ONWARD: How Starbucks fought for its Life without losing its soul

Why you should read this book?

This is a must-read book for anyone interested in leadership, management, or the quest to connect a brand with the consumer.
In this personal, suspenseful, and surprisingly open account, Schultz traces his own journey to help Starbucks reclaim its original customer-centric values and mission while aggressively innovating and embracing the changing landscape of technology. From the famous leaked memo that exposed his criticisms of Starbucks to new product strategies and rollouts, Schultz bares all about the painful yet often exhilarating steps he had to take to turn the company around.

The book is an inspiring story of how Howard and Starbucks built a circle of safety around their partners (or employees in other organisations) and rebuilt trust, belief and love across a huge, multinational organisation – and the benefits that this has on the company, and more importantly, those that come into contact with the company (their partners, suppliers, customers, etc.)

There are moments in our lives when we summon the courage to make choices that go against reason, against common sense and the wise counsel of people we trust. But we lean forward nonetheless because, despite all risks and rational argument, we believe that the path we are choosing is the right and best thing to do. We refuse to be bystanders, even if we do not know exactly where our actions will lead. This is the kind of passionate conviction that sparks romances, wins battles, and drives people to pursue dreams others wouldn't dare. Belief in ourselves and in what is right catapults us over hurdles, and our lives unfold.

“Life is a sum of all your choices,” wrote Albert Camus. 
Large or small, our actions forge our futures, hopefully inspiring others along the way.
Entrepreneurs must love what they do to such a degree that doing it is worth sacrifice and, at times, pain. But doing anything else, we think, would be unimaginable.
So when some refer to Starbucks’ coffee as an affordable luxury, I think to myself, Maybe so. But more accurate, I like to think, is that the Starbucks Experience—personal connection—is an affordable necessity. We are all hungry for community. Our intent to create a unique community inside the company as well as in our stores has, I think, separated us from most other retailers. Starbucks has always cared about what the customer can and cannot see. Ever since I had been with the company, we had banned smoking and asked partners not to wear perfume or cologne to preserve the coffee aroma. It is perhaps the most sensory aspect of our brand, and it reinforces the core of who we are: purveyors of the world's highest-quality coffees. The unique sights, smells, and charms that Starbucks introduced into the marketplace define our brand. If coffee and people are our core, the overall experience is our soul.

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.
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. 

So many companies fail. Not because of challenges in the marketplace, but because of challenges on the inside.

Like a doctor who measures a patient's height and weight every year without checking blood pressure or heart rate, Starbucks was not diagnosing itself at a level of detail that would help ensure its long-term health. We predicated future success on how many stores we opened, not from how each store was performing.

During a quarter instead of taking the time to determine whether each of those stores would, in fact, be profitable. We thought in terms of millions of customers and thousands of stores instead of one customer, one partner, and one cup of coffee at a time. With such a mind-set, many little things dangerously slipped by unnoticed, or at least went unacknowledged. How could one imperfect cup of coffee, one unqualified manager, or one poorly located store matter when millions of cups of coffee were being served in tens of thousands of stores?

“When you start a business, you do not operate from a lofty place, because you cannot afford to,” I explained to a roomful of our top leaders one day. “It is so vitally important that we get back to the roots of the business, that we get back in the mud,” I declared spontaneously. “Get our hands in the mud!” I literally pleaded, holding my hands out in front of me. I held on to this analogy because it made so much sense, and from that day on I repeated it over and over and over, to people at every level.

The Starbucks mission: To inspire and nurture the human spirit one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.
The only reason our partners can make our customers feel good is because of how our partners feel about the company. Proud. Inspired. Appreciated. Cared for. Respected. Connected.
Starbucks’ coffee is exceptional, yes, but emotional connection is our true value proposition.

Howard has always believed that innovation is about rethinking the nature of relationships, not just rethinking products,
More important than customers’ ideas would be the discussions that followed. Each idea was a door, an opening line for conversations on topics our customers cared about, like recycling or low-fat food. By using suggestions as opportunities to learn from and inform our customers, the new website would be more than a mere one-way suggestion box; instead, it would be a genuine opportunity to connect.

“Protect and preserve your core customers,” he told our marketing team when I invited him to speak to us. “The cost of losing your core customers and trying to get them back during a down economy will be much greater than the cost of investing in them and trying to keep them.”

Among the themes that began to emerge were, one, an increasing desire for value—people wanted more for their money—and two, loyal customers wanted to be rewarded for their frequent purchases.

Building a great, enduring company requires thoughtfulness and, at times, the courage to make very difficult decisions.

“Onward” implied optimism with eyes wide open, a never-ending journey that honored the past while reinventing the future. “Onward” meant fighting with not just heart and hope, but also intelligence and operational rigor, constantly striving to balance benevolence with accountability. “Onward” was about forging ahead with steadfast belief in ourselves while putting customers’ needs first and respecting the power of competition.
“Onward” was about getting dirty but coming out clean; balancing our responsibility to shareholders with social conscience; juggling research and finances with instinct and humanity. And “onward” described the fragile act of balancing by which Starbucks would survive our crucible and thrive beyond it. With heads held high but feet firmly planted in reality. This was how we would win.

Finding a balance between Starbucks’ fiscal responsibilities and our responsibilities to live up to our partners’ expectations was more art than science, an ongoing struggle that prompted debate almost every time we sat down to talk about specific cuts.

During this period, the most important steps business leaders could take were to put our feet in the shoes of our customers, listen to our advisors as well as our own intuition, and refuse to surrender our core values.

Innovation, as I had often said, is not only about rethinking products, but also rethinking the nature of relationships. When it came to our customers, connecting with them in a store and online did not have to be mutually exclusive experiences. Figuring out exactly how the retail and virtual worlds might coexist would be a matter of connecting the dots,

"Grow with discipline. Balance intuition with rigor. Innovate around the core. Don't embrace the status quo. Find new ways to see. Never expect a silver bullet. Get your hands dirty. Listen with empathy and overcommunicate with transparency. Tell your story, refusing to let others define you. Use authentic experiences to inspire. Stick to your values, they are your foundation. Hold people accountable but give them the tools to succeed. Make the tough choices; it's how you execute that counts. Be decisive in times of crisis. Be nimble. Find truth in trials and lessons in mistakes. Be responsible for what you see, hear, and do. Believe."

The story about the transformation of Starbucks illustrates the clear benefits of putting the purpose, mission and vision of the organisation (or team) at the heart of all your decisions – and then letting this be your guiding star for everything that you do – and it gives you some brilliant ideas about how you can do the same thing.