Steady Work (eBook)

Emily Adams, Karen Gaudet (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-934109-03-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Transforming frontline operations in a retail chain the size of Starbucks is a story in itself. This book goes further, investigating how lean thinking addressed huge demand fluctuation in a retail environment across thousands of stores, and then how baristas and managers in Newtown, Connecticut used that system to get them through the worst week imaginable. It is a deeply personal story with global relevance.

Textauszug

Learning to See the Perfect Latte

The circle of faces around me leaned in as I lifted the pitcher of cold milk closer to a metal wand pumping out 190-degree steam. The perfect latte requires precisely steamed milk. I said, “See, the tip of the steaming wand needs to skim just below the surface of the milk, making a shushing noise. Just like a piece of paper being ripped in two.”

I held my breath and brought the milk closer. The wand skated under the milky surface once, twice, and then my nerves betrayed me. My hand holding the metal pitcher bounced. The wand sunk deep into the milk and hit the interior side of the pitcher, and the milk screamed like a newborn calf.

“OK,” I said, trying to grin. “That’s how not to do it.”

One of my district managers, David, smiled encouragingly. But I’m pretty sure that a smirk crossed the face of a store manager in this downtown Hartford, Connecticut, café. Most of the people here had actually been Starbucks baristas. They were more experienced with a steam wand. Who was I to give this training?

On this February evening in 2008, I was a regional director for Starbucks, responsible for about 110 stores in the Northeast. It had been six years since I had (briefly) made lattes in my original training. So, I was rusty. But I was here, leading this retraining, so that we would all be making beverages the right way, I explained. I shook my hand where the steam had burned it and tried again.

We were relearning how to spot a bad shot of espresso, how to avoid screaming milk, because Howard Shultz had just returned as CEO of Starbucks and announced that we needed to get back to our roots. On one day, we shut down operations in about 8,000 stores across the United States for sessions such as this. Some people called it a publicity stunt. But it was the beginning of a profound shift in the way we worked.

It was not clear to me then, but what we were really learning was to see the work together—to create a common understanding about what was right and what was not right. This would eventually lead to solving problems in a new way. I was also learning how to be vulnerable in front of a team, to admit that I did not always know what I was doing and that other people might have better solutions.

Over the next five years, my fellow executives, managers, baristas, and I would learn the basic principles of lean thinking and how to apply Toyota Production System techniques to some of our operations. We created islands of excellence that often wobbled and fell. Then, we implemented a management system to support frontline standardization and witnessed the power of an interdependent operating system—one that was reliant on all of its parts, which stabilized and balanced the work while exposing problems for us to address. Together we created work with a steady cadence built on standardized routines that was able to absorb the busiest hours at Starbucks. Steady work was the true revelation of our experiments, and, on the worst week of our lives, it saved us.

During those years, I discovered the profound and maddeningly elusive power of standardization in a service industry. I saw what is required to keep standardized operations running and how the discipline could change us if we allowed it.

But first, we all had to learn how to pull the perfect shot of espresso that would coat the back of a spoon like honey. After all, this was the work.

* * *

It is easier now, in hindsight, to see what a pivotal moment February of 2008 was for Starbucks. Opened in 1971 in Seattle as a seller of freshly roasted coffee, Starbucks changed owners and morphed into a seller of coffee beverages in 1987. Over the next 20 years, it expanded into the daily lives of millions of people.

Café lattes in paper cups were suddenly everywhere. All over the country, people embraced the coffeehouse culture, setting up their laptops and settling in for hours. Starbucks began talking about its stores as a third place in American life—like a church or a library, a place outside of home and work where communities gathered. They emphasized human connections.

And the company grew. The Frappuccino and the Pumpkin Spice Latte arrived. In the decade of 1998–2008, Starbucks opened an average of four new stores every single day and expanded its market from Japan and Brazil to Saudi Arabia and Russia, all while emphasizing fair-trade coffee and sustainable farming practices. The company went public in 1992, and as the stock price soared, stocks split and split again in the first four years.

