[Image Source](https://www.amazon.com/Founder-Michael-Keaton/dp/B01MY7FSMF)
**The Founder Discussion Paper**
The Founder, the new biopic depicting Ray Kroc’s dogged pursuit of building the McDonald’s Corporation into an iconic brand and food-industry juggernaut that is known all over the globe.Although there is little joy that came from the Golden Arches as Kroc pulls outs on deals and stabs his partners; business and family in the back to gain complete control in a quest for greatness.
The film chronicles how a Midwestern salesman Ray Kroc stumbled onto a pure gem in the fast-food business in the L.A. backwater of San Bernardino in the 1950s. Richard McDonald and Maurice McDonald stumbled on an untapped niche in the fast-food fad of the 1940s and 1950s: This innovation provided quick, reliable, high-quality alternatives for families who were on a budget and wanted to mitigate the disorderly, dirty, and teenager-infested drive-in restaurants at the time. The McDonald brothers had tried several different food service options which to be none successful until Richard McDonald re-engineered the kitchen into high-quality hamburger limited menu machine. Both brothers were committed to maintain the standard for their food and their establishment. And families flocked to their stores.
In the film, Kroc is depicted as the world class spectacular traveling salesman and was inspired by the staggering influx of customers outside their store, plus the marketing ideas and segmentation tools encapsulated in images of the then unknown but now world-famous Golden Arches. There was potential to build McDonald’s into a global brand whose identity was high-quality food, a persistent focus on order and cleanliness, and a safe family-friendly atmosphere. The only problem was that the brothers had already tried to franchise their store and pulled the plug because they couldn’t get an hold of effective quality. Nevertheless, Kroc convinces them it’s worth another shot providing support and advocating the brothers to take control and produce a service that would bring value to the consumer, while Kroc would handle the financing and franchising aspect. Kroc, however, finds that franchising is a difficult monster, He convinces his rich counterparts to invest in the company and its vision, but they were absentee store owners and fall short often meeting the standards for store and food quality. He also finds, that he has signed away too much control over to the McDonald brothers. This instance happens with entrepreneurs today, at times business individuals give too much control to others and this results in the elimination of any profit completely stifling an entrepreneurs financial success.
Evident from the film we can infer that many viewers would perceive Ray Kroc as a double-dealing, ruthless businessman. Viewers may also express that Kroc’s brutal approach to business was inevitable; Kroc had no chance of being successful without exploitation of the McDonald brothers, who are portrayed as sympathetic innovators whose name and ideas were stolen from them, Contrary, the McDonald brothers were as uncompromising and unwavering in their approach to business as Kroc was to his vision for the utter expansion of the franchise. The Founder unfolds as a conflict between two unrelenting, unbending forces: the McDonald brothers’ strict intent on preserving their vision of McDonald even if that meant staying in one stor and Kroc’s vision to completely disrupt the entire food industry. Each side was iconoclastic in its own ways. As we analyze the film and the themes we gain from it it is purely evident that Kroc is the more agile entrepreneur, pivoting his business model and adjusting his marketing segmentation in a way to successfully scale the McDonald enterprise and monetize his vision by building a global brand. Kroc, rather than the McDonald brothers, ended up becoming the disrupter and a differentiator of this generation.
The film greatly crafts a story that illustrates the fundamental differences and interactions between entrepreneurship and innovation, and the implications for wealth creation. Wealth is created when an invention is scaled and monetized through the market. When an entrepreneur can produce this, the consumers monetize the value of the product and or service by validating its value through payments in the marketplace this can be considered win-win of trade of value. Innovation is not enough to create social value and capital. Entrepreneurs must scale these inventions so that society can access their benefits bringing value to their lives. This is what allows entrepreneurs in our society to disrupt the marketplace and generate industry wide change. The McDonald brothers were the inventors and profited from their invention at their first store and the ones they tried to franchise. Though their skills and talents were competent they were not sufficient enough to build a brand identity that would help franchise their business in a scalable form.
For example in society a businessman or woman is focused solely on making profits, while the entrepreneur is looking for new opportunities and invests the necessary capital in products or services that are different from what the economy already provides its consumers. Entrepreneurs use unarticulated knowledge from experience, intuition and things of that standard to successfully identify these opportunities and bring value to consumers. The film provides an excellent cinematic example on how these certain concepts differentiate entrepreneurs from conventional businessmen, as well as the interactions and variations in talents among entrepreneurs. The Founder gives a great representation of Kroc’s vision and the pressures that come with compromising business ethics while staying true to a larger vision of higher quality. At one point, for example, Kroc wants to cut down on refrigeration costs by adding a powder substitute for liquid milk in the milkshakes. The McDonald brothers refused to that decision. This propels Kroc to find ways to exploit weaknesses in the contract and ultimately corner the brothers into relinquishing ownership and control.
The Founder keeps the pace moving by steadily ramping up the tension that comes between Kroc and the McDonald brothers, within society today we see this happen quite often. While also effectively showing the subtle corruption implied in the film’s title, as Kroc eventually fully co-opts the title of Founder of McDonald’s.
