What “The Founder” movie taught me about every good engineer Vs a great business man!
I wanted to share my thoughts on Engineering with the Medium community and have been postponing it for a while now (read typical engineer). Interestingly enough, I have also been postponing the movie “The founder” (The story of McDonald’s). Today as a weird coincidence, I stumbled upon a chance to check these both items off the list!
My definition of Engineer:
Anyone who solves a problem and makes a living out of it.
(Now that we got the definition out of the way, let us dive into the article)
While most of the writing about the movie out there point at Ray Kroc’s business acumen, I could draw a connection with Nick Offerman’s character Dick McDonald. (Major Spoilers ahead!)
The movie really lays out how Dick McDonald adopted the Industrial Engineering-101 concepts of assembly, workstations, Pareto-analysis (or 80–20 rule) and applied it to the food service industry. As the tennis court scene depicts- he was the finest engineer at solving his problem. He gave his model a USP “fast delivery”- the speede service system (as they refer to it). In addition, he also downsizes his menu to focus on the Top 20% (focusing on “high-movers” instead of the product-mix).
