🍟 The McSystem

Why Your Business Needs a McDonald's Mindset

Author

Eryn Peters
May 18, 2025

In partnership with

Happy Sunday, pals!

If anyone will be at CWS in London this week and wants to grab a coffee - please send me a note! I’d love to see your beautiful faces.

In today’s issue

  • ⚡️ Lightning List - What I’m reading this week

  • 🍟 The Art of Duplicity - Are you irreplaceable or irresponsible?

  • ⭐️ Community Spotlight - Alto has been acquired by Revelo!

  • 💰️ Sponsor - Artisan

⚡️ Lightning List ⚡️ 

💰️ Funding alert. Rippling announces $250M Series G.

👀 Even the AI Director. Microsoft lays of 6,000 employees.

👀 The TLDR 👀 

I’m trying something new - respond to this email and tell me if it’s helpful or not. I’m going to periodically analyze future of work headlines globally.

Key Headline Trends Across Continents

👯 Art of Duplicity 👯 

Ever had that random call from a long-lost high school or uni "friend" who suddenly wants to grab coffee?

This happened to me right after university – a couple I barely knew invited me for coffee, and surprise! They tried recruiting me into their MLM scheme. They handed me the book “The Business of the 21st Century” by Robert Kiyosaki (I’m intentionally not linking since I don’t want to support MLMs lol). They insisted I read it before our next meeting.

The book was mostly garbage (as expected from MLM literature), but buried in there was actually one fascinating concept I've carried with me throughout my career: the art of duplicity.

🤔 What is the Art of Duplicity?

No, I'm not talking about being two-faced! I'm talking about creating systems that can be easily replicated.

The book used McDonald's as their golden example (pun intended). Think about it – a McDonald's in Tokyo operates almost identically to one in Toronto or Timbuktu. Their success isn't about having the world's greatest burger; it's about creating a system so foolproof that it can be duplicated anywhere with consistent results.

This concept isn't just for fast food. It's a powerful framework for how we structure our teams, companies, and even careers in today's rapidly evolving workplace.

💼 It’s good for business

If you're the only person who can do something critical in your organization, you're not indispensable – you're a liability. Harsh? Maybe. True? Absolutely.

  • 🙅 Single points of failure: What happens if you get sick, quit, or (heaven forbid) get hit by a bus?

  • 🪜 Scaling, meet ceiling: Your growth is limited by your personal capacity.

Nobody wins awards for working the hardest or doing it all themselves. Let’s change that.

🧪 Stress-Testing Your Duplicity

How do you know if you've created truly duplicable systems? Here are three tests:

  1. 🌴 The vacation stress test: Take two weeks completely off (even one). No checking emails, no "quick calls." If everything collapses, you've failed the test.

  2. 🧠 The knowledge distribution audit: Randomly ask team members about processes outside their immediate role. Blank stares? You've got a duplicity problem.

  3. ♻️ The unexpected absence simulation: Without warning, have a key team member work on something else for a day. Watch what happens and take notes.

🔧 Build More Duplicity

Creating duplicable systems isn't about making yourself replaceable; it's about making yourself scalable. Here's how to make it happen:

  • 📃 Document obsessively: If it's not written down, it doesn't exist. Create process docs, recorded trainings, and clear guidelines.

  • 💪 Cross-train religiously: Make it a regular practice, not something you do when someone's about to leave.

  • 🤝 Build redundancy by design: For every critical function, ensure at least two people could step in at any moment.

  • 🧱 Standardize before optimizing: A consistent B+ process that anyone can follow is better than an A+ process only one person can execute.

The future of work isn't about hoarding knowledge or making yourself irreplaceable. It's about creating systems that thrive with or without you. That's the true art of duplicity, and it might be the most valuable skill we can develop in an AI-powered, remote-first, constantly-changing work landscape.

⭐️ Community Spotlight ⭐️ 

Alto has been acquired by Revelo!

Alto, the remote-first tech talent platform that has helped companies like 24 Hour Fitness and UNICEF build distributed engineering teams, has been acquired by Revelo, expanding their pool to 400,000+ vetted developers across Latin America.

This strategic merger maintains the same Alto team and mission while adding enhanced AI-powered matching capabilities, simplified international hiring processes, and a shared vision that Latin America represents the future of remote tech talent. The Alto team expressed gratitude to clients and partners, promising exciting developments ahead as they scale their vision of borderless tech collaboration.

Alto acquired by Revelo

From 🇦🇷 to Silicon Valley 🇺🇸 — no funding, from 0, just conviction — turned into a 10-year journey that created jobs across 20+ countries!

www.linkedin.com/posts/pablobaldoma_acquisition-alto-revelo-activity-7326298155598139392-BEP1?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAbOSOQB8_P1QOTU-h074dCViwR7C410gNM

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Ads help keep Weekly Workforce running. Please support by checking out this week’s sponsor (clicking them often buys me a coffee) or book in your ad.

📚️ Term of the Week 📚️ 

Talent Density noun | ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN TERM

hiring and retention strategy focused on maximizing the concentration of exceptional performers rather than headcount. Companies pursuing high talent density intentionally maintain smaller teams of exceptional performers (often at premium compensation) rather than larger groups of average contributors. This approach, popularized by Netflix, assumes the exponential output of top talent outperforms linear scaling with average performers, even at higher per-employee costs.

Related terms: A-player philosophy, performance compounding, strategic understaffing, force multiplier hiring

That’s all for now, pals. See ya next week.