Leading a Business the Starbucks Way

The Starbucks brand is recognized and celebrated around the world. This special status and the sustainable profits at its core arise from a set of leadership principles that prioritize long-term emotional bonds and human relationships over short-term transactions. In Leading the Starbucks Way, organizational consultant Joseph Michelli distills these principles and explains how they have been operationalized and expanded over time. Most importantly, any organization can learn from Starbucks how to build powerful connections with customers, employees, and other stakeholders-connections that can infuse commerce with passion, trust, integrity, and even love.

Starbuck's is one of the world's most successful global brands. Its leadership has developed and honed a set of five strategic and executional principles that have driven its phenomenal growth and helped it recover from serious setbacks during the economic downturn of the mid-2000s. Joseph Michelli describes each of these principles and encourages leaders to use them to fuel the growth of their own organizations:

• Savor and elevate. Starbucks leaders communicate and demonstrate a personal passion for their product, fueled through training, rituals, and on-the-job experiences. They inspire employees to deliver products and services not just at a consistent level of excellence, but also with a powerful human touch.
• Love to be loved. By modeling and committing to integrity, Starbucks leaders aim to win the trust of employees and other stakeholders. Then they leverage the trust of their partners to develop deep human connections-indeed, bonds of love-with every customer.
• Reach for common ground. Even in a highly diverse international marketplace, there are certain universal human desires: for example, attention, appreciation, and community. Starbucks uses these commonalities to build connections with maximum global appeal; at the same time, the company understands how to localize products and environments to demonstrate cultural sensitivity and relevance.
• Mobilize the connection. Starbucks applies digital, social, and mobile tools to improve the in-store experience and to serve consumers wherever they are-encouraging exploration of Starbucks offerings across multiple channels.
• Cherish and challenge your legacy. Starbucks leaders continually renew the entrepreneurial spirit that fueled the company's original success. They are unafraid to experiment, innovate, and take chances to increase the relevance and uniqueness of the brand, and ultimately to define a long-term economic and cultural legacy.

Joseph Michelli shows how a company can build deep, lasting relationships with its customers and other stakeholders and why those human connections are the key to sustainable profits. The book also demonstrates the power of product passion and authenticity in helping to overcome significant business challenges.

Every chapter concludes with a list of "Connecting Points" that generalize from Starbucks' needs and capabilities to those of other organizations. Together with suggested exercises in call-out boxes called "Refection on Connection," this extra material enhances the book's usefulness to readers and makes it particularly relevant to entrepreneurs, brand managers, and human resource professionals. The book should be read cover to cover, as the chapters and concepts build on each other. There is also a bibliography and index.