They wanted it to be one that was very much focused on the community about working together to get better. Those are great values for us to build on and there was also a strong sense of ethics with Ray. I took the circumstances of me coming into the role as let's celebrate the values and see this as why we're such a great company as opposed to, hey, this is something we should be embarrassed about or that somehow suggests that there's a problem at the company. No, actually the company's working just fine. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. There are a lot of listeners I'm sure that have just been given a leadership opportunity. And I'd love to have you walk through your process for how you put together your initial strategy, how you arrived at the key tenants, how long it took you to create it , those kind of things. I mean, just so I'm sure there was a strategy in place, but you're the new sheriff in town. How did you begin to put your stamp on where you wanted to take the company? I do think the first thing, a lot of times when you put new leaders into jobs, they almost feel like, well, I'm required to come up with a new strategy. And I think that can be a mistake in a lot of cases because the strategy should change because the business situation requires a change. It shouldn't be a new change in strategy just because you got a new person sitting in the seat. And when I came in, I very much actually said the strategy is completely unchanged. So when I first came in, I said, there is no change in the strategy. We are continuing to execute against the strategy that we had. And then we had this little thing called COVID that happened that upended our worlds completely. And it was only through that that I then said, okay, I think the changes that have happened as a result of COVID and some other things with the business, those are fundamental enough that the strategy that we had probably doesn't make sense for what the future holds for us. And so I then tried to make sure that our strategy is always grounded in the consumer. We did a lot of consumer research to understand how they were thinking about what the role of McDonald's would be in a world where maybe they were not going in and sitting in a restaurant as much or in a world where there was more uncertainty. And through a lot of research, and as you know, David, there's statistical tools and you get insights teams and everybody else that can give you all sorts of information. But I brought together a group of our leaders and we started to look at all this information. And it got us to the strategy that we have now, which we call accelerating the arches. And the strategy has three primary tenants or pillars. The first is that we thought we have one of the world's great brands in McDonald's, but that we have not sufficiently fed and nurtured that brand and that there was a lot of upside if we could tap into the cultural relevance of our brand. And so we made brand one of the features there. And I would tell you that it was relevant in the context of COVID because part of what we were seeing in the data is when there's uncertainty, people start to want to grav itate to what's known. So having a brand like McDonald's that's trusted served us very well in COVID and in times of uncertainty leaning into a brand like that is powerful. So that was one. The second is I touched on this earlier, but core menu. We thought we had a great core menu with our big Macs, our quarter pounders, our French fries, our McFlurries, our chicken nuggets. We didn't need to be doing all of these peripheral products on top of that. What we did in a lot of the research showed this is that we were able to meet most of our core customers needs just with our core product. The only reason to add product is if there are needs out there that you're currently not meeting, we didn't have those needs that we weren't meeting. So the second part of this strategy was core menu where it's C of our strategy. And then the last thing is what we described as the 3D's and the 3D's for us were digital drive-through and delivery. And what we were observing was that consumer interest in those channels was significantly elevated. Again, COVID is a big part of it, but we also expected that consumer interest in those channels was going to stay elevated for the foreseeable future. We thought this business has now sort of fundamentally changed. There will always be a dining component to it, but being great at drive-through digital and delivery, if we can be great at those things, that offers a lot of opportunity. So that sort of was the basis for our strategy. And part of being able to come up with a strategy is you also have to be able to explain it to the organization. Everybody in the organization needs to know what the strategy is. If the CEO and the senior team are the only people that know what the strategy is, it kind of is useless. So we came up with this moniker of MCD, Marketing Core Menu 3D's, which by the way is the McDonald's stock ticker, MCD. And we said that's our strategy, guys. Accelerating the arches is about marketing core menu 3D's. That's what we need to be doing day in and day out. And fortunately for us, it's been working. And it's also been something that whether you go into the C suite or whether you go down and talk to the local franchisee, everybody can play back that strategy, which is a big part of leadership, getting everybody on board with which direction you're trying to go. Yeah, if you can get everybody understanding what you want to do and why, you're more than halfway