Originally Posted 18/08/2004 07:36

Yesterday I finished reading Grinding It Out by Ray Kroc. Kroc, if you don’t know, was the milkshake mixer salesman who met the McDonald brothers and their state of the art fast food restaurant in San Bernardino, CA, and turned it into the larges fast-food franchise in the world.

The book was great. It slowed in certain areas-especially when he went into his pre-McD’s past when he was struggling as a piano player. He didn’t meet the McDonald brothers until he was 52. He died a multi-millionaire with 8,000 restaurants.

As someone who worked for McDonalds for three years as a teenager (in San Diego and Springfield, Massachusetts) I found the book especially interesting. All the things you have to learn as a McDonald’s employee and the vocabulary you have to adopt but don’t want your friends to hear you use, are unabashedly used in this book. Kroc would user phrases like “You could have toasted a McMuffin in the smile he gave me” or “I felt like a Shamrock Shake on St. Patrick’s Day.”

It’s refreshing to hear about the monolithic McDonald’s back when it was just an idea. In the large organisation with a legacy that it is today, it’s refreshing to think that it was just an idea 50 years ago.

A great book. A great man. Lots of disappointments. Lots of risks. But he built something that has become a part of all of our lives-regardless of what we think of it.

There ought to be a support group for people who buy too many books. I buy too many self-help books. I buy more books than I could ever have time to read.
Every lunchtime, while my colleagues eat in the company restaurant, I walk around the book stores of London. I love the discount rack. You can find so many cool things there. When I don’t go to the book store, I go to the library which, if nothing else, is not as expensive as the book stores.
I’ve read books on speed reading and try my best to keep up with it all. I read much more quickly than I did a few years ago. But still, that just means I buy more books. I read load of them, but some sit in a corner of the house never to be found again.

For the past few years now, I’ve been reading about one self-improvement book a week. I started with the 7 Habits and have read so many I’ve lost count. I’ve read Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, Tom Peters, Herb Cohen and loads of other not-as-famous authors. I’ve read about NLP, Negotiating skills, Networking, Sales, Customer Service–you name it.
After a while, the books start to get a bit dull. I still like to read them and re-enforce anything that is worth learning.
But I just finished reading Harvey Mackays Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive. It was great. I enjoyed reading it a lot. I was so taken by it that I tried to do some negotiation and haggling at Tottenham Court Road. It was a lot of fun.
So, to put it briefly, I highly recommend it.