What Domino's, Burger King and Best Buy Teach Us About Designing the Conditions for Performance

There are few things more tempting than a good turnaround story.

A company is broken. A new leader arrives. The story changes. The market responds. The stock price rises. Commentators declare the company saved.

Nice arc. Clean ending. Very satisfying. Also, almost entirely fiction.

The real lesson from the turnarounds at Domino's, Burger King and Best Buy is that bold leaders diagnose the operating system beneath the market-facing story. They find the places where the business has become structurally incapable of delivering on its own promise. Then they redesign the conditions so that better performance becomes possible, even perhaps inevitable.

In most organizations — especially large legacy organizations — the visible problem is rarely the real problem. Declining sales, eroding trust, tired stores, inconsistent service, loss of relevance. These are symptoms. They fit neatly in an analyst’s deck. The real problem, however, lives underneath.

The system no longer produces the experience the brand says it produces.

That is a very different kind of problem. And it requires a very different kind of leadership.

•   •   •

Domino's did not have a marketing problem. It had a truth problem.

Let's start with pizza.

In the late 2000s, Domino's was in a bad place. The brand was known for speed and convenience but not quality. And customers were not shy about sharing their complaints. They were saying the pizza tasted like cardboard and the sauce tasted like ketchup. Subtle, that.

Then Domino's did something unusual. It listened.

More specifically, it stopped pretending the criticism was a perception problem. In fact, the company went a step further and made the criticism the center of its campaign. It admitted the product was not good enough and reformulated everything — crust, sauce, cheese, preparation. Patrick Doyle, who became CEO in 2010, was one of the visible faces of a broader transformation that would eventually redefine Domino's as much as a technology and delivery company as a pizza company — ordering systems, tracking, digital convenience and operational speed all becoming key aspects of the value proposition.

That is the popular version of the story: Domino's got honest, changed the pizza, and won.

But the real version is this: Domino's stopped confusing messaging with performance.

If customers think your pizza tastes like cardboard, you have three choices. You can deny it. You can advertise around it. Or you can make better pizza.

Domino's chose door number three. Revolutionary stuff, apparently.

The power of the Domino's turnaround was not the public admission. The power was that the public admission created accountability for real product and operating model change. The company couldn’t say "we heard you" and then keep sending out the same pizza in a redesigned box. Once the truth was public, the system had to change.

That is the first lesson. Performance improves when leaders make the real problem visible. Not the polite problem. Not the board-friendly problem. The real one.

The pizza was not good enough. Say that out loud and suddenly a different kind of work becomes possible.

•   •   •

Burger King is trying to repair the system around the Whopper.

Burger King's turnaround is not identical to Domino's, but you can see the family resemblance.

Burger King still has powerful assets. The Whopper is iconic. Flame-grilling is distinctive. "Have it Your Way" remains one of the better expressions of customer choice in fast food history.

For years, Burger King's U.S. business struggled with tired restaurants, uneven execution, inconsistent guest experience and franchisee profitability challenges — a brand that seemed to know it had a rich inheritance, but not always why. The company's "Reclaim the Flame" plan, announced in 2022, put $400 million behind the turnaround: $150 million for advertising and digital, $250 million for restaurant technology, equipment, remodels and relocations. More than 93% of U.S. franchisees endorsed the plan. That’s critical because a franchised business cannot be transformed by memo.

A lazy diagnosis would say Burger King needed better advertising. A sharper diagnosis is that Burger King needed to make its inherited advantage work again.

The Whopper didn’t need to become something unrecognizable. It needed to arrive hot, intact and tasty. The restaurants didn’t need a brand refresh. They needed investment. Franchisees didn’t need another tranche of corporate platitudes. They needed economics that could support staffing, service and reinvestment. Employees didn’t need a poster about hospitality. They needed a store environment where hospitality was actually achievable.

This is where the Burger King story illustrates a core principle of The Performance Stack. The brand promise sits at the top. The operating conditions sit underneath. When the bottom is weak, the top becomes entirely a work of fiction.

•   •   •

Best Buy did not beat Amazon by pretending stores weren’t stores.

When Hubert Joly became CEO in 2012, Best Buy was widely assumed to be dying because of Amazon. Circuit City and Radio Shack were early casualties of Amazon’s dominance, and most believed Best Buy was next in line. Customers could visit a store, look at a product, ask questions, scan a barcode and buy it online somewhere else. This is called “showrooming” — a polite retail term for "thanks for the free labor."

The obvious answer was to see stores as a liability. Joly saw something different.

The stores weren’t the problem. The way Best Buy was leveraging the stores was.

Under Renew Blue, Best Buy price-matched competitors, invested in employees, repaired vendor relationships, strengthened Geek Squad, used stores as fulfillment infrastructure and turned physical retail into a place where customers could get advice, service, installation and confidence. Harvard Business School has described Joly's turnaround as rooted in human connection, purpose and partnership rather than a narrow cost-cutting exercise.

That is the reframe. Best Buy was not a weaker Amazon. Best Buy was a different kind of asset.

