Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul

by Howard Schultz

No business can do well for its shareholders without first doing well by all the people its business touches.

How could it be wrong to invest in our people?

That, as I've said, is what merchants do. We take something ordinary and infuse it with emotion and meaning, and then we tell its story over and over and over again, often without saying a word.

We believe that success is not an entitlement and that it has to be earned every day.

I was not as tied to a computer or a BlackBerry as so many others were. But I could not ignore what was happening around me.

Wow. These problems keep recurring on every generation, right? If Howard's generation has the Internet as their biggest challenge, I wonder what mine will be.

As one Starbucks partner expressed, it was as if we were running a race but no longer knew what we were running for.

This was the kind of operational rigor we let slip and then didn't attend to the subtle but negative cumulative effects, such as declining beverage quality, because every metric we were looking at said everything was fine.

Or "using the wrong metric", as Edmond Lau would say.

For the past two years in particular, we—and I say “we” because no one person had led the charge—chased the pace of growth by building stores as fast as we could rather than investing in sustainable growth opportunities.

Ah, the mistakes everyone do when they're looking for quick gains. I afraid this also applies to other industries as well.

During the past five-plus years, our new product offerings either had nothing to do with coffee or were simply line extensions rather than exciting ideas that had significant impact, such as Frappuccino and the Starbucks Card.

And to know they just made "Unicorn shake" instead of coffee a few months ago... what happened to Starbucks now?

We're numbers guys, and you're not giving us any numbers.”

Which is true, because that's why they bother putting their money to your company - to gain more money.

About how knowledge can breed passion.

Boy this is true. I have experienced this.

But the news would, I felt, be more appreciated if it came from someone else.

Of course - there's a chance their marketing campaign will look like a bragging attempt to the consumer.

Like other partners who had helped build Starbucks from its infancy, Arthur took the transformation very personally, and when he came back he did so with a vengeance.

Oh, how great it is to have business partners who driven by the same vision!