I just finished the book Onward by Starbucks CEO and President Howard Schultz co-authored by Joanne Gordon detailing Starbucks’s remarkable turnaround from several years of failed rapid growth preceding the recession that resulted in about 600 stores closing amidst the recession, and most of them were opened only 18 months prior! Starbucks Corporation has over 14,000 stores worldwide. It raked in $11.7 billion in revenues and $2.4 billion in earnings. Its increasing global presence is leading the company toward a newly reinvigorated growth model. But Starbucks was in trouble in 2007. It was growing too fast. It wasn’t meeting its financial metrics; same store sales were on a sustained decline. Massive promotional and pricing campaigns from competitors such as McDonald and Dunkin’ Donuts threatened Starbucks’s customer base. Columnists as-a-matter-of-fact-ly voiced against the indulgence of “$4 latte” in bad economic times. Against great odds to regain organizational and market confidence, Howard Schultz returned to Starbucks in 2008 knowing that he 1) could not simply dwell on the past; innovation is a must; and 2) there is no time for throwing blames; instilling confidence will be his #1 priority. With this mindset, Schultz rolled up his sleeves and went to work, on something that is only second to his family in terms of importance and love. 

What I came away from the reading is an inescapable appreciation for this man’s love and passion for his job, and the company he has built 40 years ago. Starbucks means the world to him. There is a soulful connection he has made with the readers acting almost as an excited kid showing off a magic trick he has pulled off in the last two years. “Magic” was cited by Schultz as the impetus that drove his entrepreneurial spirit, for “as a boy at the Horn & Hardart Automats in New York City, where I [Schultz] was amazed by the ‘magically’ reappearing food. Even at a young age, I began to realize what it means to be a merchant.’” Some of Schultz’s qualities strike me as notable mini-lessons on leadership: 

• His attention to details (Founder’s Conviction): reteach all Starbucks baristas on how to steam a perfect cup of espresso through a nationwide training video, commitment to get rid of the foul smell of burnt cheese in the oven from overtaking the natural coffee aroma in the stores, baristas’ ability to make eye contact with customers over the brewing machine, etc.
• His every effort to connect with customers and to bring coffee to life (Relevance): implementing Starbucks Rewards program, asking leadership to redesign Starbucks stores, using social media, commit Starbucks to community service, utilizing crowdsourcing through MyStarbucksIdea.com, and constantly innovating – rolling out Pike Place Roast and VIA to revitalize Starbucks’s core competency.
• His repetitive emphasis for Starbucks to be about people (Soul): ethically sourcing coffee throughout the Starbucks supply chain – leading the industry as the number one buyer of Fairtrade-certified coffee, never let go the “sacred cow” that is the comprehensive health care package that all Starbucks partners and baristas enjoy, his conviction to improve the company morale and culture through a large scale leadership conference for 10,000 Starbucks partners and managers in New Orleans, his leading effort to build more farmer support centers in East Africa to allow coffee growers to increase their productivity yield, thus more money in their pockets, etc. 

Howard Schultz wrote this book with much humility and humanity with little corporate pretense. From time to time, you can pick up on his disdain toward the financial guys, the Wall Street people, who do not understand what Starbucks is all about. As part of the Transformation Agenda he and his team drafted to turnaround Starbucks, the new bold mission for the company reads: “To inspire and nurture the human spirit one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time” The number 40,000 – the desired number of stores Starbucks would have liked worldwide – used to intrigue Schultz, but then he realized that number would not mean anything without the focus of one. Going back to an earlier post I wrote, Starbucks epitomizes the kind of 21st century corporate responsibility model that multinational firms need to adopt, in which the leadership puts a human dimension on corporate success, where profits come with social responsibility for the very people and communities affected by the business.

Schultz’s renewed emphasis on customer service, on human connection, on constantly refining and improving Starbucks’s value proposition made him an admirable 2nd timer CEO who righted his ship of enterprise and steered it toward financial stability and regained the trust of its own people and consumers at large. An amazing documentary narrative and memoir worth reading. I would recommend Onward to anyone who looks to be inspired by organizational leadership, love, passion, conviction, decision making, and effective communication in uncertain times. This book serves as a valuable, personal inspirational piece examining these topics through the eyes of a CEO who is leading one of the most resilient and innovative beverage corporations in the world. 

