Colonel sanders education

Copyright © 2017 by University of Phoenix. All rights reserved. Week 4 Case Study

FIN/486 Version 6 1

* This case was prepared by Robert J. Fitzpatrick, Bellarmine College, Louisville Kentucky.

Copyright © 2017 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.

KFC and the Colonel*

Introduction

The story of Kentucky Fried Chicken is the story of Colonel Harland Sanders. The “Colonel,” however,

was not a real colonel and Sanders was not even a Kentucky native. He was, nevertheless, a prime

example of the resiliency of the human spirit because he demonstrated that, even at 66 years of age,

after a series of financial fiascoes, it is still not too late to become a business success and a millionaire.

After having lived in obscurity during the first six decades of his life, his benign, bewhiskered

countenance became the best-known living advertising symbol throughout the world. Although he was

often tough and curt with his employees and associates, he loved children and he donated much of his

time and fortune to helping young people. Unpredictable and sometimes erratic in his personal and

business dealings, he was unfailingly dedicated to hard work and to the perfection of details. Active until

December 1980, when he died at the age of 90, he was a living example of his own philosophy, “A man

will rust out faster than he’ll wear out:” this was Harland D. Sanders, the kindly curmudgeon who

founded Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Harland Sanders was born in Henryville, Indiana, a small town about 17 miles north of Louisville,

Kentucky. When he was five or six years old his father died, leaving his mother to raise him and two

younger children. What appeared to be a disaster prepared Harland for his future success, because as

the oldest child in the family Harland had to take over some of the duties of the household, including

some of the cooking. Preparing meals under his mother’s direction helped to provide him with the

know-how on which he would capitalize many years later. “I cooked just like Mom did, and later when I

went into the restaurant business I just kept doing it the same way,” he said in an interview in his later

years. When Harland was 12, his mother remarried, but his new stepfather did not take kindly to his

inherited brood. In fact, on one occasion, he kicked Harland. Hurt by such harsh treatment, Harland left

Henryville and found a job working on a farm in Greenwood, Indiana. At this time he also attended

school, but he dropped out of the seventh grade. He said later that it was the mathematics that did him

in.