Top of the food chain
Jane Fraser
18jan05
THE golden arches of McDonald's at the dingy end of Kingsford in Sydney seemed a little lacklustre yesterday, due, no doubt, to the bleak weather. But inside the store was lit up, a shiny, clean, cheerful and organised midday jostle as usual.
An Indian family of four hunkered in the corner, a team of removalists dusted the crumbs from their overalls and reluctantly made towards their truck, small children with their mothers squealed for more chips or another Coke, others played in the amusement area with its signs: No Bullying! and Be Kind to Others!
The staff, immediately noticeable for their extreme youth – ponytails, acne, braces, grins – were subdued but busy and efficient. They had been told of the death, earlier in the day, of Charlie Bell, the man who put their sometime insalubrious Sydney suburb and store on the world map. But the corporate juggernaut had moved swiftly and there were to be no public comments. A terse press release from chief executive officer Guy Russo announced the passing of the McDonald's dear friend and inspiration; its former, lamented, leader. The McDonald's family is in mourning. The man who spent his life surrounded by hamburgers succumbed to colon cancer. But the show goes on.
Bell would have approved; he was the quintessential company man, McDonald's to his very core and had been ever since he first heard of McDonald's as a 15-year-old schoolboy at Marcellin College, in the Sydney suburb of Randwick. A mate from school was applying for a job at what he told Bell was the most exciting thing in town – the new kid on the fast food block – McDonald's, which had recently opened its 10th outlet in the southeastern suburb. "What's McDonald's?" Bell had asked.
Marcellin, an institution which has as its motto Aeterna Non Caduca – Everlasting not Ephemeral – is recognised as a Marist Brothers institution that has produced a generation of well-educated young Catholic men from Sydney's eastern suburbs. Charlie Bell was not one of them. He was a poor student. Neither was he a sporting hero. His red hair, pasty complexion, podginess and a propensity to sweat furiously made him a target for the merciless Australian sun and schoolboy derision.
Hardly surprisingly, Bell made scant impression on either his teachers or peers, who were little surprised when he left school at 17 to pursue a career in film and television, an ambition never realised.
By that time he had been working at McDonald's for two years. He scrubbed the tables, he decorated and mayonnaised the hamburgers, he threw himself into the McDonald's work and play milieu.
"He was a nice fellow, a really hard worker who always did 10 per cent more than other people," says Greg Pollock, an ex-Marcellin student who worked with Bell at the hamburger joint.
Other former schoolfriends recall riding their bikes to Kingsford after school to try to cadge a burger, but Bell was impervious to their pleas. McDonald's came first.
Pollock recalls, too, that McDonald's was a beacon for young boys. Coming as they did from a conservative, single-sex Catholic school had its drawbacks. McDonald's provided the social icing. There were girls working there. Young attractive girls. So, serendipitously, it was at McDonald's that Bell met his wife, Leonie Webb, who was a training consultant for the company.
Seven Network's Peter Ritchie was managing director of McDonald's Australia in 1980 when he met the 19-year-old Bell, the youngest manager of a McDonald's store worldwide. Bell continued his steady climb up the McDonald's corporate ladder and reached the top last April when he became chief executive and president of McDonald's International – in charge of more than 30,000 restaurants in 118 countries.
The youngster who started at the bottom flipping burgers and mopping toilets became the latest Australian to run an iconic American corporation, joining the ranks of Jack Nasser at Ford, Doug Daft at Coke, Geoff Bible at Philip Morris and James Gorman, who runs the broking business at the Wall Street standard-bearer, Merrill Lynch.
Sydney advertising agency owner Craig Wilson spent some time with Bell at last year's Cannes advertising festival. Wilson's teenage son had just begun his first job working for a Sydney McDonald's store. Bell wrote the boy a note wishing him well. "You never know where your first job will take you," he said.
Yet within weeks of being appointed to run McDonald's globally, Bell was diagnosed with colorectal cancer and seven months later he stepped down to concentrate on his fight – a battle he lost.
In one of life's ironies, Bell had replaced his friend and colleague, Jim Cantalupo, erstwhile CEO, who had died suddenly of a heart attack. By the mid-1990s, when Bell was being recognised as a mover and shaker in the McDonald's family, Cantalupo had come looking for him, trying to convince him to relocate to the US. Bell declined and held out until 1999 when he gave in. The two men, working together, were seen as the architects of change that revitalised the flagging sales of McDonald's. Two weeks after Cantalupo died, Bell was told he had cancer.
In a rare interview given to The Australian after his diagnosis, Bell was asked what impact a down-to-earth Australian would have on a corporate culture where trainee managers are whipped into a frenzy by a quiz on filtering lard; where head office had to devise a policy covering the comings and goings of "chief happiness officer" Ronald McDonald after several employees confessed to a phobia of clowns; a company so fixated on its public image that it will build an ersatz university with an artificial lake and an artificial duck.
"Australians are pretty blunt and we say things how they really are," Bell replied. "Sometimes the words don't come out as eloquently as some of my US colleagues would prefer them to come out. But they know I'm being honest about the business at hand and what we need to focus on.
"The biggest threat to McDonald's comes from within -- that is a company becoming complacent. There are a lot of companies that get fat, dumb and happy and take their eye off the ball."
Asked about his fight against one of the world's most lethal forms of cancer (it is second only to lung cancer as the most common form of cancer death in Australia and the US) he answered instead with the open, no-nonsense attitude McDonald's employees around the world embrace. "There are good days and there are bad days," he said. "And I've had my share of both."
He refused to become introspective or self-pitying. He swore he would carry on as head of the global chain, despite debilitating chemotherapy and two operations. He remained cheerful and optimistic, but it was obvious he was dying. Gaunt and clearly in considerable pain, he resigned his position at the end of November and was flown home to Australia in a company plane specially fitted with medical equipment. He had served for only nine months – something his legacy belies.
Bell is credited with turning the company around, with the introduction of its healthy alternatives and was also instrumental in launching the McCafe concept that has been adopted globally.
Charlie Bell is survived by his wife, Leonie and daughter Alex.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,11969435,00.html
