The composition of a company’s corporate officers or board can tell you a lot about a company’s operations and culture. “If a corporation has two executives who think alike,” Ray Kroc, the man who transformed McDonald into an international juggernaut, told a bunch of college students. “One of them is unnecessary.” In the case of McDonald’s corporate officers, during Kroc’s time, the group’s diverse background was viewed as a key strategic asset.

In Kroc’s mind, McDonald’s wasn’t building a typical company. At that time, franchise businesses made most of their money off up-front franchising fees. Kroc wanted to invert that model. Instead of charging $50,000 for a franchise fee, McDonald’s would charge just $950 upfront and 1.5% of future revenue. To ensure that 1.5% generated sustainable income, Kroc had to perfect the firm’s business operations—a first for a food service company.

He didn’t want to hire a bunch of MBAs to manage his business because they were all trained in a specific management approach–one that prioritized upfront fees over a long term partnership. In McDonald’s: Behind the Arches author John F. Love summarized Kroc’s situation, “Even the best hotel and restaurant schools had no notion of the type of business Kroc was building.”

McDonald’s corporate officers: Kroc’s ideal

This ethos resulted in a preference for hiring action-orientated people over academics. College and advanced degrees weren’t needed. What McDonald’s needed was people who had common sense and were willing to work the long hours necessary to build an innovative new model.

Love highlights the McDonald’s commitment to this ideal.

When he joined McDonald’s personnel department in 1962, Jim Kuhn was greatly relieved to learn that McDonald’s did not require (and still does not) a college degree for managerial slots. ‘ ‘The thing that I loved at McDonald’s,” Kuhn says, “was that they just told me to go out and get the best damn people I could get and to look at them, not their credentials. We hired people that would not have gotten through the door at other companies, not because they were losers but because they were not traditional.”

That philosophy is intact today and is reflected in the surprising lack of college degrees inside McDonald’s executive suite. Of the twenty-six executives at the senior management level of McDonald’s Corporation, fully twelve are without college degrees, including Chairman Turner. Among the company’s eighty corporate officers—from assistant vice president on up—forty-three (or 54 percent) do not have baccalaureates. For its size, McDonald’s also has relatively few MBAs (twenty-eight), and it is likely the only company in America with more than $1 1 billion in sales that does not boast a single Harvard MBA. “Our people all have real-world degrees,” Kuhn says.

This ideal turned hiring into a core strategic asset. While its competitors focused on perfecting the now, they were building towards the future.

Modern composition..still an asset?

Does McDonald’s carry on this same preference for action and results over academic achievement? Well, the short answer seems to be no. Obviously, times have changed. America’s view towards college attainment has shifted tremendously. In 1960, when Kroc was laying the foundation of the McDonald’s empire, just 7.7% of Americans were college graduates. In 1986, when Behind the Arches was published, the number was around 20%. Today, that number is 35%. But still, I was surprised by the results.

According to their website, there are 14 corporate officers. Of these McDonald’s corporate officers, all 14 have college degrees. 8 of the 14 (57%) have advanced degrees. 5 have MBAs.

As McDonald’s heads into new and unproven areas of business, namely e-commerce, it’s easy to wonder if Kroc’s vision may be better suited.

But on the bright side, there is now at least one Harvard MBA within the company: CEO Chris Kempczinski.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash