Onward by Howard Schultz, Joanne Lesley Gordon Page A
Authors: Howard Schultz, Joanne Lesley Gordon
Tags: Non-Fiction
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leaders. Both Jim and I had good intentions and similar goals, but differing opinions about how to achieve them. Removing the sandwiches would have cost the company sales and customer loyalty. I was willing to trade some short-term pain for longer-term gain. Jim and others were not.
My adamant stance was admittedly dispiriting for partners in our food department who had worked for years to create the new food offerings. Months of planning, research, and testing had gone into the sandwiches’ development, including hundreds of hours trying to minimize the smells of sausage, bacon, and, of course, burnt cheese. At one point, an “aroma task force” was pulled together as the team wrestled to eliminate the offending smells.
They experimented with different ovens.
They retrained baristas to clean the ovens more often.
They replaced the parchment paper that held the sandwiches.
Cook times were narrowed to prevent dripping cheese.
Manufacturers were asked to rework their ovens’ vents to keep aromas from entering the air, and our own operations people tried to improve the stores’ heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems to pull odors from the air.
Nothing seemed to work.
Internal disagreement about the sandwiches’ benefit to Starbucks as a business—versus their detriment to Starbucks as a brand—continued to heighten tensions within the company's most senior ranks. The debatewas as divisive as the memo. Maybe even more so. The question at hand was whether the company should follow customer data or my intuitive sense. At the time, I was not interested in finding a compromise.
Adding to my frustration was the reality that the sandwiches were not alone in detracting from our stores’ essence. There was also the loss of coffee aroma, the resteaming of milk, the too-tall espresso machines. The list was getting longer. Such negative incrementalization, like one thread after another pulling at our seams, could be the company's undoing.
I saw it. I felt it. I could not ignore it.
A founder's perspective is unique.
Entrepreneurs are builders, and the lens through which I view Starbucks and the marketplace is somewhat different from what it would be if I were a professionally schooled manager.
Such a lens, however, has its strengths and weaknesses.
On the plus side, founders know every brick in the foundation. We know what inspired the company and what was required to create it. That knowledge, that history, brings with it a high level of passion to do whatever it takes to succeed, as well as an intuition about what is right and what is wrong.
But sometimes we are too close to a situation. Entrepreneurs can be blinded by emotion, by our love of what we have built, unable to see it fresh and with the eyes of a more objective outsider.
Whether I was right or wrong about the sandwiches was less telling than my obsession with removing them, which was a manifestation of my mounting frustration. Twenty years after purchasing Starbucks, I felt like a former captain who could sense his ship slowly sinking. In a knee-jerk attempt to keep us afloat, I pushed to eradicate the sandwiches from our menu. But my efforts were only a gasping attempt to plug one hole when, in reality, there were so many other holes bringing us down.
By the fall of 2007, six months after I wrote the memo, I did not think anything substantial had changed inside the company or in our stores. Day by day my disappointment edged toward anger, and at times fear, that Starbucks was losing its chance to get back the magic. That's when I began to seriously consider if the time had come for me to return as ceo.
Chapter 6
Loyalty
I still remember what it was like when we started building the company. Every day we were fighting for survival, doing whatever we had to do. We rolled up our sleeves and left our egos at the door. Every small gesture mattered, and so
My adamant stance was admittedly dispiriting for partners in our food department who had worked for years to create the new food offerings. Months of planning, research, and testing had gone into the sandwiches’ development, including hundreds of hours trying to minimize the smells of sausage, bacon, and, of course, burnt cheese. At one point, an “aroma task force” was pulled together as the team wrestled to eliminate the offending smells.
They experimented with different ovens.
They retrained baristas to clean the ovens more often.
They replaced the parchment paper that held the sandwiches.
Cook times were narrowed to prevent dripping cheese.
Manufacturers were asked to rework their ovens’ vents to keep aromas from entering the air, and our own operations people tried to improve the stores’ heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems to pull odors from the air.
Nothing seemed to work.
Internal disagreement about the sandwiches’ benefit to Starbucks as a business—versus their detriment to Starbucks as a brand—continued to heighten tensions within the company's most senior ranks. The debatewas as divisive as the memo. Maybe even more so. The question at hand was whether the company should follow customer data or my intuitive sense. At the time, I was not interested in finding a compromise.
Adding to my frustration was the reality that the sandwiches were not alone in detracting from our stores’ essence. There was also the loss of coffee aroma, the resteaming of milk, the too-tall espresso machines. The list was getting longer. Such negative incrementalization, like one thread after another pulling at our seams, could be the company's undoing.
I saw it. I felt it. I could not ignore it.
A founder's perspective is unique.
Entrepreneurs are builders, and the lens through which I view Starbucks and the marketplace is somewhat different from what it would be if I were a professionally schooled manager.
Such a lens, however, has its strengths and weaknesses.
On the plus side, founders know every brick in the foundation. We know what inspired the company and what was required to create it. That knowledge, that history, brings with it a high level of passion to do whatever it takes to succeed, as well as an intuition about what is right and what is wrong.
But sometimes we are too close to a situation. Entrepreneurs can be blinded by emotion, by our love of what we have built, unable to see it fresh and with the eyes of a more objective outsider.
Whether I was right or wrong about the sandwiches was less telling than my obsession with removing them, which was a manifestation of my mounting frustration. Twenty years after purchasing Starbucks, I felt like a former captain who could sense his ship slowly sinking. In a knee-jerk attempt to keep us afloat, I pushed to eradicate the sandwiches from our menu. But my efforts were only a gasping attempt to plug one hole when, in reality, there were so many other holes bringing us down.
By the fall of 2007, six months after I wrote the memo, I did not think anything substantial had changed inside the company or in our stores. Day by day my disappointment edged toward anger, and at times fear, that Starbucks was losing its chance to get back the magic. That's when I began to seriously consider if the time had come for me to return as ceo.
Chapter 6
Loyalty
I still remember what it was like when we started building the company. Every day we were fighting for survival, doing whatever we had to do. We rolled up our sleeves and left our egos at the door. Every small gesture mattered, and so
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