there. So congratulations on that. That's fantastic. You know, I also love Chris, how you celebrate the past of McDonald's as you're taking the company forward. I understand one of the guiding principles of McDonald's came from your founder , who you mentioned, Ray Crock. He said, "If you're not green and growing, you're red and rotten." Tell me a story of how you might have put this principle into action in the company. Well, Ray's got a whole sort of book of fantastic quotes. And anytime I'm looking for inspiration, we have an archivist here at McDonald's who has every speech, every interview, etc. Ray ever did. And there's some real nuggets in there, some real jewels. So it's a great source of inspiration when you're looking for a way to tap back into the genius of Ray Crock. But that's a great one that you highlighted there. And where I use it a lot of times is about this need for us to be a more risk-taking organization. And one of the challenges that you have when you become a brand or a company like McDonald's and you're in a leadership position is it can create a false sense of complacency or a false sense of comfort that we're the leader now. We're preordained to be the leader forever. And as you well know, in fact, it's constantly it's a moving bar. And if you're not green and growing, you are red and rotten. And so I've used that time and again, where the organization will ask about things. For example, we did a big remodel program in the US several years ago. And there were questions about, well, why do we need a remodel right now? And by the way, a big part of what we were doing is we were getting ready for a digital future. So we were putting in kiosks in all of our restaurants. We were putting in digital menu boards into all of our drive-throughs. We were putting perimeters or geofencing around all of our restaurants so that if someone came across the geofence with an app that we would actually know that someone now was on property. So we had to do all of those investments and those all the way all happened before COVID. But there was pushback, as you would imagine, because those things cost a lot of money and they cause a lot of disruption. And sort of why do we need to do this? And it's because of what we saw where the consumer was going and lo and behold, thank God we did because those things ended up being game changers for us when we went through COVID. So it's a lot around innovation that I dust off those Ray Crock quotes and they still carry residents today. That's great. I love you having archivists. Chris, you're known for being one of the best marketing minds in the business. You are a true consumer, behaviorist. You really understand the customer. What tips can you give people on how to make sure you can really understand your customers? Well, one thing that I try to make sure is you'll certainly hear anecdotes on stuff. And there is sometimes a tendency to dismiss the anecdote and to dismiss the one-off story. But I oftentimes will say and remind our teams the plural of anecdotes is data, meaning that you add enough of those anecdotes together and lo and behold, you start to have data that's suggesting a particular way to go. And so when I'm out there in the market, it's trying to make sure that I'm finding time to connect with the customer to actually hear what's on their mind . So that then when I start to get the data, because in these jobs, you're inundated with data. You 're getting new reports, new studies, new whatever, all the time. But you've got to be able to have your own internal antenna to sort of compare what you're getting on a piece of paper to, does that resonate with what I'm actually hearing from the customer? Does that make sense? And a lot of times it does, but there are some times that it doesn't. So how do you refine that your own internal antenna ? That would be one thing I would encourage every marketer to do. And that only comes through talking to customers and being out in the market. You're not going to be able to develop that antenna by sitting in your office. So that would be one thing to do. The second thing that I like to do is I'm just a voracious learner and someone who studies what other people are doing out there . And I love to, whether it's going on to websites like ad age or there's a magazine called Cont agious, see what are other campaigns or other ideas that people are doing. But also just comparing notes and talking to leaders at other companies to just hear their insights, see what they're coming up with. I find a lot of times I get great ideas just by listening to what other people are seeing and some of the things that I might then bring back to the team and say, "Hey, I was talking to so-and-so." And they said this, "Have we thought about that?" And sometimes those ideas don't make sense for us, but a lot of times they do. And then I think the last thing for me is you do have to be willing to take a position on things. And what I talk a lot of times about with our ad agencies, but also with our internal marketing teams, for advertising or for marketing to be impactful, to break through, there has to be attention. You have to be pushing up against something where it creates interest for people. If you're just doing, call it slice of life advertising, which is people that are happy sitting in a McDonald's, "Oh, isn't this food great? Well, where's the tension in that?" So inherently, when you start to take positions on things, and one of the things that we did several years ago was we said, as opposed to trying to go after the consumers that don't like McDonald's