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An exceptional concern read, with countless lessons in business, management, leadership and sourcing. These lessons are inter-weaved within a nifty story near the showtime and growth of one of the most recognizable brands in the world. A must read!
Below are excerpts from the book that I found especially insightful:
one- "Few outside McDonald's understand that Ray Kroc's brilliance is found in the style he selected and motivated his managers, his franchisees, and his suppliers. He had a knack for bringing out the best in people who worked with him. To be sure, Kroc'southward success with McDonald's is a story of his ain entrepreneurship. But it is more. He succeeded on a grand scale considering he had the wisdom and the courage to rely on hundreds of other entrepreneurs."
2- "The cardinal secret to McDonald's success is the way it achieves uniformity and fidelity to an operating regimen without sacrificing the strengths of American individualism and diversity. McDonald'due south manages to mix conformity with creativity."
iii- "Essentially, the approach Kroc took in franchising was the same as he took in selling nutrient service supplies: his success was based on finding a way to make his customers successful with his production. As simple as it sounds, information technology was a revolutionary idea in the rapidly expanding food franchising business organisation, and Kroc's notion of a fair and balanced franchise partnership is without question his greatest legacy."
4- "In brusk, Kroc assembled and tolerated 1 of the most diverse collections of individuals ever to occupy the top management of an american corporation. And even today, the practice of recruiting extremely individual managers is a McDonald;s trademark, i near completely subconscious past the chain's legendary operational uniformity."
5- "In fact, McDonald'due south greatest touch on American business is in the areas that consumers do not see. In their search for improvements, McDonald's operations specialist moved back down the nutrient and equipment supply changed...They changed the way farmers abound potatoes...they altered the manner ranchers raised beef...Indeed, no i has had more affect than McDonald's in modernizing food processing and distribution in the by four decades."
6- "McDonald'south as well encouraged closeness with vendors by giving them enormous incentives to upgrade their operations. It did and then by demonstrating early on that information technology could be merely as loyal to suppliers that met its standards as information technology was tough on those that did not."
7- "What converted McDonald'due south into a money machines had nothing to do with Ray Kroc or the McDonald brothers...Rather, McDonald'due south made its coin on existent manor and on a little-known formula developed by Harry J. Sonneborn."
8- "The costless commutation of Zien's promotional ideas set a precedent that remains a key principle in McDonald'due south marketing today: that all franchisees are partners, and what one develops to amend his or her local operation is provided freely to all operators to better the system'due south performance, with no royalty going to the franchisee, who discovered the concept."
9- "...for almost of its history, dedication to new products resided with certain production-oriented franchisees who stubbornly pushed their inventions on company managers who were not hands sold on them."
10- "He (Kroc) had built not a company but a organization of contained companies all pursuing the same goal, each dependent on the other. Indeed, the synergy that was developing between all the parts of McDonald's was so different and unexpected that Kroc himself was only starting time to grasp the significance of it."
11- "The packaged foods companies belatedly discovered that at that place was an enormous difference betwixt the management of manufactured foods sold to grocers and foods prepared and sold directly to customers at a fast-food outlet. In the former, manufacturing is centralized and more easily controlled, and the sale to the consumer is indirect and depends highly on branded advertising. In the latter, production is decentralized and hard to command, since each store is a cocky-sustaining production unit. Furthermore, the auction to the consumer is direct and depends highly on local service."
12- "But McDonald's reliance on virtually convict suppliers for technological breakthroughs goes across new products. Indeed, it was suppliers - driven by the prospect of increased McDonald's business - who played the key role in organizing McDonald'southward supply lines and making its distribution arrangement one of the most avant-garde in all of retailing."
13- "...McDonald'south Americanization of the global food service industry is i of the nigh promising developments in U.S. trade relations. McDonald's, after all, is exporting what has get the centerpiece of American industry - the service sector."
14- "More important, however, Fujita's success made information technology clear to McDonald's that to succeed in retailing abroad it needed a partnership that could give McDonald'south a home grown flavor in each foreign market without deviating from the fundamentals that made McDonald'southward piece of work in the United States."
