From Productism to Customerism: The Changes and Constancy of Starbucks' Corporate Culture

I have always insisted on a point of view is that corporate culture is not outside the business management of the enterprise "another set", corporate culture is generated in the business management activities, can also be said to be a "result" of the business management. Such a statement, in fact, comes from the basic viewpoint of the school of cultural function, that is, all cultures are "useful", because "useful" to slowly become a culture. If we look carefully, there are not a few cases of this in practice. Robert Kagan, Lisa Kagan, and others. Robert Kagan, Lisa Leahy and others in Robert Kegan, Lisa Leahy, and others, in their book "Culture for All: ODD in the Developmental Organization," refer to Greg Jensen, CEO of Bridgewater Hedge Fund, who said in response to a question from his firm about what was true, what was not, and what was not. Jensen, in response to their firm's authentic, transparent, and open corporate culture, says, "We don't think culture is a contributing factor to business success; we don't think it is a factor. In fact, we think culture is the cause of success. We are successful because of our culture, and we think culture itself is our business strategy. That's the whole answer."

"Culture itself is our business strategy" is a penetrating and "bold" statement, because very few companies in reality are as "transparent" and "honest" as Bridgewater. "and honesty" as Bridgewater. Recently, I read Starbucks founder Howard Schultz's Injecting the Heart: A Cup of Coffee to Achieve the Legend of Starbucks, and I saw some similar scenes.

First, a successful corporate team based on unique values and code of conduct

In 1987, Howard Schultz took over from the two founders of the weak Starbucks and turned it single-handedly into a world-class enterprise, and he believes that the success of Starbucks "proves that a company oriented towards the heart and soul of nature can still make money, and shows that a company in the heart and soul of nature can still make money. demonstrates that a company can make money without sacrificing respect for the core values of its employees while ensuring that its shareholders win over time". These are "values and norms that are rarely found in other American businesses," and Starbucks is able to do so because they have a leadership team that believes this is the right thing to do, and that it is the best way to run a business.

In business, Starbucks' basic strategy is to win customers with the best coffee, the best service, and the friendliest atmosphere; and to be the best in every market by competing fairly and with dignity and integrity. To do all this, it is necessary to create an exceptional workforce , so "Starbucks continues to attract and hire people who work together toward the same goals, who don't nestle and who enjoy the challenge of what others think is impossible to achieve". Howard Schultz said he wanted to create a corporate culture "in which individuals are not only fulfilled, but also respected and envied by others".

To this end, Starbucks put forward a "meaningful mission statement" and use these six principles to "help us determine the correctness of the company's decisions": first, to provide a perfect working environment and create mutual respect and trust in the workplace. First, to provide a great work environment and create an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust; second, to uphold diversity as an important principle of our business; third, to use the highest standards of sourcing, roasting, and providing the freshest coffee; fourth, to always meet the needs of our customers with a high degree of enthusiasm; fifth, to contribute positively to the community and the environment; and, sixth, to recognize that profitability is the foundation of our future success.

Here are the steps that led to Starbucks' mission statement:

Step 1: The senior management team reviewed and analyzed the company's values and beliefs, and drafted the mission statement in a retreat, "seeking to articulate a powerful message and translate it into a program of action that will guide us at every level as we review every decision we make.

Step 2: Send the draft to every Starbucks employee and ask them to revise it based on their comments, resulting in a mission statement that is "not an award that adorns the walls of our offices, but the substance of our beliefs; not a list of inspirations, but the foundation of the principles that we share to lead our business. It is not a list of inspirations, but a foundation of principles that we *** with to lead the development of the enterprise".

Step 3: Hire a consulting firm to create teams from coffee shops, offices, and factories, with participants selected from non-executives. They came together from their respective positions from time to time to discuss issues and make recommendations on management decisions, market expansion, and staff sizing.

Step 4: They insisted that it wasn't enough to write a mission statement and tell people about it; Starbucks needed a way to make sure it was implemented. So they proposed a "mission review" organization, in which every employee in every store would be encouraged to fill out a postcard-sized "review card". If they see that management is making decisions that are not in line with the mission statement, they can report them to the "mission review" organization.

