Book of the week: "Onward" by Howard Schultz
For my third book of the year, I chose "Onward" by Howard Schultz, after a client/friend highly recommended it. After somewhat scary revelations of my previous book “Boomerang”, I looked forward to reading “Onward” - an uplifting story of entrepreneurship.
“Onward” proved to be just that (uplifting) and so much more. This book by Howard Schultz catalogs and follows his re-emergence as “ceo” of Starbucks in January 2008 (according to Schultz all leaders were lower case letters, and all the employees are termed “partners”). What makes this book particularly interesting is the timing of his re-emergence at Starbucks as the recession had officially begun in December 2007.
After he came back, Starbucks had to deal with things that had never happened to the company before—the closing of hundreds of stores, the laying off of thousands of employees, negative earnings, and negative comps. In the book, you feel like you are there in the trenches fighting with him—as he states: “The crisis was forcing people all along the economic spectrum to come to terms with new realities and redefine how they lived in the world. Starbucks and I were hardly alone in our transformation.”
By the end of the book Starbucks had turned the corner on the negative economic trends, and as Howard states, “I did welcome a shift from survival to growth mode” (emphasis added). You hear entrepreneurs that first start their business talk about being in “survival mode”, you hear seasoned business owners in the current economic climate speak of about being in “survival mode”—it was very intriguing to hear the ceo of Starbucks discuss the experience of the past two years as “survival.”
In fiscal 2010, Starbucks revenues increased to a record $10.7 billion. As Howard looks at how Starbucks got off-track, I think the following quote is on point: “Growth, we know all too well, is not a strategy. It is a tactic. And when undisciplined growth became a strategy for Starbucks, we lost our way. But no longer are we growing the company the way we did in the past. In short Starbucks today aims to be a very different type of company.”
After reading the book, and the Herculean work that Schultz did to transform his company, I believe this re-emergence as a ceo and leader of the company has been instrumental in Starbuck’s ability to be such a strong brand in the current economic climate.
In addition to many useful nuggets of insights throughout the book, I also found it interesting and refreshing to read how Howard was influenced by the writings of a small merchant with one store in Italy. To me, it reflected how entrepreneurial mindset applies just as well to a small entrepreneurial company, as it does to this Mega-Company.
In that vein, I look “Onward” to my fourth book of the year—“Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe (The Bill of Rights and the Election that Save a Nation”). I am very excited to finally get the chance to read this book because the author is Chris DeRose, a fellow Pepperdine Law School graduate. Let’s see if he can make the politics of the founding of America interesting (I have already read the first 40 pages or so and am already engaged to read onward).