15- "The company was non only a good target for environmental activists because it was large, but the fact that information technology had outlets in virtually every U.South. customs of any size made McDonald's attainable to picketers and protesters everywhere, in some cases for issues that the company was not remotely involved in."
Regards,
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I have been reading this on and off for virtually a calendar month. It'south not an easy read (at least, non for me), equally it is organized thematically, rather than chronologically. That in itself is non an outcome, but it can brand reading difficult.
Information technology's a fascinating look at McDonald's, although it does endure by bei
A long and detailed history of 1 of the, if not THE most famous fast food franchise in history. A look, warts and all, at McDonald's as information technology started and how it has grown to a huge multi-national corporation.I take been reading this on and off for nigh a month. It'southward not an easy read (at least, not for me), as it is organized thematically, rather than chronologically. That in itself is not an effect, but information technology tin brand reading hard.
It's a fascinating expect at McDonald's, although it does suffer by existence somewhat outdated. Information technology would have been interesting to see history of "super-sizing" as well as the fast nutrient controversies over obesity and health bug addressed. Hopefully this will be updated at some point.
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This volume, while long, is fascinating. The history of McDonald's gave me a newfound respect for the company and the level with which they'll go to ensure the quality of their food. While I never ate at McDonald's, salvage for the occasional breakfast on the go, I plant myself eatin
I became curious nearly the history of McDonald's after watching the movie The Founder. The flick was wrong on many fronts with regards to Ray Kroc. His family is probably livid virtually his inaccurate portrayal in the moving picture.This book, while long, is fascinating. The history of McDonald'southward gave me a newfound respect for the company and the level with which they'll go to ensure the quality of their food. While I never ate at McDonald'southward, relieve for the occasional breakfast on the go, I found myself eating there more frequently because of this volume. I highly recommend this read.
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John F. Beloved's McDonald's: Behind the Arches was something of a landmark book when it was originally published in 1986, and even after more than iii decades it serves every bit a useful and thoroughly researched history of the company'south—and the entire American fast food industry's—early on years. Information technology is also, i
And so, I wrote this review for my INFO 5712 (Horizon Technologies in Libraries and Information Science) grade this semester (Fall 2018), and I'm besides tired to cutting it downward for Goodreads. Sorry, folks!John F. Love'due south McDonald's: Behind the Arches was something of a landmark book when it was originally published in 1986, and fifty-fifty after more than than 3 decades information technology serves every bit a useful and thoroughly researched history of the company's—and the unabridged American fast food manufacture'due south—early years. It is likewise, in many ways, a chronicle of the cult of personality at the heart of the McDonald's empire, and gives an almost-insider's perspective on the means in which such personalities inform American business organization interests. In 1986, few if any companies made the Fortune 500 list that were helmed past charismatic leaders like McDonald'south Ray Kroc; in 2018, we have weathered the media storms surrounding dozens of such tech titans, from Nib Gates and Steve Jobs in the late 1980s to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in the belatedly 2010s. We are now in some ways primed to both emulate and criticize the world'southward almost powerful founders and CEOs, rendering Love's forgiving film of the McDonald'southward Corporation'southward bureaucracy a touch likewise rosy and naïve for modern tastes.
Structure
McDonald's: Behind the Arches, appropriately for a book tracking the development of a visitor dominated by the cult of personality, is structured around the important people in its hierarchy: the McDonald brothers, company founder Ray Kroc, and the cluster of successors whom he trained upwardly through the company'southward evolution and clean-cut to take his place—including those that gave him considerable problem. These beginning-tier managers included Sonneborn, Schindler, Turner, Conley, and Martino, each of whom took on pregnant functions inside McDonald's and allowed it to remain somewhat decentralized. Whether consciously or subconsciously, the book's internal compages mirrors this reality every bit the tight structure of the early chapters gives way to much more loosely structured, roughly chonological chapters in the 2nd half.
The Cult of Personality
Love's comment that "selfish interests never prevail" (p. eight) no longer rings true in an era when a tech titan can launch an aerospace beginning-up and so likewise launch his luxury roadster beyond Earth's orbit without any accountability to the public. It is difficult to nurture the illusion that such public figures—absurdly wealthy, socially insular, and politically powerful—are remotely in touch with the boilerplate citizen's daily needs and experiences. Back in 1986, by contrast, Ray Kroc may indeed have seemed like a champion of the common man—although this epitome may in part exist due to Beloved'south biography itself. How nosotros write about public figures is, after all, how we remember them.