or will tell you all the reasons why they don't think McDonald's is a good place to go eat, we're going to actually lean into the brand lovers. And that was a lot of what was the genesis behind our famous orders campaign, where we found celebrities who loved McDonald's and we're actually proud to talk about what their favorite order is. And that was leaning into this tension, which is in a time where maybe people are saying, "Hey, this isn't a place to go eat," that you have people out there who are actually saying, "Hey, I love McDonald's and let me tell you why I love them." So it's finding all those sorts of things and also just being surrounded by great people because I've never written one ad, I've never done a marketing campaign, I just approve stuff or reject stuff. And so you got to have a great team around you as well to bring it to life. You're right about that. And you talk about meeting consumers where they are. What do you mean by that? Sometimes we will try to run our restaurants for what works for us as opposed to what works for the customer. And I talk about with our teams and franchisees, for many years, we ran our restaurants from the back of the house to the front of the house, meaning what works for kitchen operations, what works for our staffing model, and then lo and behold, customer , here you go, and this is how you need to interface with us as opposed to what I would describe as working from the front of the house to the back of the house where we start with, "How does a customer want to interface with us?" And then we've got to figure out on the back end how we do all of that. So as an example, one of the areas that is a challenge for us is all the customization that happens around food and beverage items. And every time that you are doing customization, it adds complexity to the back of the house. And so a traditional approach would be to say, "I'm going to try to limit all the ways that a customer could do customization because it doesn't work for us ." And the reality is, in this day and age, today's consumer, Gen Z consumer, they want to customize everything. And so in our app, in our kiosk, we provide them with an ease to be able to customize their product, whether I want extra pickles, I want triple whole milk, I want caramel, whatever, we need to make it easy for the customer to be able to adjust their product to be what they want it to be as opposed to what we'd want it to be. And that, for us, has been a mindset shift because, again, it is more complicated and challenging for us to do, but that's the customer expectations. That'd be just an example of meeting the customer where they are versus starting with what we want. That's a good one. And I read that every day McDonald's feeds 1% of the world's population. When you hear a statistic like that, Chris, what comes to mind? Love to get it to 2%. Well, along those lines, the company's mission is to feed and foster communities. Talk to me about the larger why of the organization and why it is that people show up to serve your customers each and every day. It goes back to a little bit of this changing relationship between a company and the people that work in the company. Back when I started my career 30 some years ago, there wasn't a whole lot of discussion about sort of purpose. And I started my career at Procter & Gamble. There wasn 't a lot of discussion about what's the purpose of Procter & Gamble. It was about, frankly, just selling more product. And I think a good thing that has happened over time is a greater appreciation for the fact that companies, big companies like a McDonald's or a Procter & Gamble or a Young Brands, etc., that we do have a lot of influence in society. We have influence not just through the people that we hire, but through the platform that our company is able to occupy through our relationships with policymakers, etc. And so how do we want to use that influence? What are we trying to do beyond just selling more product? And by the way, it's what our employees are asking for us . They can pick and choose where they're going to go work. The best ones can pick and choose. And you're seeing, particularly with this generation, much more concern and interest with how am I going to be impacting the world by working at McDonald's versus if I go and work somewhere else? Because I have that choice today. And we've had to get much sharper about being able to articulate. So why McDonald's? Why should you make this place a career? Why should you be excited about coming into work every day and sometimes spending weekends and sacrificing family time and all the other things that you have to occasionally do to support this business? And it goes back to what was Ray Crock's kind of founding vision? And that's what we were talking earlier. Ray is a constant fountain of inspiration on these things. The whole idea that Ray had when he started this company was about being a brand that's of the community. And the whole reason that Ray wanted these restaurants to be in the hands of franchisees is because he had the view, which is for this company to be successful, it's not going to happen by having this business managed out of headquarters in Chicago. It's going to be about having a franchisee who's in that restaurant every day, who's also part of the community, who's serving their neighbors day in and day out at customers. That's going to be where the brand gets its residents and gets its cultural value. And so that whole business was built up around that notion of being in the community. And we talk about our restaurants as not