Amazon could sell you a television. Best Buy could help you understand which television to buy, see it, take it home, install it, connect it, fix it and explain why your remote now has 47 buttons, none of which appear to do the thing you need.

The turnaround worked because Joly refused to accept the market's frame. The market said: physical retail is dead. Joly asked: what can physical retail do that digital retail cannot?

That is strategy. Not a goal. Not a slogan. Not a 50-page deck called "Winning the Future."

A strategy. A way to turn the company's existing assets into an asymmetrical advantage.

•   •   •

The shared pattern.

Domino's, Burger King and Best Buy sit in different categories. But the pattern is remarkably consistent.

Each had an asset the market had started to discount. And in each case, the turnaround required a leader to do three things.

Tell the truth about the current condition. Domino's had to say the pizza was awful. Burger King had to acknowledge that its operational reality had fallen behind its promise. Best Buy had to face the fact that Amazon was not going to disappear because someone said "omnichannel" with conviction.

Reframe the company's assets. Domino's could become a technology-enabled delivery system with a better product at the center. Best Buy was not a doomed retailer — it was a human, physical, service-enabled infrastructure company hiding inside an electronics store. Burger King has a distinctive product and brand memory that can still succeed, if the execution catches up.

And third — the part leaders like to skip because it is slower, messier and harder to photograph — redesign the conditions that produced the experience.

Recipe reformulation. Kitchen execution. Store remodels. Franchisee economics. Employee training. Vendor partnerships. Pricing architecture. Digital infrastructure. Fulfillment networks. Service capability. Capital allocation.

That is where turnarounds are actually won. Not in the announcement. Not in the campaign. Not in the investor-day language. In the conditions.

•   •   •

Why leaders fix the wrong layer.

Here’s the trap.

When performance slips, leaders often assume they have a motivation problem, a messaging problem, or an accountability problem. The team needs to care more. The brand needs to be clearer. The managers need to hold people accountable. The campaign needs to be bolder and more memorable.

Sometimes that’s true. More often, it is not.

Often, the system is producing exactly what it has been designed to produce. The employee isn’t indifferent, the restaurant is understaffed. The store associate isn’t disengaged, the incentive model is wrong. The customer doesn’t hate the brand, the experience has become too inconsistent to trust. The product isn’t misunderstood. It’s actually mediocre.

That is the uncomfortable part. Because if the problem is motivation, the leader can give a speech. If the problem is messaging, the leader can hire an agency. If the problem is accountability, the leader can tighten the dashboard.

But if the problem is design, the leader has to change the system. That means choices. Capital. Tradeoffs. Patience. Discipline. Political will. Courage.

Far less fun than a new tagline.

•   •   •

The lesson.

The core thesis of The Performance Stack is that leaders do not get uncommon results by asking existing systems to try harder. They get uncommon results by designing the conditions that make better performance possible.

Domino's did not ask customers to reconsider the old pizza. It changed the pizza and the operating model around it. Burger King is not simply asking customers to remember the Whopper. It is trying to make the Whopper, the restaurant, the worker experience and the franchise economics worthy of remembering. Best Buy didn’t ask employees to out-hustle Amazon. It redesigned the role of stores, services, vendors and people in a way Amazon couldn’t easily replicate.

A leader's job is not to admire aspiration. It’s to inspect the conditions. What are we asking people to deliver? What does the system make easy? What does the system make hard? Where does the customer promise break down? Where do incentives contradict the stated strategy? Where are we compensating for bad design with heroic effort? Where are we calling something a people problem because we lack the understanding to recognize it a system problem?

Those questions are less glamorous than the turnaround mythology.

The easy story is that legacy organizations decline because they are old. Legacy organizations decline when they lose the ability to see their own assets clearly — when they mistake inheritance for advantage and preserve the visible symbols while neglecting the operating system that made those symbols matter in the first place.

A Whopper is not an advantage if the restaurant experience makes people regret ordering it. A store network is not an advantage if the stores are treated as expensive warehouses with annoying fluorescent lighting. A famous brand is not an advantage if the product underneath it has become an unfortunate meme.

But the reverse is also true. Legacy assets can become extraordinarily powerful when leaders redesign the conditions around them. Stores can become service infrastructure. A delivery brand can become a digital ordering machine. An old burger chain can become relevant again — if the execution catches up to the inheritance.

Not optimistic. Hopeful.

Optimism says everything will work out. Hope says the assets are still there, but someone still has to do the work.

Domino's did the work. Best Buy did the work. Burger King is still doing the work — and the jury is not fully back yet. McDonald's isn’t exactly waiting politely in the corner. Amazon didn’t stop being Amazon. Customers remain fickle, labor remains hard, input costs remain real and franchise systems are wicked hard to move at scale.

But that is exactly why these cases matter. They remind us that performance is not magic. It is not charisma. It is not narrative alone.

Performance is designed.

And when the design is wrong, even iconic brands begin to look ordinary. When the design is right — when leaders tell the truth, reframe the assets, and rebuild the conditions — ordinary systems can produce uncommon results.

That is the work. Not glamorous. Not easy.

But real. And real is where leadership has to start.