Love's treatment of Ray Kroc is a perfect example. Described by Beloved as a human being with a "disarming capacity for dealing with hundreds of people on an extremely personal basis" (p. 45), Kroc had a magnetic personality—and just similar a magnet, he both attracted some people and repelled others. Dearest repeatedly describes Kroc's colorful public and private outbursts and the effect these displays of emotion had on his employees—making him in many ways an even more perfect parallel to some of today's charismatic corporate figureheads, of whom such tantrums are almost expected.
Today's experts are divided on the benefits and risks of such beliefs from figureheads such equally Kroc on a company's bottom line; Kroc is now joined by such rarified company every bit Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX. Even Steve Jobs was known by reputation for being a demanding and often difficult boss. This particular kind of leadership fashion attracts controversy. Adam Monson (2018), for example, argues that "[east]ach time Musk damages his celebrity status, he damages Tesla, which makes Tesla a very risky investment. Tesla is specially risky for the average investor who can't beget information technology to crash" (para. 6). Contempo reports, including Julia Carrie Wong'due south (2018) contempo article in The Guardian, indicate that Tesla is rife with malpractice and employee lawsuits waiting to happen, in part because Musk struggles to go along a rein on his public misbehavior. Musk'due south legacy, like Kroc's, will likely shift from the correct to the incorrect side of public stance as the consequences of his behavior have more time to manifest. Love's book was published before McDonald's reputation was fully eroded by greater public awareness of the visitor's systemic issues and the more than problematic elements of Kroc's leadership. One can hands forgive McDonald's: Behind the Arches for beingness of its time, merely it is less like shooting fish in a barrel to forgive McDonald'southward every bit a corporation or Kroc equally an individual.
Showing its (Problematic) Age
In many ways, McDonald'southward: Behind the Arches is indeed a product of its time—including the well-nigh problematic aspects of that fourth dimension. While it'south maybe inevitable that a book nearly 1980s engineering would reference Xerox every bit a revolutionary leader in office equipment evolution (p. 48) and the Soviet Spousal relationship as a continuing fact of life (p. 447), it is disappointing that a book published after the civil rights motility and second-moving ridge feminism would be and then tone deafened to women and people of color.
The world was a different place in 1986 in terms of industry, only 1986 is not so former that the book's opinion on social issues should experience so utterly conflicting. For example, Dearest is aware of, if not specially bothered by, the systemic sexism embodied throughout McDonald's history. Early on in McDonald's: Behind the Arches, Beloved writes that the McDonald brothers after whom the company is named employed only men "[p]erhaps as an overreaction" (p. 8) to what they saw every bit the power of women to attract unwanted demographics to their stores. Despite lavish profiles of the company's majority-male executives, Kroc compliments the one woman—June Martino, who began as Kroc'due south bookkeeper in 1948 and later on became McDonald'due south Corporation's Secretary-Treasurer, and finally a Director—for existence something of an exception to her gender; he describes how she "even cleaned the washrooms [at ane shop] to prepare the place for a wedding reception" (p. 413). He also makes note of her lifelong involvement in phrenology (p. 96)—a pseudoscience which has long served to prop up arguments for racial and gender profiling—and describes her as existence something of a "den female parent to McDonald's young [male] managers" (p. 109). She was, according to Beloved, most valued for having "involved wives in the McDonald's family unit" and for "bargain[ing] with their frustrations over the long hours their husbands were putting in" (p. 109). While it is entirely possible that men were also performing the same tasks, Love chooses to highlight her accomplishments in supposedly domestic, maternal, and feminine roles—while doing zero of the sort with his profiles of McDonald's male executives.
McDonald's opinion on women eventually inverse, generally due to cocky-interest, which is to say that the company eventually realized at an institutional level that women made good employees, and therefore they helped brand the visitor assisting; the company had to be dragged to this determination kicking and screaming, notwithstanding, subsequently a franchisee violated the store's license past hiring women in the mid-1960s (p. 293). In that case, "[a]s shortly equally the company's field consultant spotted women in the Elkhart store, he told Christian [it's owner] to burn them. Christian refused" (p. 293)—and several years later, in 1968, the company officially immune stores to hire women equally staff (p. 294). Even then, however, "[s]ome of the criteria on hiring the first female person crew persons were so discriminatory that they could not exist published in the operations manual" (p. 294).
