What I learned from starbucks…part III

On reading Howard Schultz’s book Pour your heart into it I gleaned a few more insights regarding Starbucks.

 People are not a line item
This one chapter explained for me the success of starbucks; Howard Schultz may have created a multinational monolith, but he has never lost his regard for the average worker trying to make ends meet. He realized that when people are expendable, working for minimum wage in a role not suited to them, with financial and relational pressures, they are far less effective in their role. More than that, he intuitively knew that people mattered and deserved to be treated with honour.His health care plan and support for those studying, battling terminal illness or working small hours fostered loyalty in employees and an internal ethos that refused to allow people to be treated as commodities (or maybe, refused to allow American people to be treated as commodities). While no on can argue that starbucks health care and student support is second to none in the US, it remains to be seen if Starbucks will embrace organics and fair trade as deeply as they have health care plans for their staff.A second motivational tool harnessed by Schultz to motivate employees was offering stock options to any employee who had been with the company for over 6 months. This connected even the most humble employees to the future of the company, and cultivated a sense of pride and depth of ownership that permeated the company from the CEO down. Health care and stock options for employees came at a high price; elevating the value of third-world lives to equal standing with American employees will no doubt create equal stress on the bottom line.The key lesson here might be that values matter; the more they cost to uphold, the deeper effect they will have.

Transition shifts ethos
I was struck by a brutal disconnect as I read Howard Schultz’s book; the starbucks he describes creating and shaping is markedly different from the starbucks I have experienced in the last 2 years. I found myself resonating highly with the values he espoused in his book, but found they didn’t actually translate to my experiences inside the very stores he described.This underscores one last point, perhaps the most important; transitions in leadership are crucial. A company can be founded on incredible principles and conduct itself with deep passion, yet once the founder of ethos moves on, the ethos of the company is under threat. Unless those who architect the initial ethos take considerable care in training others to maintain and shape the ethos, the internal values regress to the path of least resistance (or highest profit). In the case of starbucks, the new ethos could not be described as a healthy progression; plunging stock prices and the re-emergence of Schultz as CEO make this clear. Starbucks is clearly not what it was. It remains to be seen if the current transition can shift not only the bottom line, but also the ethos under which Starbucks operates.