· This is the 4583 original first article word count 5k+ ·
· Shui Jie | The article follows Qin Shuo’s circle of friends ID: qspyq2015 ·
I used to write Su Dongpo , Wang Yangming and other ancients, mainly to find how they are The method of overcoming a spiritual crisis can also turn a desperate situation into a treasure, a work, and a classic. This week I write about a foreigner, the well-known "father of Starbuck" Howard Schultz. In fact, no matter how huge the cultural differences between the East and West are, the universal laws that can mobilize spiritual power when individuals face huge challenges are similar.
Starbucks has been frequently searched abroad recently because it does not provide free public toilets and has been refused requests for employees to return to work. According to The Paper reported that on June 9, local time, Schultz said when attending the DealBook DC 2022 Policy Forum that he had "begged" employees to return to work, but employees still chose to only come to the company every week 2 to 3 days.
In April this year, Schultz came out for the third time and returned to Starbucks to take charge of the overall situation. He plans to leave the CEO position in the first quarter of 2023. The last time was during the financial crisis in 2008. In April, he criticized the former management for "false promises." Repairing a company, sometimes, means repairing people's hearts.
html In May, the financial report was released. He promised to invest US$1 billion in store partners (welfare) in fiscal year 2022 to promote the hourly wage of all store partners to US$15, effective from August 1. Lifelong partners will receive a 5% salary increase or a 5% starting salary increase. The purpose of raising wages is to combat inflation.When social needs are also "my" needs, we will actively promote them. This can unite all forces and create a good atmosphere. His entire management style has remained unchanged, which is to heal people's hearts, inspire people's hearts, and mobilize all community and public forces that can be mobilized. The whole attitude was as humble as ever. I don’t know if this brief return to the front line will continue the glory of “starting from scratch”.
He is over 70 years old, and he only took over for a short period of time, so the most appropriate method is still to play the role of spiritual leader, reassurance, stabilizer, and ballast stone. The wisdom of an old man is to know everything after experiencing the world. The good and the bad will eventually pass. It is enough to achieve "perseverance and self-transcendence" at any stage. People are encouraged to "nurture their hearts and wait for their own success." ".
starts from scratch, the power of restarting and reshaping, how important these are to this era.
In fact, Schulz had a mental crisis when he was a child. The family lived in a government low-rent house. The father was fired after suffering a work-related injury. The mother was pregnant at the time and had suffered from depression for many years. Their family is very poor and they always have to borrow money from acquaintances to make a living.
He felt that family life was depressing and unattractive since he was a child, and he always wanted to escape. His means of escape were playing fields and chess boards in parks. Although the sports field in the low-cost neighborhood was rough, he felt it was full of opportunities and a sense of belonging. He felt that the chess players' level of concentration, battle of wits and courage, competitive friendship, overall consideration, and the silent interaction between people who occasionally taught him a few tricks was a different kind of experience.
In this way, he silently endured, accumulated, and spent his depressed childhood and adolescence. However, he later learned that these were also the source of strength for him to overcome difficulties in the future. The painful and depressing "world" is better soon than it is early, and it will be strange in the future.
Schultz especially likes to play ball. He believes that team sports give people a sense of belonging. Because it is a tacit understanding that can be formed without verbal communication."When I'm playing, I don't have to communicate through a lot of words to connect with my teammates. When my teammates are in a huddle, or when I score a touchdown or recover a rebound from out of bounds and my teammates lift their chins in appreciation, I have an unparalleled sense of belonging that I don’t feel at home. “Sports makes people positive and empowering.
In high school, he suffered a broken nose and several concussions while playing touch football. But this kind of injury is not an injury at all. Life’s bumps and tumbles are all behind.
I also had a broken nose bone when I was a child. When I was a child, I also felt that my family life was very depressing. I always wanted to escape from my hometown and go to the most distant city. When I was too young and couldn't escape, I went to see Lao Zhuang. At the age of twelve, I started practicing writing in front of the computer. When I read Schulz's autobiography "Starting Over," I felt an inexplicable sense of intimacy.
How do people grow themselves and spread the effects of self-growth to society? Schultz's upbringing illustrates this point. He is the one who commercializes "culture" and "atmosphere". In fact, in a sense, commercialization is just a way of propagating and spreading ideas. In 1983, Howard Schultz, marketing director and retailer of Starbucks, a small coffee bean roaster in Seattle, was on a business trip to Milan to attend a trade show. The Starbucks logo is a mermaid with her breasts exposed, named after Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" (I've written about this novel before, "Whale Down"). In the novel, the first mate of the protagonist Captain Ahab is named Starbuck. Starbucks was founded in 1971 by Gerald Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zeev Seeger. In 1981, Schultz met Gerald and Gordon and joined the team.
｜Starbucks founders: Jeff Seeger (history teacher), Jerry Baldwin (English teacher), Gordon Bowker (writer)
People’s progress must have seen the world and seen different shocks The world can be seen in the heart, and I feel that I must make some more complete changes to let go of this heart.
After Schulz came to Italy, he found that there were coffee shops everywhere at that time. Even though they were quiet, they were full of energy. The atmosphere on the streets was really great. The staff of espresso are called baristas, and all coffee-related people and things have their own proper nouns, which are cautious, solemn, and full of ritual. Italian coffee requires just the right water flow, temperature, pressure, and timing, and the production process is also very complicated - pouring beans, grinding, weighing, tamping, waiting, filling with water, and finally cleaning the equipment.