Kroc, mostly, left it to others to move the company forrad on gender equality; Sonneborn, for example, was the 1 to insist that his wife and McDonald's Secretary-Treasurer June Martino be immune into the all-male New York Stock Substitution (NYSE) director's dining room when the company historic being listed on the NYSE in 1966 (p. 245). Love concludes, somewhat mildly, that "Kroc was no pioneer of women's rights" (p. 98). More than accurately, he was simply bigoted in means which were tolerated by his majority-male person peers.
The book is also slow to condemn Kroc'south (and therefore McDonald's) racism, even though the volume is, again, aware of the issue. Time and once again throughout the book, Love argues that "Kroc assembled and tolerated one of the virtually diverse collections of individuals e'er to occupy the tiptop direction of an American corporation" (p. 88, emphasis mine). By implication the word diversity, in the 1980s, obviously did not acknowledge the concept of race; even today, only i of the fourteen top executives listed on the McDonald'south website is a person of color, while three are women. McDonald's: Behind the Arches seems blind to the fact that McDonald's actively benefited from racism—and but granted franchise licenses to African Americans afterwards the Cleveland Civil Disorders of 1966 through 1968 made it clear the visitor would lose profits past continuing to exclude people of color from the franchise (p. 363). Black applicants, co-ordinate to Love, "did not fit [McDonald's] notions about how a licensee should look, talk, and apparel, and near the amount of formal education he should have" (p. 371). Desegregation was however ongoing at the fourth dimension, making information technology near impossible for people of color to acquire the same level of didactics as white franchise applicants. McDonald'south had but four blackness operators as of 1969, not quite 50 in 1972, and 167 as of 1986 (p. 373) as a result of aggressive affirmative action and the ill-blighted (and terribly named) "zebra packages" (p. 372) by which the company paired upward black franchisees with white partners in an endeavor to boost diversity while maintaining other, more nebulous standards. Love bends over backwards to apologize for Kroc's racism, stating at ane point that "despite Kroc's repeated use of ethnic [antisemitic] epithets, he harbored no real prejudices" (p. 99). The company'due south corporate hierarchy and dealings with its franchisees would rather seem to contradict this argument.
The company continues to face up, as Lenika Cruz (2015) notes, a legacy rife with systemic racism. While McDonald's (amidst other brands) began taking "depictions of African Americans more than seriously" in its advertising in the 1970s, "other minorities were left out, largely because they had no significant spending power and weren't worth pursuing" (para. nine). Thus, any intersectional concept of diversity—one which would admit the enormously important presence of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and other minority ethnic groups in America equally citizens and consumers—is mooted.
32 years afterwards its original publication and 23 years after the publication of a revised edition, McDonald'southward: Behind the Arches does not bear upwards well under the lens of social criticism. Its ongoing relevance is rooted instead in its analysis of the company's internal compages and operations.
Decision-making the Narrative
Writes Dearest, "[i]t is in the area of manpower that McDonald's influence on the American economic system is most disregarded" (p. four), with one in fifteen workers getting their first task through the company (p. 5) as of 1986. Turnover was, he points out, always high, simply the company's influence remains massive in terms of the American workforce; each year, thousands of employees progress through McDonald's training and then take that training into other jobs—and not but in food service.
Love writes that "the history of McDonald's is a case study on managing entrepreneurs in a corporate setting" (p. 8). The company bet its future success on maintaining high standards of quality in service and product development in its early years, and in denying territorial franchise licenses that would have loosened the company'southward primal command over individual stores (p. 60). According to Love, Kroc realized early on that "[t]he whole purpose of a franchise system [...] was to obtain the benefits of cooperative purchasing then that eating house operators in the chain could sell food at a lower price than they could if they ran their restaurants independently" (p. 64), and he fabricated information technology part of his mission to align franchisees' self-interest with the company'due south general business organization interest. He gave franchisees "freedom to create and contribute ideas that he believed benefited the system, but he would non tolerate deviation from the norm when he thought information technology hurt the system" (p. 86).
