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In the office, he had a habit of stopping one-hour meetings after 45 minutes and telling partners to use their extra 15 minutes to call someone they usually did not contact every day.
In Paris, one of my favorite places to visit is Colette, a spectacular three-floor specialty store that is owned and operated by a mother-daughter team. Colette delights customers with its whimsical collection of high-end, hard-to-find items from all over the world. Books. Sneakers. Toys. There is even a bar that serves 100 different bottled waters! The owners are curators, and shopping Colette is an adventure in discovery.
Now, after skimming the news before 6 a.m., I'd make calls to our overseas offices, read e-mails from partners—hundreds were streaming in with suggestions and observations about the business—and then sit back to consider what I needed to do that day to be as productive as possible and have the most impact on the business. I asked Nancy to be very discriminating with my schedule, and it helped that I'd shed outside distractions, such as my corporate board positions.
Only 3 percent of the world's highest-quality arabica beans are good enough to make it into one of our burlap bags.
was about time Starbucks acknowledged our most loyal customers.
Starbucks is not a coffee company that serves people. It is a people company that serves coffee, and human behavior is much more challenging to change than any muffin recipe or marketing strategy.
It was right for and engaged our partners. It was right for and met the needs of our customers. And it was right for the business.
we had adhered to a simple yet ambitious economic model: a sales-to-investment ratio of two to one. During a Starbucks store's first year in business, it needed to bring in $2 for every $1 invested to build it.
Success is not sustainable if it's defined by how big you become. Large numbers that once captivated me—40,000 stores!—are not what matter. The only number that matters is “one.” One cup. One customer. One partner. One experience at a time. We had to get back to what mattered most.
The company does not make investments in health coverage and ethically source our coffee because these things are “cool.” They are the right ways to conduct business.
I'd brashly embraced Sorbetto as a silver bullet. But there is no such thing. Not growing our store count. Not new coffee blends. Not loyalty or value programs. Not healthier foods and drinks.
“Just get products to stores” was the mandate—that it did not have the time to properly invest in the discipline and competency that building a world-class supply chain requires.
“This is my little escape,” he said he had finally told his wife. “You just have to allow me that.”
The city lost well over 100,000 trees, and when the storm was over, the physical destruction it left amounted to 37 years worth of garbage, all generated in one day.
In retrospect, I realize that the ferocity of my reaction to the breakfast sandwich was likely heightened by my frustration with other shortcomings at the company. More emblematic than problematic, the sandwich turned out to be among the least of Starbucks’ ills. But like so many other things we had dealt with in the past year, we had turned the sandwiches around and learned from the experience how to improve the business.
I want to write pages that have their own poetics about the things I make or do, but at the same time I want them to be like the pages of a manual, down-to-earth instructions, exact and useful information about our job. It is a job that has been transformed with the passing of time and yet it has remained the same.
