Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time

Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time

In Pour Your Heart Into It , former CEO and now chairman emeritus Howard Schultz illustrates the principles that have shaped the Starbucks phenomenon, sharing the wisdom he has gained from his quest to make great coffee part of the American experience. The success of Starbucks Coffee Company is one of the most amazing business stories in decades. What started as a single store on Seattle's waterfront has grown into the largest coffee chain on the planet. Just as remarkable as this incredible growth is the fact that Starbucks has managed to maintain its renowned commitment to product excellence and employee satisfaction. Marketers, managers, and aspiring entrepreneurs will discover how to turn passion into profit in this definitive chronicle of the company that "has changed everything... from our tastes to our language to the face of Main Street" ( Fortune ). "For entrepreneurs, managers, and fans of Starbucks coffee, Pour Your Heart Into It is the definitive chronicle of how a curling-edge company built a worldwide reputation through retail by leading with its heart."― Business Times "It is hard to imagine a more satisfying brew than this memoir."― Publishers Weekly "By offering a detailed account of how Starbucks captured the psyche of its audience, Schultz reveals a purely American truism: If you can capture the imagination of your audience, you have a winner."― USA Today Howard Schultz is a native of Brooklyn, New York, who joined Starbucks in 1982 and has been Chairman and CEO since 1987. He lives in Seattle. Dori Jones Yang has over fifteen years' experience as a reporter, writer, and bureau chief for Business Week in New York, Hong Kong, and Seattle. She lives in Bellevue, Washington. Pour Your Heart Into It How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time By Howard Schultz Hyperion Books Copyright ©1999 Howard Schultz All right reserved. ISBN: 9780786883561 CHAPTER ONE IMAGINATION, DREAMS, AND HUMBLE ORIGINS It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye. --Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince Starbucks, as it is today, is actually the child of two parents. One is the original Starbucks, founded in 1971, a company passionately committed to world-class coffee and dedicated to educating its customers, one on one, about what great coffee can be. The other is the vision and values I brought to the company: the combination of competitive drive and a profound desire to make sure everyone in the organization could win together. I wanted to blend coffee with romance, to dare to achieve what others said was impossible, to defy the odds with innovative ideas, and to do all this with elegance and style. In truth, Starbucks needed the influence of both parents to become what it is today. Starbucks prospered for ten years before I discovered it. I learned of its early history from its founders, and I'll retell that story in Chapter Two. In this book, I will relate the story the way I experienced it, starting with my early life, because many of the values that shaped the growth of the enterprise trace their roots back to a crowded apartment in Brooklyn, New York. HUMBLE ORIGINS CAN INSTILL BOTH DRIVE AND COMPASSION One thing I've noticed about romantics They try to create a new and better world far from the drabness of everyday life. That is Starbucks' aim, too. We try to create, in our stores, an oasis, a little neighborhood spot where you can take a break, listen to some jazz, and ponder universal or personal or even whimsical questions over a cup of coffee. What kind of person dreams up such a place? From my personal experience, I'd say that the more uninspiring your origins, the more likely you are to use your imagination and invent worlds where everything seems possible. That's certainly true of me. I was three when my family moved out of my grandmother's apartment into the Bayview Projects in 1956. They were in the heart of Canarsie, on Jamaica Bay, fifteen minutes from the airport, fifteen minutes from Coney Island. Back then, the Projects were not a frightening place but a friendly, large, leafy compound with a dozen eight-story brick buildings, all brand-new. The elementary school, P.S. 272, was right on the grounds of the Projects, complete with playground, basketball courts, and paved school yard. Still, no one was proud of living in the Projects; our parents were all what we now call "the working poor." Still, I had many happy moments during my childhood. Growing up in the Projects made for a well-balanced value system, as it forced me to get along with many different kinds of people. Our building alone housed about 150 families, and we allshared one tiny elevator. Each apartment was very small, and our family started off in a cramped two-bedroom unit. Both my parents came from working-class families, residents of the East New York section of Brooklyn for two generations. My grandfather died