theceomagazine.com | 57HAMBURGER UNIVERSITY
Hamburger University isn’t an institution
dedicated to teaching people how to flip
burgers. Nor does it bestow bachelor’s
and master’s degrees in Big Macs. “It’s
more like a corporate training facility
aimed at all McDonald’s employees,”
says KFC Hong Kong and Macau CEO
Alan Chan. “They teach people all the
way from restaurant management to
more advanced management classes.”
From 1994 to 1996, Alan spent two years
at Hamburger University as a ‘Professor’
during his time at McDonald’s. “They
call us ‘Professor’, but we are not real
professors,” he says. “We are more like
instructors, teaching classes there.”
But fret not, the place is not trying to
diminish the value of tertiary education.
In fact, its selection rate of one per
cent at its Shanghai campus makes
the institution more exclusive than
Harvard, and the American Council on
Education states the one-week course
can count as credit towards an associate
or bachelor’s degree at more than 1,600
US universities and colleges.
The first Hamburger University ‘campus’
opened in 1961 in Oak Brook, a suburb in
the west of Chicago. Since then, another
six campuses have opened in Tokyo,
London, Sydney, Munich, São Paulo
and Shanghai, and more than 80,000
restaurant managers, mid-managers
and owner-operators have ‘graduated’
from the facility.
Interview | INSPIRE