While Love repeatedly describes Kroc's arroyo every bit generous in spirit and somewhat freewheeling, information technology is articulate from the sequence of events that Kroc was actually deeply invested in maintaining rigid control over even the smallest minutiae of the visitor and its franchisees: experimentation merely happened within strict guidelines, and Kroc was prone to bringing in company-canonical assistance to supervise even that experimentation. If an experiment was proven to exist a success, the franchisee lucky plenty to take developed it maintained absolutely no intellectual holding rights over the product or service, and benefited not at all from the company's co-choice of that idea. Kroc was therefore able to maintain a compatible McDonald'due south customer experience and turn a profit from his employee'due south well-constrained ingenuity.
This balance betwixt control and freedom equally the footing for controlled innovation is a recurring theme in Dearest's book. Control, writes Love, could indeed exist carried too far but also enabled the company to reshape the food service industry to better serve its needs—and yes, sometimes, the client's needs as well. A key benefit of administrative control was the visitor's enforcement of its "SQC" (p. 145), or quality command, standards. They issued manuals which were "at times likewise detailed" (p. 142). These manuals "specified prices for all products, a violation of current restraint of merchandise rules, and [their] all-male person chore titles were intentionally discriminatory" (p. 142). Fifty-fifty after, corrected manuals were hundreds of pages long. McDonald'due south staff, meanwhile, were trained to provide speedy, efficient, and loftier-quality service at "Hamburger University" (p. 148), the company's sprawling grooming center.
When it came to dealing with vendors and the materials they supplied to the company, McDonald's prototyped surprise vendor inspections (p. 131) and instituted a series of laboratories and exam kitchens to invent new products and refine existing ones. Kroc and McDonald'due south were not content to leave chips and milkshakes alone, for instance, and sought instead to constantly improve both the production and the efficiency of product past way of new technologies and mechanism. Their systems proved eminently portable: McDonald's essentially reconstructed foreign nutrient supply systems away after expanding overseas, just as information technology had before done in the United States (p. 442).
Control—no thing whether it was exerted by way of real estate ownership, franchise licensing, staff training, vendor contracts, and SQC reports on both vendors and franchise stores—accomplished two simultaneous goals: raising profits, and raising customer satisfaction. Writes Beloved, "viewed from the outside, centralized command seemed to be a passion for Ray Kroc" (p. 205) and it was enforced by the fact that, in 1982, McDonald'due south became "the owner of the most valuable real manor in the world" (p. 159). Franchisees rented their properties from McDonald'southward, and if their standards ever slipped, they were at risk not merely of losing their franchise licenses but too their functional capacity to exist.
Kroc and McDonald's became just as deeply invested in controlling the public narrative every bit they were in controlling operations. In the beginning, even so, the company was ho-hum to pick up on advert of any kind, especially national (pp. 205-208). Kroc advocated for franchisees investing in their local communities, specially in local charities; after all, "community involvement was a far more efficient form of promotion than advertising was" (p. 212), in part considering it cost the company itself no money, and while information technology cut into franchisees' bottom lines, it often repaid the investment of the franchisees' time and money in full. Additionally, charity gave "private operators a sense of personal identity in a business where that identity can easily be lost" (p. 213). This was also an expanse where the McDonald's assistants had picayune interest in exerting its command, at least in the start, and immune creativity to flourish.
Later on, equally company-run stores began to make upward a larger percentage of McDonald'southward locations, the company began to invest more in Ronald McDonald Houses. Kroc reportedly was known for saying that McDonald's "is not in the restaurant concern; it's in the show business" (qtd. in Beloved, p. 208), and he understood instinctually the need for constructive branding and a strong public image. McDonald's began to encourage franchisees to pool their money to pay for radio, boob tube, and straight mail ad campaigns. McDonald'southward too invested in creating the graphic symbol of Ronald McDonald for public marketing campaigns—appropriating the thought from a franchisee—to appeal to the national children'south market (p. 224). Further funds went toward appearances in the Macy's Parade (pp. 246-247) and in the first-e'er round of Super Bowl commercials (p. 248). While initial franchisee investments were low, the company as a whole had spent $180 million on national advertising by 1985 (p. 250)—all of it guided and directed by Ray Kroc and the McDonald's Corporation rather than by the franchisees themselves. Today, in 2018, McDonald'southward seems to strike a balance between national and local advertising, the erstwhile of which is now centered on social media and television, and the latter of which remains up to the individual franchisee's skills, interests, and imagination.
