Jim Skinner: Plan to Win

As McDonald's Vice Chairman and Chief Executive, Jim Skinner leads the world's largest food service company with over 32,000 restaurants in 117 countries. McDonald's serves 60 million customers each day and employs 1.7 million people across the globe in corporate and restaurant positions. In order to remain competitive and an iconic American institution, McDonald's has developed programs and strategies for motivating employees and teaching leadership.

Jim Skinner's long term career and experience within the McDonald's corporation makes him a very valuable asset to the corporation. After serving nearly ten years in the United States Navy, Skinner began his career with McDonald's as a restaurant manager trainee, and since then has held several leadership positions within the corporation. Prior to being named CEO, Skinner served as Vice Chairman of McDonald's corporation and had management responsibility for several International markets, in addition to overseeing most corporate staff functions. Over the years, Skinner has received several awards and honors including, Dow Jones' "CEO of the Year," "America's Best CEOs" by Institutional Investor magazine and Barron's "30 Most Respected CEO's."

The four functions of management include planning, organizing, leading and controlling. An effective leader must also possess the skills, knowledge and experience necessary to attain goals in an effective manner to aid in the organization's success. Jim Skinner's vision, desired long term goals and accomplishments since attaining his position has shown that he is operating within the four management functions. Upon becoming CEO in 2004, Jim Skinner set three top priorities for his leadership; long-term sustainable growth for the company; talent management and leadership development; and promoting balanced active lifestyles. His leadership turned the company around and refocused on customer strategies, business disciplines and close global alignment.

Planning is defined as the development of action-oriented plans for achieving an organization's purpose, mission, goals and objectives in the short and long term (Dumler & Skinner, 2008). In order for an organization to be economically successful, planning is required. Although uncertainty is often present in the planning process, a leader must be able to cope with and adapt to that uncertainty. Jim Skinner entered into his position with clearly defined goals and objectives. In order to attain these goals and objectives, he incorporated Systematic Planning, which involves planning at all levels of the organization. At the beginning of his tenure as CEO of McDonald's, Skinner met with several other McDonald's Corporate Executives to tackle a big problem, the company, by most measures was doing terribly. His intended goal for this meeting was to strategically plan the necessary changes that needed to take place within each function of the organization. As a result of this meeting, Skinner charged each function the task of helping to reverse the company's sliding image and profits. Skinner named this strategy "Plan to Win."

Skinner's Plan to Win strategy possessed the six steps of the Planning Process. Step 1 involved Identifying Current Conditions. Skinner recognized from the beginning that the McDonald's corporation was in terrible shape. Although the restaurant was well known, Skinner knew that the competition was increasing as other fast food chains were developing and expanding nationally and internationally. His plans included taking a broad look at the organization internally and externally; and understanding the current conditions and how to address them. Skinner's long term experience within the McDonald's corporation allows him to have a vast knowledge of all operations.

Steps 2 and 3 of the Planning Process are: Determine Goal s and Objectives and Create Action Plans. The goals and objectives of the Plan to Win strategy were faster, friendlier service; tastier food; more appealing ambience; and sharper marketing. Skinner assigned action plans to meet each of the goals and objectives in accordance with the functions responsible for each.

Steps 4, 5 and 6 of the Planning Process are: Allocate Resources; Implement the Plan; and Control. The Plan to Win strategy involved strategically auditing the individual budgets of each operating function. The necessary cuts and additions were made to meet the intended goals and objectives. The plan was immediately implemented and is still currently in effect. As CEO, Skinner holds the responsibility for controlling the Plan to Win Strategy.

Organizing is the structuring of both human and physical resources to accomplish organizational objectives; involves dividing tasks into jobs, delegating authority, determining the appropriate bases for departmentalizing jobs, and deciding the optimum number of jobs in each department (Dumler & Skinner, 2008). In order for an organization to be effective, a strong organizational structure must be present. The organizational structure is the framework for any business and must be consistently aligned with the organization's strategy. Skinner's Plan to Win strategy required all members of McDonald's corporation's organizational structure to focus their attention on quality improvement. In doing so, he realigned divisions, roles and responsibilities accordingly in order to reach the goals and objectives of his plan. Skinner put a lot of time and attention on promoting and assuring talent management and leadership development within the corporation.

Human resource planning is a two-step process that involves forecasting future human resource needs and then planning how to adequately fulfill and manage these needs (Dumler & Skinner, 2008). The first step in the Human Resource Planning Process is Needs Forecasting. The Plan to Win strategy was developed in 2003 when McDonald's was in the start of revitalization. In this revitalization, Skinner wanted to most importantly focus on the things that were important for the McDonald's brand and the restaurant business for 40 plus years. Before Skinner's tenure with McDonald's, the company's growth was mainly attributed to opening new locations and not necessarily on improving the operations of existing locations.

Step 2 of the Human Resource Planning Process, Program Planning, focuses on career and performance management. The McDonald's corporation employs over 1.7 million people in its organization. Corporate management believes in training and leadership at all levels through Hamburger University. McDonald's founder, Ray Kroc's training ideology: "If