In this activity you have a number of background resources to explore as input to this case study.
First read this two page review of McDonald’s corporate culture:
‘McDonald’s: a prime example of corporate culture’ (Salva-Ramirez, 1995).
Next watch the following video clips – Video 3.3 shows McDonald’s management staff training in 1995, while Video 3.4 is a news report from 2015.
As an optional part of this activity, you might like to use the internet to find out what is going on at the Hamburger University today. For example, you could examine what information is provided on the McDonald’s company website.
Now read the following article, which considers the corporate university from an academic perspective: ‘Utilizing institutional perspectives to investigate the emergence, rise, and (relative) decline of corporate universities’ (Alagaraja and Li, 2015), which is also available in your printed Reader.
Based on the information you have gleaned from these materials, select at least two strategy tools that have been discussed during this unit and use these to work through the potential issues you feel McDonald’s might face in reviewing the role of the ‘Hamburger University’ as part of a ten-year HRD strategic plan.
As a reminder the tools you might wish to consider include:
- mapping internal and external context
- STEEPLE analysis
- stakeholder analysis
- SWOT analysis
- value chain analysis
- benchmarking
- scenario analysis.