For those of you familiar with the practice of building corporate culture, this fourth step is the real killer. That's why even someone as well-prepared as Howard Schultz said, "Most business executives are intimidated by this system, and so am I." "I listen to them and think: Do I really want employees to form such teams to oversee management as a way to improve our management? If I refuse, then what is the sincerity of management in having such a mission statement?" Interestingly, after much consideration, "we approved the proposal." The review continues to this day with Starbucks' mission statement:

Any employee in any department has the right to criticize any behavior that is inconsistent with this statement, and we have promised that the manager of the department in question must respond within two weeks, whether by phone or by mail. We print out "suggestion cards" for every new employee, including, of course, the forms that other companies issue. We receive hundreds of cards each year, and the person making the suggestion can leave his or her name off the card, but of course, the person who makes the suggestion without signing his or her name does not get a direct response. I read those recommendations carefully every month along with other reports. As the company has grown, Mission Review has become an important link between our diverse workforce. Each quarter, a team of people from each division of the company come together to discuss some of the issues that matter most to our employees, seek solutions, and present their reports to our Quarterly Public Forum. This process not only keeps the mission statement alive, but also provides an important avenue for open communication. This has resulted in many great recommendations being implemented.

To this day, after a long career in business management, Howard Schultz has learned that one of the greatest responsibilities of an entrepreneur is to infuse his business with his own values. It's like raising children, "You start this work with love and compassion, and if you infuse the right values into their hearts, when they grow into adults, they'll make responsible decisions." That's why he believes that no matter how big it grows, Starbucks' fundamental core values and ultimate goals are unlikely to change, and he believes that Starbucks will be able to maintain its passion, style, creativity, and individuality long after it becomes a major global corporation.

Of course, Howard Schultz understands that "it's easy to talk about values, but difficult to practice them, and even more difficult for an outsider to determine which ones come from the heart and which ones are window dressing". So how does Starbucks live up to its six mission statements? Below we analyze them slightly in relation to the three most important dimensions, namely products, customers and employees.

Second, productism: fixation on quality coffee and freshly roasted beans

Howard Schultz said, "Whether you're a parent or an entrepreneur, from day one you begin to put the imprint of your own beliefs on your child or your business, whether you realize it or not." This quote is right on the money and reminds us of Ben Horowitz's famous quote - what you do is what you "are". So what is Starbucks' "mark" on its products?

At the start of the company, Howard Schultz said, "If the art of espresso making, with its Italian romance and freshly roasted beans, can be brought to the United States, it is possible to revitalize an ancient commodity and appeal to thousands of people, just as it has appealed to me so strongly." Thus he believes that just as every company must stand for something, "Starbucks stands for not only great coffee, but for the deep processing method of roasting the beans to black that mesmerized the founders, and which makes the product transcendent and authentic." Based on this, he emphasizes: "The deep-roasted, fresh, pure flavor coffee beans are the touchstone of our business success or failure, our lifeblood, our spiritual wealth. No matter what we do, we will not buy cheap coffee beans, and what our customers enjoy at Starbucks will be quality coffee. We won't give up on deep roasting, and we won't contaminate our beans with chemicals and artificial additives." To summarize, by maintaining respect for the core product, customers can walk into any Starbucks store and get the best coffee in the world. Howard Schultz's book has two examples that validate the above point well.

The first example is that in 1994, the world went through a crisis of coffee bean price hikes, and Starbucks went through quite a long ordeal and paid a big price. Howard Schultz said that the decisions made during this extraordinary period never deviated from our purpose of "providing the best coffee". We could save millions of dollars a year by purchasing relatively inexpensive beans, and maybe only 10% of our customers would taste the difference. But if we compromise on this principle for the sake of higher profits, what do we gain? Eventually all our customers will see the compromise in quality, and there will be no reason for them to walk a few more blocks to our store. So he argues that "sacrificing quality for profit will only cause Starbucks people to hold their heads up for the rest of their lives, and that will be an irreparable shortcoming."

