From Publishers Weekly
After a working life spent building Starbucks from a chain of 28 stores to an international coffee business through positions such as executive vice president of sales, founding president of Starbucks International and president of Starbucks North America, Howard Behar tells of the strategies he used to establish the business into the success it is today. Behar shares the soft skills that helped to construct the company from a regional outlet to a corporation with international reach. While the book occasionally brings in examples from other companies, sharing anecdotes from Starbucks itself is Behar’s strong suit. The most interesting sections involve stories behind products readers may know from their o [Read More...]
Buy It’s Not About the Coffee: Leadership Principles from a Life at Starbucks at Amazon
Cool Things Beyond Coffee: Mouse click here to know more about cnn.
September 20th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Well, Starbucks has to be about its coffee at some level (and the book admits it on page xiii). For heaven’s sake they sure make a big fuss about it, right? In any case, I am not a real Starbucks customer because I don’t drink coffee, they don’t serve soda, and I think their pastries have no flavor (but they look nice). That being said, I like this book even if it is another in the many books trying to catch some of the glow in the success of Starbucks. Behar at least has the credibility of actually having led a good chunk of the growth.
The book is about getting your core understanding of yourself just right and having people centered values. Howard Behar joined Starbucks in 1989 and was named its President in 1995 and retired in 2003. In this book he lists ten principles and then discusses each in its own chapter (plus an introduction). They are:
1) Know who you are
Face challenge
2) Know why you’re here
3) Think independently
4) Build trust
5) Listen for the truth
6) Be accountable
7) Take action
9) Practice leadership
10) Dare to dream
While these seem awfully like light fluffy clouds in a list like this, the chapters do flesh them out in ways that will help you get at why a serious man like Behar believes in them. Really, it comes down to how you work with people. You cannot run a business of any size by yourself and in order to work with people and earn their trust you first have to know something about yourself. Once you have a solid core with serious values you actually live by, you can then reach out and lead others because you are worth following.
This is a helpful and concise book and if you appreciate reading about principles for self-development, this will be a book you enjoy.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
September 20th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
I respect, though do not agree with Lloyd Eskildson’s review. While the review was deeply thoughtful and wordy, the underlying fact is, that the book is about the author’s people skills, not about current market fluctuations which occur in every industry known to man. The author is not professing his beloved Starbuck’s will rise through the likes of a nuclear explosion - which is seemingly where you expect a business to go -my goodness. The review was snobby at best.
Way back down here on earth, the real-life day-to-day operations within a company are complex at best, and accounts of these experiences must be given more credit than to call them “surface” and “misleading”. They are called books because they are TINY WINDOWS into the life of an author. Why do I understand this? Because of extended, sometimes painful experience - I can read “behind” the wording and envision the type of conversations going on when he ‘appears’ to be surface-writing. Only someone with more corporate experience than time spent in a library, would understand this.
That being said, the book is a magnificent tool to change a very trendy and highly disturbing trend in American business - complacency. When business is ‘all about me’ (the birthplace of complacency in my opinion), it declines. Without mentioning names, I will say with ferver and focused passion, that there are only a handful who really understand how to avoid the ‘all about me’ syndrome, which the majority of business owners fall into quite readily. More times than not, giving a person the keys to their own business is like a lamb being led to slaughter when it comes to personality change. There grows within the concept of being a C.E.O., a need to self-serve for the sake of who’s watching. Peer pressure at this level is magnificent and largely a waste of precious time and energy. I roll my eyes at it, out of pure boredom and silliness of the game because I simply haven’t time for caring if my social and physical accessories are up to par with the Jones family.
What the author has done here is level the playing field - and not out of disrespect for the office he honors. He understands ‘how’ to wear his hat and how to let others wear theirs. Nothing is more damaging to a company than to not understand this. It’s an excellent book and should not be missed by anyone wanting an edge in their business. I highly recommend it.
September 21st, 2009 at 2:01 am
The problem with most of the books written about Starbucks is they lack a caffeine jolt! Howard Behar’s book falls into this trap. Yes, it does contain some interesting (though few if any) new nuggets.
The best book on Starbucks continues to be Pour Your Heart Into It by Chairman Howard Schultz who essentially wrote about the same concepts as Behar, but in an interesting and lively manner.
Schultz and Behar are master business people. Schultz is also a masterful, inspirational story teller, as anyone who has seen him give a keynote speech will testify
Behar takes the reader through ten business concepts, all of which make good sense but few of them are illustrated in anything but a general way. Combine this with multiple sub-concepts and you have a book that fails to be a page turner. Some of the concepts are downright trite e.g. celebrate failures, which he admits Starbucks doesn’t do either!
Despite its current problems, Starbucks has done so many things so well that it should be studied by business people. Thus taking any of Behar’s ten concepts and implementing them in your business might well be worth trying. Implement them though with passion which is probably what this book is missing.