At Starbucks, the coffee has to be excellent, from the sourcing and growing to the roasting and brewing. The vision has to be inspiring and meaningful. Our finances have to be in order. But without people, we have nothing. With people, we have something even bigger than coffee.
During his many years as a senior executive at Starbucks, Howard Behar helped establish the Starbucks culture, which stresses the importance of people over profits. He coached hundreds of leaders at every level and helped the company grow into a world-renowned brand. Now he reveals the ten principles that guided his leadership and not one of them is about coffee.
Behar starts with the idea that if you regard employees and customers as human beings, everything else will take care of itself. If you think of your staff as people (not labour costs) they will achieve results beyond what is thought possible. And if you think of your customers as people you serve (not sources of revenue) you all make a deep connection with them, and they all come back over and over.
This approach has been integral to Starbucks from the start, and remains so today. Behar shares inside stories of turning points in the company's history as it fought to hang on to this culture while growing exponentially.