The second example is the story of Starbucks partnering with United Airlines to serve Starbucks coffee on airplanes. To ensure the quality of the coffee, we scrutinized every process - from the ingredient list to the grinding process to the water filtration system, said Howard Schultz. United Airlines has the best in-flight cooking equipment of any airline, but we found out that they wanted to replace their stainless steel utensils with cheaper plastics, and we compared the performance of the two in our cooking tests, measured the soluble content of solids in the different utensils, and asked them not to make that substitution, which they agreed to do. Additionally, Starbucks asked that United flight attendants be trained to not only know how to cook coffee and issues related to coffee preservation, but also to know Starbucks' history and values, so that all attendants would be able to answer relevant questions from passengers.

On his obsession with productivism, Howard Schultz said:

Whenever decisions are difficult or corporate bureaucracy is rampant, I take a walk to the founding store in Pike Place Market. I run my hands over the worn wooden counter, grab a handful of coffee beans roasted black, and let them glide gently through my fingers, leaving behind a faint aroma of grease. I keep reminding myself and those around me that we have a responsibility to those who have come through our doors to visit them.

We can innovate, and we can rediscover the full potential of our business, but the principles of Starbucks' great coffee, and its freshly roasted raw beans, remain the same. It is our spiritual property.

Third, customerism: the customer's requirements "to say yes"

The product is prepared for the customer, there is no problem. However, it is interesting that in the growth of many enterprises, productism tends to overshadow or even defeat customerism. That is, some companies will ultimately fail because they become obsessed with their products and ignore and disregard the needs of their customers, although in reality the opposite is more often true.

At Starbucks, this same issue continues to nag the leadership team. The world's finest Arakabi coffee beans, deep roast, freshness, and purity of flavor were the capital from which Starbucks got its start. Starbucks has always been guided by the principle of conditioning customers to receive the coffee they love, which has conflicted with the needs of more customers who have "come to us" during its growth, but whose "tastes are hard to match". So Starbucks has two beliefs that on the surface seem to be contradictory: one is that they believe that a business must be built on its most authentic product, which can only be better than what the customer wants. The other is that they believe in "just saying yes" to customer requests and that good retailers should break the mold to meet customer needs. Howard Schultz said, "The two values often collide violently, sometimes even in my own head". In the early years of Starbucks, they refused to bargain on things like refusing chain franchises, refusing artificially flavored coffee beans, and refusing to sell coffee beans in supermarkets.

The real break with Starbucks' culture of productivism and steering it toward customerism was initiated by another Howard - Howard? Bihar initiated. As president of Starbucks, Bihar began by pointing out that Starbucks was too product-oriented. Howard Schultz said, "That's the most valuable criticism of Starbucks and the harshest thing that can be said about it." Bihar proposed a two-pronged shift, emphasizing that it was the "people" who made the coffee, and that the "people" had a direct impact on the quality of the product and the quality of the service, and made the difference between Starbucks' success and failure, whereas the product was inanimate. Therefore, "must hire those outstanding people", "here are not just individuals coming and going, here is full of soul." The second shift is to move further toward a customer-centered philosophy; Bihar believes that Starbucks has focused so much on the quality of its coffee that it has sometimes overlooked the preferences of its customers. He encourages his partners to be bold and "just say yes" to customer requests. According to Bihar, "We should do whatever is moral, right, ethical, and whatever the customer likes.

At one point, Howard Schultz argued that Bihar's principles ran counter to Starbucks' long-established traditions. As a result, he opposed both the addition of flavor-enhancing syrups to lattes, and even more so, the addition of nonfat or skim milk to coffee. At the time, it was fashionable for Americans to avoid whole milk for health and weight reasons. However, Starbucks still felt that milk with milk fat has a more mellow flavor, will make the coffee taste more exciting, it and Starbucks coffee is a perfect match. So in terms of Starbucks' history, mentioning fat-free milk even signaled a betrayal, since their goal was to bring authentic Italian espresso to the United States.

