From Ducker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship, emphasis added —
“…hamburger stands have been around in the United States since the nineteenth century; after World War II they sprang up on big-city street corners. But in the McDonald’s hamburger chain — one of the success stories of the last twenty-five years — management was always being applied to what had always been a hit-or-miss, mom-and-pop operation.
McDonald’s first designed the end product; then it redesigned the entire process for making it; then it redesigned or in many cases invented the tools so that every piece of meat, every fried potato would be identical, turned out in a precisely timed and fully automated process.
Finally, McDonald’s studied what “value” meant to the customer, defined it as as quality and predictability of product, speed of service, absolute cleanliness, and friendliness, then set standards for all of these, trained for them, and geared compensation to them.”
Interesting. Defining value explicitly, and then managing intensely for that.
Obvious, no? But, still perhaps rare for nascent businesses.