Sunday, August 2, 2009

Book Report: Pour Your Heart Into It

I suspect it's far more interesting to read this book today with 20/20 hindsight than it would have been when it was originally published about 10 years ago. Howard Schultz (CEO of Starbucks) penned this as the Starbucks brand was peaking. The book provides an interesting history of the company from birth to several years after their IPO, but indulges in a decent amount of "we did a kick ass job." We can all agree that the Starbucks team created an incredibly memorable brand that will sustain over the long haul, but it's meaning today is very disconnected from the vision Howard Schultz puts forth in the book.

To his credit, Howard writes candidly about the company's struggle to keep Starbucks grounded in it's premium coffee roots while trying to reach an ever more mainstream audience. At one important turning point in the company's early history, an influential member of the executive team succeeded in pushing the company towards a customer focus (as opposed to a product focus). This brings up an interesting question for all CEOs, should you be in the business of providing whatever a customer says they need? People like fats, sugars, and salts so if you're a food service organization should you load up your products with those things? It's an interesting question and one that pulls at the tension between delivering to your customer something you believe in vs something they'd happily buy. Howard laments the idea that anyone would ever compare Starbucks to McDonalds, yet today the two companies are now tellingly locked in a marketing battle. How do you stay true to your core while still continuing to meet the demands of Wall Street for eternal growth? 

Other books I've read recently...

Lives of Ants - Yes an odd choice for me, but an okay survey of the ant species. Not that exciting of a read, but I'll leave you with two fun takeaways: there are ant species that raise livestock (aphids) and others that raise crops (fungi). Crazy!

The Language Instinct - Pretty interesting (key elements of language are innate, children without language can create new full featured languages, theory of a universal system underlying all languages), but Pinker dives too deep and the book gets very technical and ultimately boring. I ended up skipping around and didn't reading everything...