Interestingly, the fat-free milk incident actually sparked one of the biggest heated debates in Starbucks' history: one of the staunchest defenders of the dogma told Bihar: "This is not about maintaining coffee quality, this is going to make it taste shitty, and we should stick to our own taste." "Are you crazy?" Bihar sneered back, "Of course we have to do everything in our power to make our customers happy!" The incident ended when Howard Schultz came into the store to observe and research, and made a decisive change when he saw that a woman who wanted a "double latte with nonfat milk" had been disappointed and left. In hindsight," he says, "that decision seemed like a no-brainer. But at the time, we weren't really sure if it was going to impact our brand and the way we've always done it. ------ An Italian will still go into a Starbucks store and ask for a real cappuccino, but another customer will ask for a nonfat vanilla mocha. ------ We have to make it clear that our customers are right to ask for what they want, and that it's our job to give them a variety of choices! ". So, over the next few years, "we moved further and further away from the dogma we had in the beginning. In addition to non-fat milk, customers could ask for vanilla or raspberry syrup to be added to their espresso, and we developed iced cream flavors and beer-on-ice specialty drinks".

Starbucks concluded from this that any company that is product-focused must innovate its core products, and can only do so if it wants its products to succeed and not just survive. For example, Intel, at the time, was phasing out an entire generation of personal computers every 18 months, replacing older products with newly developed Microsoft chips. Having resolved the narrow mindset of productivism, Starbucks made a lot of efforts to innovate and activate various elements of the coffee experience, such as store decorations, merchandising, espresso drinks, coffee preparation, and Jenn-Air CDs, and even brought in immunologists to start extracting coffee extracts. Schultz commented on the "coffee extract" said, this is far from espresso, this is far from immunology, but not far from the market.

Of course, Starbucks' continued product innovation has been opposed by coffee productivists. For example, in the case of Starbucks' partnership with PepsiCo, "coffee industry purists accused us of selling our soul."?

Fourth, make employees partners in the company

Whether it is to build a quality product or to provide quality service to customers, it is impossible to do without employees. On this point, Howard Schultz said, "The key is the heart. I give my heart to every cup of coffee, and to my partners at Starbucks. When customers feel that, they respond accordingly." In other words, satisfied employees are a prerequisite for product and customer service.

Tellingly, Howard Schultz's thoughts on employees came from the death of his father. For a long time before that, born into a poor Jewish family in Brooklyn, he often argued with his father over his lack of hard work and his inability to take on more family responsibilities. in January 1988, his father died. He said, "That was the saddest day of my life. He had no savings, no pension. Worst of all, he never gained human dignity or meaning in life from his work. When I was a kid, I didn't have it in my head that I would one day be the owner of a company, but I had it in my mind that if I ever got ahead, I would never let anyone else be reduced to such a state".

Perhaps, "must not let others fall to this kind of situation", become Howard Schultz continued to drive and willing to "with the staff for the good" of the original heart. When it comes to Starbucks' care for its employees, he says, "If there's one achievement at Starbucks that I'm most proud of doing, it's the atmosphere of confidence and mutual trust among our partners." "We have taken the unprecedented step of giving all of our partners a broad-based health insurance policy and offering stock options to each of them, even part-time partners. We give more respect to warehouse custodians and newbies than only senior management enjoys at other companies." These approaches, which run counter to traditional corporate business strategies, have led Starbucks partners to "take deep pride in their work, and very few of them jump ship. Our turnover rate is lower than the average for a typical business, which not only saves money, but also helps to enhance our relationship with our customers". Based on this Schultz believes that "if people connect themselves to the company they work for, invest their feelings and weave their dreams in it, they will gravitate to it and strive to make things better. When employees have confidence and dignity, they contribute more -- to the company, to their families, and to the world, although I didn't mean to do that in the first place."

The idea of offering a health care plan to employees came about when his father died, and he "wanted to do something to build that relationship of trust with the employees of Starbucks". At the time, the company wasn't profitable, so he wanted to reward employees in other ways. At the time, employees had made a request to have health benefits for part-time employees as well, but that request had previously been denied. Schultz suggested to the board that health insurance should cover part-time employees who worked more than 24 hours a week. When Starbucks executives expressed skepticism about this, he countered with the argument that on the surface it appeared that the company's costs had gone up, but if this could be used to reduce turnover, it would save money on training and hiring. The motion was later approved by the board for implementation.

