Thompson was now one of four people working on quality management at McDonald’s. The other three had the plum jobs of writing speeches for the top execs; he drew the short straw of carrying the flip charts to meetings around the globe. But this task enabled him to learn, and then to master, the complex operations of the world’s largest restaurant business. He met nearly every significant group in the company and pieced together the process flows, the subcultures of the different operating units and the relationships between them, the details of the business model—the hidden magic that made the
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