In the Northeast, where I managed ten districts of 10–15 stores each, we saw 12%–18% sales growth year over year. In my Brookline, Massachusetts district, which covered the area between Fenway Park and Boston College, sales grew by 15% year over year without adding a single store. In the rest of my districts, we were adding at least one store every month.

My job in those years—from 2002–2008—was consumed with the logistics of opening new stores. I worked with the in-house real estate team and my crew of about 10 district managers to select new sites, hire new partners, and add a dozen or more new stores a year. When a district manager had more than 10 stores, we created a new district and (usually) elevated a store manager to lead it. When I had more than 10 districts, we split off part of my region and promoted a district manager to regional director. We were creating approximately one new district every year. Still, we grew.

Starbucks added dozens of new seasonal flavored beverages, breakfast sandwiches, CDs, and books. Our store managers received a 300-page glossy promotional book every eight weeks that introduced new drinks, new coffee roasts, new music compilations, and movie promotions. We had drive-through stores, mall stores, community coffee houses; we opened licensed stores in airports, grocery stores, and universities.

And then in 2007, along with the rest of the world’s economy, Starbucks stumbled. A new store in Connecticut opened to surprisingly laconic sales. We failed to hit revenue targets in a number of locations. Along with the district managers, I went into stores and talked to baristas, asking whether they were doing the usual community outreach, whether they were offering free samples. They were doing everything the same way it had always been done.

Our instinct was to extend store hours, create new outreach initiatives, offer more samples. Nothing seemed to work. Memos from executives at Starbucks headquarters in Seattle warned of ominous signs in the national economy.

By the fall of 2007, when the nation’s bankers were being questioned in front of congressional committees on live television, the damage to our economy was already clear to us. As the Great Recession took hold and neighborhoods were suddenly peppered with foreclosed homes, people cut back on their three-cup-a-day habit or gave up the daily luxury of a perfect single-shot vanilla latte. The company that could do nothing but win was suffering a sharp correction.

In coffeehouses around the Northeast, our employees were worried. They saw neighbors losing their homes. Jobs in formerly stable industries were being eliminated. For many people, a part-time job at Starbucks had been a reliable source of healthcare benefits, the little extra needed to fill out a family’s income or to help a student through college. For others, it was a full-time career. If their neighbors could not afford a latte, how would we survive?

We responded, in part, by relearning the craft of making a perfect espresso beverage. To do this, Starbucks shut down thousands of stores across the country in February 2008 and asked leaders like me—newly retrained—to lead the training. Journalists responded with a collective gasp. Businesses were supposed to cut costs and headcounts in recessions rather than spend money on developing employees.

To understand how unique Starbucks’ reaction to the Great Recession was, you need to know a little about the quick-serve restaurant (QSR) industry. While Starbucks held itself out as anything but fast food, this was the category we belonged to, and it was where I had been working for 20 years before Starbucks.

* * *

Starting out in high school restocking the salad bar at my local Bonanza Steakhouse in central Connecticut, I went on to work my way through the many layers of management at Burger King and Wendy’s restaurants and then franchise groups. Working for franchise owners who had 15–25 restaurants, I was accustomed to a hard-numbers, no-nonsense approach to management. In QSR, labor costs were considered fat that should be trimmed as tight as possible.

In fact, all costs were considered bad. Once, when I was on vacation, a franchise owner—let’s call him Mr. Brown—called me, furious. He had been in one of his New Hampshire stores and noticed that there were paper cups in the kitchen trash cans, indicating that employees had been consuming beverages on the job.

Now, this particular store was high performing. It made a lot of money for Mr. Brown. On weekday afternoons it was mostly staffed by local moms...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 29.2.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• ISBN-10: 1-934109-03-7 / 1934109037
• ISBN-13: 978-1-934109-03-8 / 9781934109038