I have not eaten McDonald’s in 20 years, but I have probably thought about it more than most people who have.
A few months ago, I watched a video of the company’s CEO trying one of its burgers. He took a tiny, hesitant bite and called it a “product.”
Technically, he was right. But nobody standing beneath the golden arches says, “I think I’ll have the product today.”
The moment stayed with me. If the CEO didn't appear to choose his own food, what did that say about the company making it?
I started reading.
McDonald’s was dealing with weaker traffic and a customer who had changed. Fast food prices had climbed enough that the usual bargain was becoming harder to see. Grocery stores were competing for the same budget-conscious customer, and eating at home had become easier in ways that had nothing to do with learning how to cook.
I blame the air fryer.
You can now make something salty, crispy, and suspiciously convenient without leaving the kitchen. You don't need much skill, and you do not have to wait long. That closes part of the gap between fast food and whatever is sitting in your freezer.
Then there were GLP-1 medications, changing appetite, cravings, portion sizes, and the reward people experience from food.
I had started with an awkward bite in a corporate video. A few hours later, I was thinking about inflation, kitchen appliances, pharmacology, convenience, and how American eating habits were changing.
That is usually how my brain gets into trouble.
At first, McDonald’s seemed like an odd thing for me to spend time on. I do not eat there. I do not cover restaurants. Nobody is waiting for my quarterly analysis of the McChicken.
But the story had become useful because it was no longer only about McDonald’s. It was showing me how several unrelated changes could arrive at the same business from different directions.
The company could adjust its menu and pricing. It could promote chicken more heavily or give customers a better deal. But it could not make air fryers disappear, lower grocery prices, or change the effect of a medication on someone’s appetite.
The burger was sitting at the intersection of forces much larger than the restaurant selling it.
There's a name for the kind of thinking that happens when an idea from one area changes how you understand another: intellectual cross-pollination.
Most of us are taught to improve by going deeper into our own field. We read more research, follow more people in the industry, study competitors, and attend conferences filled with people who know the same language.
That depth is necessary. Medicine depends on it. I would prefer that my cardiologist understand electrophysiology rather than arrive with three fascinating podcast episodes about bees.
Still, spending too much time inside one field can make its assumptions difficult to see. The language becomes familiar. The problems arrive already labeled. Everyone knows which questions are serious, which answers are acceptable, and which subjects belong to another department.
Eventually, people with similar training start reaching for similar explanations.
That is often when a strange example becomes useful.
Medicine borrowed from aviation to improve the use of safety checklists.
Technology borrowed the language of viruses and infection to explain malicious software.
Business talks about ecosystems, friction, bottlenecks, and pipelines because other fields gave us ways to understand movement, resistance, and interdependence.
The useful idea does not always originate in the field that needs it.
I have noticed this in my own work. I can begin with a tennis scoreboard and end up thinking about whether companies are measuring points or actually winning the match. A mushroom pretending to be meat can turn into a question about why we keep building imitations instead of solving the original problem. An outdated infrastructure requirement can explain why new healthcare ideas keep getting trapped inside systems built for another era.
The objects are rarely the interesting part. I am interested in what they reveal about the system around them.
With McDonald’s, the trail led back to healthcare.
Healthcare spends a great deal of time trying to change behavior by supplying more information. Eat better. Move more. Take the medication. Follow the plan.
Those instructions may be clinically correct. They also enter a life already shaped by cost, time, convenience, technology, habit, and appetite.
People do not make food decisions inside an educational pamphlet. They make them in a kitchen with an air fryer, on a phone with three delivery apps, within a budget that may look different than it did six months ago, and inside a body whose hunger signals may now be influenced by medication.
The clinical recommendation is only one force in the room.
That was the useful idea I brought home from McDonald’s. If you want to understand why people behave the way they do, study the environment around the choice. The strongest influence may be coming from somewhere your field does not usually look.
This applies well beyond food.
A founder can learn about trust by listening to how a good physician explains risk. A hospital operator can learn about workflow by watching a restaurant kitchen during the dinner rush. A healthcare company can learn about adoption by noticing what happens when a familiar button moves three inches and suddenly nobody knows where to click.
You don't need to become an expert in every industry that catches your attention. That would turn curiosity into another impossible reading list.
You only need to stay with an unfamiliar subject long enough to find one useful connection.
I usually begin with a few basic questions. What is changing here? What are people doing differently? Which assumption no longer fits? Where else might the same pattern be showing up?
The advantage of knowing very little about a subject is that you have not yet learned which questions you are supposed to stop asking.
That can feel uncomfortable. Inside your own field, you know which details matter. Outside it, you may not understand the vocabulary or recognize the obvious answer.
Good.
That is often where curiosity becomes more useful than expertise.
Find something you would normally ignore. Better yet, choose something you dislike. Study it without trying to become a fan. Follow the behavior, the incentives, and the changes surrounding it. Then bring one useful idea back to your own work.
I started with a CEO taking an awkward bite of a hamburger.
I ended up thinking differently about how healthcare tries to change human behavior.
Quite a lot from a meal I would never order.
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