McDonald's is a company which has a colorful history and developed the culture associated with the Fast Food Chain today. In 1937, the McDonald's brother Richard and Maurice opened the first McDonald's restaurants in America; it was a freestanding business that offered until then an unthought-of concept. The main items they then sold were beef or pork burgers, fries and drinks. Their restaurant were set up differently to the restaurants of those times, with open kitchens the customers could see right through, and counters with many operational cash registers. Under a high degree of customer satisfactory contributed for business expansion, McDonald today has over than 30,000 restaurants over than 100 countries in the world and it has maintained the top position in the Fast Food Industry for the past 50 years.
McDonald's has been pursuing a growth strategy for the last decade. McDonald's foreign operations amount for more than half of the company's revenue today and all have been marked basic vision of selling the maximum. However, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the giant experienced problems owing to external environment changes. In 2002, the company experienced huge embarrassment with law suits, negative media coverage, and 15 percent drop in its stocks making it the third biggest loser in the Dow Jones Industrial average. This roller coaster ride has largely been attributed to the leadership of , who has instituted strategic changes and made the Company soar once again.
Among the blows that McDonalds took was the obese-causing and loser-employer issues. McDonalds has been hammered for providing people with unhealthy food that makes them obese and is an indirect contributor to other health problems. Based on figures rising in US and UK, the cultural changes are also taking place, the anti American sentiments in the rest of the world has had negative impact on McDonald's sales. The biggest challenge that managerial level faced was changing the mind set of the people from being a loser to employees of a growing Company. Even the company strategy announced, not many people were influenced by the confidence.
To battle it out, a growth of 6-7 percent annual growth which was not much considering the huge size of the food chain was pursued. The challenge was to increase the sales and revenues of the Company and retain its status back. However, the growth had to be reengineered as well, i.e. not from new restaurants but from the improvements in the existing restaurants. Moreover, another factor which drives attention is the destruction of the food market. Due to the growing number of immigrants, the variety of tastes was also increasing and the exotic cuisines from Asia and Latin America were attracting consumer preferences rather than McDonald.
The only way in which they can do that is take a long, hard look at their product line." The organizational development focused upon generating revenues from the existing operations. The biggest change is the expansion in the menus based upon the product development ...