(I'm omitting the "Ongoing Relevance" section since it doesn't all fit. Apologies.)
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The author has done an outstanding, boggling and almost never-replicated job in constructing this masterpiece.
His power to isolate the events of each chapter from the other related events put things into their prospectives.
Information technology is unmatched mature, decent and world class reading about a corporation (and the people who congenital information technology) of the same qualities.
- Holds up well, 20 years after publication
- Shows the importance of identifying the opportunities that align with the greater forces in society - formation of middle grade families; machine transportation; suburbanization; standardization
Better than I thought it was going to exist.
Lots of fun anecdotes.
Kroc'south secretar
A fantastic book! A real pedagogy. The author really gets into nuts and bolts rather than the usual vague "innovations in supply chains"-blazon stuff. Quite understandable and answers a lot of questions and corrects a lot of misconceptions. Plenty of fast food restaurants already existed, actually what Kroc did was create an innovative powerful franchise system. And what actually bodacious its success was Harry Sonneborne'due south inspiration to create real estate wealth.Lots of fun anecdotes.
Kroc'south secretary was given a ten% pale in the company.
The McDonalds refused to approve whatever changes at all to the arrangement and then Kroc was constantly in violation of contract fifty-fifty for adding a furnace to the stores, since the one in California didn't have or need one.
The corporation was among the early users of rooftop air treatment because the book of cooking done meant all the air in the building needed to be replaced every 3 minutes and the couldn't afford to lose the storage room in the basement. During rush hours--and this was earlier the stores had indoor seating--the crew couldn't have left because the pressure level difference was too great to open the doors.
Taco Bell is named later its founder Glen Bong, a telephone repairman who was a frequent company to the original McDonald's. (Once again, contrary to popular fable, Kroc wasn't the outset to observe how well they were doing.)
When the restaurants were redesigned, they were so sturdy that the urban center of Cleveland made them designated evacuation spots.
The first McDonald'due south in Japan was built in 36 hours.
The trick to perfectly frying fries isn't a particular temperature of the oil in the deep fryer, that changes between machines and even between batches. The trick is that once the oil has regained iii degrees from when yous put the fries in, they're fix. (The other tricks involve getting the potatoes with the correct starches. Early McDonald's buyers went out and tested them by floating them in water. Today the lengths McDonald's goes to become consequent ingredients causes anxiety about nutrient diversity, but in the early days it was the solution to suppliers who tried to pass off adulterated or bluntly dangerous production.
The original Ronald McDonald was played past Willard Scott.
None of the food innovations Kroc came up with ever succeeded and near of the new products you've heard of were created by franchisees. (The fish sandwich was a response to Catholic communities' meatless Fridays.)
I think the story of Kroc'due south early on career and how he got involved was beautiful as well. He worked for a long fourth dimension as a salesman of restaurant supplies, often urging ideas on owners that would increase their sales and thus employ of his products. When his employer didn't desire to take on multimixers, he went independent and became the distributor (if I empathise correctly). He worked with owners and suppliers to keep milkshake product going even through dairy shortages during the war, but afterward sales were all the same falling off. He visited the McDonald'south bulldoze-in because they were his best customers and he needed to encounter what on world they were using so many machines for.
In a meeting with the brothers, he asked them to let him know when they hired a a new franchise licenser so he could go on in touch with him about supplying the new stores with multimixers (the offset one had to retire later on only a curt stint due to health problems). A calendar week later he chosen to cheque in and enquire if they had chosen one nonetheless. When they said no, he said, "Well what nigh me?"
There were a couple points in the more contempo history (Well, "recent". The revised edition was printed in '95.) that grated as pro-McDonald's biased, for example the nutrition side of things and union bug. But hey, the guy needs access to write a thorough book.
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