just being 40,000 restaurants, but they're 40,000 community centers, which is where people bring little league teams, which is where people get married, which is where people go on dates. And so that's the value that McDonald's. That's our purpose of feeding and fostering community. It's everybody has this strong connection at the community level. And if McDonald's can be a part of that, it's a tremendous power from all of that. So that has sort of been the history for us. And it felt very natural. That's the other thing when you're doing these purpose and values. If you have to explain it to somebody, you probably have it wrong. And as soon as we started talking to people about our purpose being the feed and foster community , we didn't even have to explain it because of course, that's what we do every day. But we now had a language to be able to attach to it. And then everybody just went about kind of what they 've already been doing with a better understanding of how it all connects together. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Chris in just a moment. As you've just heard us talk about, Chris is very good at making sure his strategy is clear and repeatable. So others can understand it and then go to work implementing it. It reminds me of the big strategic shift that Larry Merloh made at CVS when he was CEO and how he used a simple compelling vision to do it. We were in Long Island and walked into the store with the region manager. And I had observed one of our colleagues that was helping an elderly customer taking bags out to her car. Our employee comes back and I introduced myself and I said, I observed what you were doing and thanked him. And the employee said to me, well, it's my way of helping people on their pet better health. This was someone who wasn't working in the pharmacy. They were working in what we call the front of store. And they were able to internalize what those words meant as to the job that they were doing every day. And there are countless examples out there like that where people have internalized that in very meaningful ways. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Larry. Episode 18 here on How Leaders Lead. You know, McDonald's is famous for its Hamburger University and training his people in the basics of the business. But you also have what I understand is Speedy Labs, which is the name of your innovation center. And you spent a couple of years in the innovation part of your business before you became CEO. What does a winning innovation strategy look like from your perspective? Well, Speedy Labs takes its genesis from the McDonald's brothers and the McDonald's brothers production system in their first restaurant in California was called the Speedy production system. And so when Ray Crock visited their restaurant, he was so impressed by the production system that these guys had devised to be able to serve the number of burgers that they did and the time that they did with speed of service. That that was why Ray ultimately bought the business from them and then the rest is history. But we've taken Speedy, which is we'd like to describe it as the first innovation that McDonald's really what's made McDonald's what it is. And we've got a whole group now that works in there. And it's all about solving problems, either customer problems or solving crew problems. And so we get all sorts of different opportunities or issues for the Speedy Labs team to go work on. And they will then pick and choose. And we've got a whole prioritization process, as you would imagine, which is what are the problems that are affecting the most people? And then if we could fix them, would have the biggest impact. And those are the ones that we get our Speedy teams focused on. You know, I've heard you say, whatever is happening in society, good or bad, you can be sure it's happening at McDonald's. Yeah, when you're in a crisis mode, when the things go, you know, when it hits the fan, and it's not what you really want to have happen at McDonald's, what are the things that you try to keep top of mind as a leader? Well, I think one thing is when things go wrong, I think people need to hear from the leader. So to me, it's much more important that a leader steps forward when things are going wrong than when things are going right. When things are going right, you want the other people on your team to be the ones that are stepping forward and celebrating them, which when things are going wrong, that I think that that's when people need to hear first from the leader. And then you might bring other people in. And so for me, when there are things that happen in our restaurants that either we're not proud of, mistakes can get made, sometimes things don't happen as we want. It depends, obviously, on the magnitude. But certainly if it's a sufficient magnitude, people need to hear from me on those topics. And because what happens in the world happens in McDonald's, what I also remind our teams about all the time is, you're probably not the first one who's gone through whatever that situation is. Most likely, there's somebody else in the world who has already encountered exactly what you're experiencing in your restaurant . It's probably already happened somewhere else. So how do I help connect you with whoever's had that experience so that you can learn from them and then kind of move on from that? So that's the other thing for me is how do we get into connecting people to the right resources, because the more that we can support each other and learn from what's already happened, the better off we're going to