Making employees partners in the company began in October 1990, Starbucks' first profitable year. The centerpiece of this effort was the introduction of a stock option program, "Coffee Bean Stock", which granted corporate stock to every employee company-wide, from the top leadership to the curry masters, split proportionally based on base salary. The implementation of this program turned all Starbucks employees into partners, Starbucks became a public company, their equity is a lot of money. 1991 August, Starbucks introduced this program to employees, and from that day on, Starbucks stopped using the word "employee", began to all the people in the company are called "partners". All Starbucks employees were called "partners", and anyone who worked for the company for more than six months was a legal equity holder. Even part-time partners, who work at least 20 hours a week, have the same rights.

How does a company stay afloat as it slowly gets bigger? How does a company provide an exciting and challenging atmosphere for its employees? This is the implementation of the "partner program" after the company's long-term consideration. Schultz said, if you can not do this, Starbucks will eventually become "a mediocre business", "I am determined not to let this happen.

What to do? Schultz said that the early partners of Starbucks, their work is motivated by the intimate atmosphere and *** with the goal of effort. So how, on the other hand, do you get 25,000 partners to feel intimate with the company now? Starbucks does it by giving its partners stock options on top of their hourly wages that are consistently higher than the industry average and benefits that are unrivaled in the industry. In addition, Starbucks has drafted a series of provisions to ensure the independence and status of partners, and in response to the partner's "mission review" set up an open forum for partners to communicate directly with management.

For example, every fall, Starbucks brings its U.S. and Canadian managers to Seattle for a leadership team meeting, where they meet in large and small groups. For example, each store has an e-mail address, called the "Starbucks Journal," in an effort to stay in touch with its retail partners. When the company has important news, Schultz sends voice messages to all partners. And so on.

Of course, Starbucks is not so "spoiled" to employees. For example, in 1996, Starbucks "mission statement" to add a declaration of diversity (the "Declaration" of the second). This "manifesto" set a higher standard for the multidirectionality and richness of the relationships between employees in the company. For example, there was a tendency for supervisors to be reluctant to point out the shortcomings and mistakes of their subordinates, so that the subordinates were shocked when they were eventually terminated. The new manifesto content advocates that the partner's deficiencies to be outspoken, so that people can make progress.

Fifth, "keep your voice"

Corporate culture has made Starbucks, but also Howard Schultz, so he regarded corporate culture as the company's most valuable resource, "If, over the next 20 years, Starbucks to our core values as the If, over the next 20 years, Starbucks were to achieve the massive expansion, strong presence and recognition we want at the cost of our core values, I'd be devastated". So how to retain such a corporate culture forever, Schultz's answer is: "Keep your voice."

This answer came from a time he watched a Beatles talk show where Paul? McCartney said of a concert in an open-air stadium, "It felt worse and worse when all those people were screaming at us," Paul said, "and it was great that they liked us, of course, but we couldn't hear ourselves sing anymore." So they've taken a break from touring ever since.

"It touched me y," said Howard Schultz, "and really hit home." When the Beatles' singers couldn't hear the music, they lost the point of making it themselves. "They had to go back to the recordings and find their voice again".

From this, Howard Schultz associated with Starbucks: when we want to concentrate on just one thing on a particular day, there will always be such and such trivialities and annoyances to stir up the trouble, resulting in us not always being able to focus on what we should really be doing. This situation is like musicians "not being able to hear the music". That's why, says Schultz, in the development of Starbucks, "if we lose our acumen and our accountability, if we start to feel like we can leave people behind when we climb to the top, I think we're actually failures. No matter how much noise there is around us, we have to make sure we still hear the sound of music." From this he laments and resolves:

In this age of moral vacuum, people yearn for their hearts to be touched by something, and to put it mildly it may just be a movie, a TV show, an evocative cup of coffee, but these are the very sounds that move in the midst of the loud and harsh din that surrounds us.

While five million people come to Starbucks every week and wait in line for what seems like a cup of espresso, when customers visit Starbucks several times a week, they want more than a cup of coffee - they want the feeling that the space gives them. Directly related to that feeling is the fact that, unlike some others, we don't give up hope that we can serve the public in a better way.