WSJ: McDonald’s to restructure U.S. field ops

McDonald’s Corp. reportedly will eliminate layers of management out in the field in the United States, leaving a slimmed-down structure that hopefully would leave regional leaders more nimble to make local menu and marketing decisions. According to a memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the Golden Arches is deferring many marketing and menu decisions to the leaders of 22 regions in the United States. “The reality is that our current U.S. structure is not optimized for the customer,” Mike Andres wrote in an email to all domestic franchisees and staff. “You’ve told us that there are too many layers, redundancies in planning and communication, competing priorities, barriers to efficient decision making, and too much talking to ourselves instead of to and about our customers. If we want to grow beyond our current results, we need to evolve beyond our current model.” He added in the email that McDonald’s needed to use more “local intelligence” when serving consumers in diverse markets nationwide: “In short, we must evolve our culture and organizational structure to put decision making closer to our customers.” The chain is also splitting up its domestic territories further, increasing the number of top-level geographic zones from three to four: Northeast, South, Central and West. Read more by clicking: http://online.wsj.com/articles/mcdonalds-to-change-u-s-structure-1414695278/?mod=mktw