be. - You know, shifting gears for a minute, I want to take you back. What's a story from your childhood that shaped the kind of leader you are today? - Well, my dad growing up was a surgeon and my dad was a real stickler for detail. And I will give you an example, which is I had a m ow the yard every weekend growing up, but it wasn't just mow the yard. My dad had a particular way that he liked the yard mode, because he liked to see a certain pattern, a checkerboard pattern in the yard. And if I didn't do the mowing of the yard in a particular right way, then I would have to go out and redo the yard. So I grew up kind of in that environment where my father always had this expression, if you're going to do a job, do it right. - I've heard that before, Chris. - Yeah, yeah, we all have. But I think what it has driven me as a leader to do is to be able to make sure that we continue to set the bar high. And it doesn't mean that we're always going to hit the bar . In many cases, maybe we're not going to hit the bar. And if we're hitting it all the time, the bar is probably not high enough. But to set the bar high, to set the expectations high, because another expression that I use all the time is you are what you settle for. If you settle for being mediocre, if you settle for good enough, then that's what you're going to end up being. But if you set the bar for I want to be great, and I want this company to be great, and that's what you're having everybody's expectations, then chances are you've got a much better chance of being great. So that's been one leadership lesson for me. I didn't appreciate it at the time when I was out there mowing the yard. But sometimes dad is right about things, and that one ended up being one that was right. - I learned in my research that your dad was wheelchair-bound. How has that influenced the decisions you're making today as CEO? - My dad actually growing up, he didn't get injured until he was 54. So actually at the age I am right now, and my father happened to be swimming in Hawaii, and a wave took him and flipped him, and he broke his neck on the bottom of the ocean in Maui, and it rendered him quadriplegic. And he was quadriplegic for 23 years. He passed away in 2017. But it was pretty remarkable to see my father who had lived this incredible life up to age 54. And by the way, part of the patient population that he treated as a doctor were people who were quadriplegic. And then all of a sudden my father is now himself quadri plegic. And you learn so much about one how luck is such a big component of life. And I think in just telling my story, that's an example of bad luck, but I've also had a lot of good luck in my life as well. And to just appreciate the role that luck can play in life, both good and bad luck, that's been one thing. I think another thing for me is to just see how at the end of the day, my father was very focused on his career growing up. And he had a lot of success in his career, but once he stripped away the career part of his life, and it was about people. And he very quickly saw in his own life, who were people that were in his life because of who he was as a person, and who were people that were in his life because of maybe what he could do for them. I think that was also something that stuck with me, which is we're all in these jobs for brief periods of time. But there are going to be people that are going to be with us in the long haul. And to make sure that no matter what the job is that you're making time for those people, because they're the ones that ultimately give you happiness, these jobs can be very time consuming. And you can become all consumed with whatever you're doing. To do that at the detriment of those relationships is a big mistake. And my father's experience showed me that. And so I'm mindful of that when I sometimes can get caught up in my own hype on stuff here at McDonald's. This is CEO that this is a moment in time. And ultimately, I need to make sure that I've got those relationships because ultimately that's going to be what matters. There's a lot of wisdom in what you just shared and thanks for sharing it. You know, as a global CEO, I know you're doing a lot of travel. I did a lot of travel by self. What's a story about one of your recent trips that really excited you and the big learning you got from it? You do do a lot of travel in these jobs. And I was in Scandinavia. So we went to Denmark and Sweden and visited a bunch of markets there. And something that I saw from our franchisees, which I just I left there so excited about is they have come up with a completely different way for us to think about the construction process of how we build new restaurants. And you would think after building 40,000 restaurants that we would kind of have the construction part of building a restaurant down to a science and in many places that we do. But these guys had figured out a way to take about 30% of the cost out of construction without having any impact on the customer experience, any impact on quality, visual, et cetera. And so to just think about the opportunities that we still have in this business, here we are 65 years later, 40,000 some odd restaurants later, and someone comes along. And by looking at a process in a completely different way, figure out how to build that same box for 30% less than what we've been doing for years and years, you just walk away from that scratching your head saying, there's so much more we can do here. There always is this that unfinished business that gets us really turned on. There's no question about that. How do you take