“Despite the flatlined economy, the art market has been roaring. In the first half of this year, total worldwide art sales hit a record of €4.3 billion ($5.8 billion), up 34 percent from 2010, according to the French Web site Artprice.com” (Blake Gopnick 2011 Newsweek). People like to talk about the “culture value of money” these days. What does that mean? On its surface, it’s almost a paradox. Are 1% capitalists and Wall Street billionaires – you know those CEOs who fly into Manhattan every morning in helicopters, and fly across continental U.S every weekend to go to their weekend home in Malibu to dine and wine with the Hollywood and Silicon Valley stars? – destroying the true value of art by throwing money at it? Remember the $100 million Picasso from a couple years ago? What about the million plus Warhol pieces? As suggested by the article, there is an increasing interest from new “artigarchs” from the BRIC countries who are experiencing the post-capitalist pleasure of collecting art works, perhaps due to a heightened appreciation for a piece of humanity? It always intrigues me how much people are willing to “invest” heavily in art works. How does one even acquire the taste of putting that much money in one art work? (If it is not practiced in the family already #newaristorcracy) It strikes me as if at one point in a person’s life, one has to feel connected to humanity in one way or another, given that their material needs have been met. A discussion with a friend earlier today prompts me to think about whether economics is the basis of society or association/community? (perhaps this is a false dichotomy…) Are we more concerned about a sense of belonging and association with others than economic needs? Or is it the other way around? I have no answer to that; but I think how we answer this question can provide a partial answer to the mentality of “artigarch.” It appears that these folks have made so much money in their life that they are now investing in the “culture value of money,” looking past the traditional role of money as a medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account (Econ 101) for something bigger than themselves – and their wealth. Perhaps if we approach capitalism and market with similar “cultural” considerations, then the whole debate/dichotomy between money and humanity may collapse, and the so-called “social responsibility” component of capitalism or capitalism 2.0 vis-a-vis Bill Gates may then serve to mediate the tensions between the two philosophical camps. One can hope that one day, just maybe, “investing” in art – $20 at a local art work fair, $50 at an antique store, $19 from eBay and Amazon – will become a societal norm of using earned money to appreciate culture and humanity, promote creativity, and even bring together communities. Art appreciation does not need to be a 1% hobby; it can be integrated into the 99% lifestyle because what is art but a piece of human expression created by a fellow human being?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/galleries/2011/12/04/five-highly-touted-artists-whose-works-are-lousy-investments.html#slide4

shortformblog:

Edward Munch’s iconic “The Scream” sells for $119.9 million: We’re with you, freaked-out screaming guy.

iheartmyart:

Veronique Meignaud, Globe, 2012

With the new Titanic 3D out in the theater, how great it is for this guy is trying to reconstruct Titanic! This time with a Chinese shipbuilding firm. O how the time has changed…When my parents first watched the Titanic back in the 90s in the living room, I failed to appreciate the movie – i don’t think I even finished watching it. The scene with Rose sensually laying across a luxurious-looking couch was simply too R-rated for my innocent 7/8-year-old eyes. Ewww! (And now I know why…) The mystique of Titanic and its tragic story caputured my mind in Ms. Burrows’s 6th Grade Language Arts class. We spend six weeks studying Titanic. We all kept a journal. I still remember getting extra credit for printing off “beautiful pictures” (courtesy of Google images) of an – get ready – and iceberg (!) and glued them to one of the pages. School was challenging back then. I also remember reading the book SOS Titanic by Eve Bunting, a readable, riveting novella detailing the maiden voyage of this luxury liner. To me, Titanic has been a timeless classic not because Hollywood has created a love story out of this tragedy, but because Titanic itself, the “unsinkable,” serves as a reminder that human ego needs to be constrained. When we are granted luxury, we take normal things for granted. When we think we have built a Titanic, we believe life boats are extraneous. More than 1500 people drowned in the freezing water that unfortunate April night back in 1912. The lesson from Titanic is humility. If only had Titanic prepared enough life boats for all passengers, if only had the Titanic crew been more well trained on emergency evacuation procedures, wouldn’t more lives been saved in the end? Takeaway: we need to strive to practice humility in our lives too so we don’t find ourselves stranded in the middle of nowhere in the vast Atlantic with nothing to fall back on but to subject ourselves to the force of nature.

shortformblog:

thedailywhat:

Titanic 2 of the Day: Because the maiden voyage of the R.M.S. Titanic didn’t exactly go as planned, an Australian billionaire has commissioned a replica of the ship for a series of journeys that will hopefully have a happier ending.

Clive Palmer, a Queensland-based mining billionaire, is partnering with China’s CSC Jinling Shipyard to build the ship, which will be ready for passengers by 2016.

“It will be every bit as luxurious as the original Titanic but of course it will have state-of-the-art 21st century technology and the latest navigation and safety systems,” he said in a statement.

The ship’s first trip will be from London to New York — rather than from Southampton to New York like the “unsinkable” original — and Palmer admits that some potential passengers will stay away because of superstitions.

“It is going to be designed so it won’t sink. But, of course, if you are superstitious like you are, you never know what could happen,” he said, encouragingly.

No word on what kind of deck chairs the new ship will have, or how they’ll be arranged.

[cnn.]

In which a titan of industry tries to become a Titanic of industry.

A New Beginning