Peter Armstrong, the Senior. Business Correspondent at the CBC, wrote a glowing recommendation of Hamburger Business Review in his Mind Your Business newsletter:
Hamburger-nomics
I’ve been dying to write about this podcast.
Regular readers know how much I love finding projects that try to tell us important stories in clever and interesting ways.
Well, let me introduce you to Hamburger Business Review. Season 2 of the podcast series just dropped, and I absolutely love it.
The concept is quite simple. Mike Merrill and co-host Zach Rose got to talking about McDonald’s one day. Specifically, they were talking about the sheer volume of case studies in the Harvard Business Review that focus entirely on McDonald’s.
So, they launched a podcast, where they would go through a case study per episode to see what they could learn. And they learned a lot.
I reached out to Merrill to ask about his takeaway from doing the podcast.
“There’s nothing in the world that McDonald’s doesn’t touch,” he told me.
The company employs two million people. The case studies cover everything from currency speculation to labour law to supply chain management.
“It’s the No. 1 toy distribution company in the world, via the Happy Meal. [McDonald’s] touches everything, and it does it at such scale that it is mind-boggling,” Merrill said.
Here’s the best part, though. Leading up to the new season, Merrill came up with another idea.
He got himself a job at a certain hamburger restaurant. He doesn’t want to name said restaurant because that might land him in hot water. So, he merely calls it The Hamburger Restaurant.
“What if I get a job at there as part of this exploration of this from the other end? So we’re looking at it from that business school case study lens, but then I’m also just day in and day out grinding it out on the floor of the restaurant,” he told me.
Working there has given him yet more insight into the megalithic structure of the company, but also about the people that work there.
“I’ve never loved my co-workers more in a job in any job that I’ve worked,” he said. “The level of care and attention they give is amazing.”
Merrill is a super-interesting character. In 2008, he sold shares in… himself. Seriously. He did an interview with Wired magazine explaining the process.
“He divided himself into 100,000 shares and set an initial public offering price of $1 a share. Each share would earn a potential return on profits he made outside of his day job as a customer service rep at a small Portland, Oregon, software company,” wrote Wired’s Joshua Davis.
He sold nearly 1,000 shares and made a tidy little profit.
“He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares would be non-voting: He’d let his new stockholders decide what he should do with his life,” wrote Davis.
Merrill still holds shareholder meetings and asks his shareholders to weigh in on decisions.
The point is, the podcast is fascinating, very fun and every time I listen to an episode, I learn something interesting.