I saw a couple of interesting videos on Netflix this last week.

The first one is called FOUNDER.
It romanticizes the story of how Ray Kroc developed the McDonald's restaurant chain into the behemoth that it is. The first part of the story was especially interesting as it showed how the McDonald brothers used lean manufacturing principles to deliver meals in a tenth of a time as it took their competitors. There is a scene that showed them using a chalk on a tennis court to work through their value stream.

This reminded me of one of my customers who worked at the BlueSky laboratory for Boeing. They have a facility that creates pretend machines out of styrofoam to test possible shop layouts for their manufacturing processes.

The second video is from a PBS series by Ken Burns called THE WAR. It talks about how America mobilized from a backwater country to the world's greatest manufacturing superpower in a period of about six months. It was amazing to see what we could accomplish with a shared vision. The movie contained Japanese aerial footage of the attack on Pearl Harbor that I have never seen before. My father was on the destroyer USS Jarvis during the attack. This ship was credited with being the first ship to open up with 5 inch guns during the attack.

The internet has brought us a lot of unfiltered footage of the carnage of World War Two. It boggles my mind how in this day and age we could still have White Nationalist-KKK-Nazi sympathizers in this country.

How did it become socially acceptable to show your face on TV and say you embrace these principles?

I saw the Founder as well, good movie, I dug the part you are talking about. Then I was pissed that Kroc swindled the McDonald brothers out of their percentage of the gross.

Then I realized that Kroc brought the finance to the party. And that the McDonald brothers Never would have expanded McDonald's the way that Kroc did.

When you get down to it the reason that the US is the most advanced economy in the world is capital investment period.

You might say there are other reasons and you would be wrong.

As to the other I don't watch PBS, but it would be nice if somebody for once would show the real causes of the war.

If you haven't read it yet, everyone on here can benefit greatly by ready the E-Myth by Michael Gerber. The movie portrays the principles of this book perfectly. Ray Kroc was the entrepreneur, one of the MacDonald brothers was the manager, and the other the technician.

Yes The Founder was an amazing movie. If you think about it in a broad perspective, American's are the ones who invented lean manufacturing, and Taiachi Ohno (Toyota) admits he was inspired by American grocery stores just in time replenishment.

Another interesting tidbit I thought was that McDonald's besides being a franchisor was really much more of a real estate developer, that's where the money and long term recurring revenue comes form. Another perfect example of stepping back and realizing that hamburgers only make up a part of the business.

I've heard that Tom Hanks is working with HBO to do a mini series based on the book Factory Man. Anybody here anything else about that?

The Founder is a great movie, with a story that needs to be told.

One of the interesting parts of the Founder was the struggle between the McDonald brothers and Kroc to keep the quality high. Dry milk shakes were used to solve refrigeration costs, but at what cost at the counter? Kroc would not consider it. He was working for the franchisees, ruthlessly reducing costs - almost art whatever cost. They eventually went back to conventional milk shakes.

I think another point of the movie is a question about the tangent of McDonalds - is it good? It created wealth out of nowhere, but at a cost to the real founders and others - the customers that bought progressively lower quality, but those products were heavily marketed to overcome that fact. Business has no conscience we are told, so carry on.

But McD's has played a pivotal role in the fattening of America. Does it bear any responsibility for that? How would Kroc have handled that?

I wish we could hear a dialogue between the younger Kroc and Morgan Spurlock of the movie Supersize Me!

Boom Like That