Ray Kroc

Kroc was 52 and selling milkshake mixers when he drove to San Bernardino to see why one small stand needed eight of them. He was not the inventor of anything at McDonald's — not the menu, not the kitchen, not the name, not the arches. What he supplied was the conviction that the brothers' system was a national asset and the relentlessness to make it one.

His genuine operating contribution was standardisation and its enforcement: identical fries, identical procedure, identical store, policed obsessively. He also built the franchise base out of owner-operators who worked their own counters rather than absentee investors, which is a large part of why McDonald's quality held while imitators' did not.

The financial architecture was not his. By 1956 the company was nearly broke — franchise fees were too small to fund growth — and Harry Sonneborn, a finance executive Kroc hired, restructured it around real estate: McDonald's would buy or master-lease the site and sublease it to the franchisee at a marked-up rent. Sonneborn told investors the company was not in the food business but the real estate business. That structure produced the income, the borrowing capacity and, crucially, the leverage over franchisees that made the standards enforceable. Sonneborn became the first president, and left in 1967 after falling out with Kroc.

Kroc's record on the other side of the ledger is well documented and should not be softened. The $2.7 million buyout of the brothers extinguished the handshake royalty. He opened a competing store near their original restaurant after they lost the right to their own name. He said publicly that if he saw a competitor drowning he would put a hose in their mouth. He was a ferocious operator whose treatment of the men whose invention he sold was, on the plain facts, ungenerous.