an idea like that and then transfer it around the world? It starts with celebrating the success. And that goes a little bit back to what we were talking about earlier. But I like to describe it sometimes as positive shaming. So as opposed to pointing out the things that aren't working so well, you take the things that are working great and you make those people heroes. And what happens in the room when you're bringing up John or Sally or pick whatever the name is and you're talking about all the great stuff that they did, everybody in the audience there is listening and they're excited for John or Sally or Sue. But they're also kind of in the back of their mind thinking, I kind of would like to be up there and they're not talking about me that way. And it starts to get the wheels spinning a little bit of, well, I kind of would like to get some of that recognition. And so then they go back and they start to say, well, hey, you know, we need to go do something like this. So there's power in celebrating success, both because of the receiver of the praise. They love to be praise, but also the all the other people that are hearing it are kind of also thinking , well, I want some of that. So I'm going to go back and use this and I'll show you, I'll come up with my own whatever that success is, which is great. I'm happy to praise everybody. That's great. Yeah, Chris, this has been so much fun. And now I'd like to have a little bit more with my lightning round of questions. Are you ready for this? Okay. What's one word others would use to describe you? I'd like to think approachable. What's the one word that you think best describes you driven? If you could be someone beside yourself for a day, who would it be and why? I'd like to be Bono, both because I love you too. And I think that they've got just incredible set of songs, but also just the life he's led, the people he's met, the things that he's been able to do. It'd be pretty cool to be Bono for a day. What's your biggest pet peeve excuses and not taking ownership for stuff? Have you ever dressed up as Ronald McDonald's? And is that a rite of passage for McDonald's CEO? I have not dressed up as Ronald McDonald. Although I feel like by admitting that I'm now setting myself up to be dressed up like Bono McDonald. But no, I have not yet done that nor do I have that as a career aspiration, even though it probably is going to happen now. As a due graduate, what's the first word or phrase that comes to mind when I say tar heels? Go to hell. [laughs] Your favorite McDonald's product? Quarter pounder. If you turned on the radio in your car, what would we hear? You would hear college rock music, which is not age appropriate. That 's the end of the lightning round. Very well done. I just have a few more questions and we'll wrap this up. You run an incredible franchise business. You have franchisees or key to your success. What advice can you give to people who work with franchisees or in a franchise business so that you maximize the opportunity? You got to be a good listener and it's that old adage of you got two ears and one mouth. And so you've got to go into those relationships in a learning mode because most likely the franchisee knows a whole lot more about what's going on on a day to day basis in their restaurant than you do. And so go in with a listening mentality. That is one. I think second is you've got to find areas of mutual alignment. And there are a whole variety of things that you can always prioritize. I try to say, let's focus on the things that we agree on versus spending all of our time on the things that we disagree on. And so getting alignment with your franchisees about the things that you can actually do together and making that the centerpiece of the relationship as opposed to the relationship being pred icated on just the things that you don't agree on. I think that's a second thing. And then the last is the franchisee needs to believe that you are there to make them be successful and that your success is not going to come at their expense. And so the more that you can build up that trust where the franchisee ultimately the relationship only works if there's trust. You know, you've worked at such great companies. You mentioned Procter and Gamble as one, your Boston consulting group, PepsiCo, Kraft, and now McDonald's. What's the single most important thing you think somebody should think about before they change jobs? For me, it's always been about the people of who I was working with. Each one of those jobs with the exception of BCG, which I did right out of business school, but each one of those jobs I went to because there was someone there that I already knew. And there was someone there that I actually trusted, respected, and I wanted to be a part of that organization. And so for me, it goes to how important relationships are and relationships in my life in my career have been how I've gotten almost every single opportunity. And those relationships also take time. And I got a great piece of advice very early in my career. It was actually my first boss at P&G who asked me, he said, "What's the most important brand you're going to manage here?" And it being P&G, I said, "I don't know, crust or tied or something like that." He goes, "No." He said, "It's the Chris Kimchinsky brand. That's going to be the most important brand that you're going to manage here at Procter and Gamble and in your career ." So you better figure out what you stand for as the Chris Kimchinsky brand, because depending on how you position your own brand, that's going to be what determines your career success. Super, super advice, because it's what created those opportunities later where someone said, "Hey, I've got this need. You know what? Maybe you should give Chris a call." And that's opened up for me so many different things in my career. So it's about relationships and just nurturing those and making sure that you're thinking about what do you want when people are talking about you? What do you want them to be saying about you? Speaking of relationships, you've met your wife at Duke and she's your partner. How do you two interact on the business front? My wife is zero interest in my business, to be honest. So when I'm at home, she's really not that interested in hearing about what went on at work, which is actually a refreshing thing, because I know I have to leave it at work, because she's not going to be interested in doing that. That said, incredibly supportive to me, and my wife was a pediatrician, but she ultimately had to give up her career to support me, because of just the jobs and the rotations and moving around her career and it ended up not being compatible with my own career. She's out of dedication and support of me was willing to make that trade off there. So I'm hugely appreciative of my wife. I wouldn't be where I am without all the support that she's given me throughout my career, but when it comes to work, she doesn't want to hear about it. She wants me to go walk the dog or go run errands or whatever when I get home. One thing I love about you is you tell it like it is, you're very honest and I find that extremely refreshing. Sometimes you don't want to hear it, but by gosh, you speak which is on your mind. Let's wrap this up with just this last question here. What's one piece of advice you'd give to aspiring leaders? Find somebody who's going to tell you the truth, because as you go up in your jobs and you get into bigger and bigger jobs, there are fewer and fewer people that are willing to tell you the truth. If there's people that are not going to tell you the truth, you're going to miss stuff and you're not going to be as successful. I think finding ways that you're going to surround yourself with people and you're going to create the conditions for people to tell you the truth that's going to make you a better leader. That's great advice, Chris. I'm going to give you a little bit of truth telling here. We talked about McDonald's French fries a little bit earlier. When I was CEO of Young Brands, I would probably sneak out once a quarter and just go to McDonald's just to get those fries. They are so good. I 'm sure you've had a lot more of them than me, but I have to tell you, I don't know if you've enjoyed them more than I have. Thank you for sharing that. It is good to know that some of our competitors out there do appreciate our product. Listen, I will not share that with any of your young people, although I guess since we just did it on a podcast, you've shared it with everybody. You also should know that when I was CEO, we had McDonald's Immersion Day. We admired your company so much that we spent a day all around the world. I had our general managers and their teams go into McDonald's for a day. Then we codified all the things we thought you were doing that we could learn from. We share that the learning mentality. I can tell you that, yes, I've spent a fair bit of time when I do my market visits and KFCs, particularly, we've given your global footprint around the world. So there's a lot we can learn from each other. Chris, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to do this podcast. I've learned a lot just listening to you. I can tell you, McDonald's is very blessed to have you at the helm. You're really doing some fantastic things. Oh, thank you so much. It's been fun. Well, great. I guess I'm going to have to sneak out and go and have some of those McDonald's fries again. But hey, it's worth it for the chance to sit down with the leader like Chris, who's so real and connected and positive in the way he leads. You know, I love his phrase, it's not real if it's not in the restaurant. Boy, isn't that the truth. Leaders can get so caught up in crafting the perfect strategy. But even the best strategy is pretty useless if your team members can't remember it and actually execute it. Chris knows that if you want to implement a strategy, you've got to make it memorable. And McDonald's big strategy is summed up with an acronym, CD, M for marketing, C for core menu, and D for digital drive-through and delivery. MCD is also fun because it's their stock ticker abbreviation. It's so simple and is something every local franchisee and team member in the restaurant can grasp and act on. And look, if you can get people understanding what you want to do and why, well, you're halfway to actually getting it done. I want you to think of a big strategy you've got in the works. Now, I asked yourself, how can you simplify it so it's easy to communicate? How can you make it even more memorable? Devote some thinking to it this week and I guarantee you 'll see your strategies take root in your business. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders make their key strategies memorable. Coming up next on how leaders lead is Carol Tomay, CEO of UPS. If you've got a culture where you put people first, you're serving them, right? Leaders second, people first. It makes a huge big difference on the customer experience and the financial results. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How Leaders Lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. [BLANK_AUDIO] [ Silence ]