At that time, the coffee that Americans generally drank came from a kind of coffee beans called Robusta . Compared with the Arabica used by Starbucks, the former was cheap and tasted weak. Compared with Italian coffee, it was simply not worth mentioning. . Schultz believes that the process of making espresso is as carefully designed as dance movements, as energetic as football, and as solemn and sacred as religious rituals. He deeply felt in his heart that Americano needed the spirit and soul of Italian coffee as a factor of change, injecting thoughts, rituals, and procedures. This allows the café to accommodate public conversation and personal reflection, making it warm and hospitable. Real coffee should make people feel simple, casual, comfortable and communal.
When you feel that you must do something, your body feels like it is electrified, and your soul has a connection signal. On the plane back to Seattle, he started writing plans and sketching, trying to integrate espresso into existing stores. But the bosses only wanted to sell whole-bean coffee. In the end, they only agreed to test it at a newly opened Starbucks at the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Spring Avenue in Seattle. Unexpectedly, it was very popular. However, it still couldn't be promoted on a large scale, so he decided to resign and do it himself. How to do
requires completing a big thing, which is to raise 1.7 million US dollars in 8 months to start a capital-intensive retail enterprise, I1 Giornale (Everyday Coffee). Its business model is to make espresso culture a daily occurrence in Seattle and eventually expand to other cities.
had a smooth start in raising funds. Starbucks invested US$150,000, and his wife Shirley’s friend Carol Bobo invested US$100,000. The remaining $1.45 million is extremely difficult. His wife was pregnant at the time, and his father-in-law began to oppose his desperate efforts to start a business. He felt the oppression of his family and was very scared.
For entrepreneurs, the line between moving forward and giving up halfway is blurry. Fortunately, his wife is very supportive, a key and close person of will, and a real spiritual support. Then noble people appeared one after another, such as Jack Rogers. The company he worked for was unwilling to invest, so he invested personally. Another example was Arnie Prentiss, who invested money and added recommenders to invest.
In January 1986, Schulz's son Jordan was born. By that summer, 30 of the 242 people he had found agreed to invest. The largest investment came from a pair of uncles and nephews, Harold Glick, who was in the muffler business, and Kenny Key, a saxophone master. is an ideal and will find people who support it. If you stick to it for a long time, you will find that it is the most charming thing in life.
｜Starbuck’s first store
How to overcome every difficulty? You need some luck, you need to get to know a wider and wider circle of friends, and you need to meet some people who can smooth things out. There are some people in this society who have stored up courage and energy. You have to attract these people with your righteous thoughts and ideals. This is also a way to get through periodic crises.
People need some adventures, some accidents, and some irrational power of continuous immersion that they usually store. how to say?
When it was time to buy the original Starbucks, Tiantian Coffee was actually under great financial pressure and financing was difficult, requiring US$3.8 million. There was also internal interference. Individual shareholders of Tiantian Coffee also wanted to acquire Starbucks, and they invested quickly. It was a friend of Howard's basketball team, a lawyer, who introduced him to Bill Gates Sr., yes, the old father of Bill Gates, the founder of and Microsoft . He called Tiantian's shareholders and Howard together as a third party to mediate the relationship between the two parties.
Howard also understood from then on that a stranger could have such a profound impact on a person's destiny, so in the future he also wanted to be altruistic, influence others, send his kindness and support, and also wanted others to enjoy such a life-changing life. charm.
He wants to make Starbucks a work destination with a collective atmosphere. This concept is really "Chinese". He insisted that part-time partners (employees) also enjoy health care benefits. Even during the financial crisis of 2008, he did not cut this cost, although if it were cut, it would make the stock price rise.
In addition, he made Starbucks the only private company to issue equal preemptive shares to its partners, calling it a "coffee bean stock." When Starbucks went public in 1992, it had 165 stores and a market capitalization of US$250 million. From 1992 to 2018, its stock has increased 218 times.
Positive factors in this society should also flow, not just money. Mutual repayment, trust, mutual care, honesty, and mutual assistance are a kind of morality and a kind of environmental protection.
At the time, in the late 1980s, companies were drastically cutting employee health insurance costs. But in fact, this kind idea also has economic value, because it stabilizes the flow of people. In comparison, the training cost is 3,000 US dollars, and the medical insurance is only 1,500 US dollars. In 1988, Starbucks became the first private company in the United States to offer comprehensive health insurance to part-time partners who worked more than 20 hours a week.
Because Starbucks has joined the open culture of Italian coffee and "created a collective around coffee", Americans no longer only drink drip coffee, but fall in love with latte and kabob, and the entire environment has achieved what Howard imagined. That casual, calm, warm atmosphere. The popularity of Starbucks also happened to catch up with the trend at that time. The Internet allowed people to work remotely and flexibly, and coffee shops became a place for working and talking. Local media at the time said it was affordable luxury. Starbucks opened in Japan in 1996, later penetrated into Spain, and opened in Beijing, China in 1999.
｜The first Starbucks in Tokyo, Japan
In 2000, Howard no longer served as CEO, but became chairman and global strategist. At that time, Starbucks had 2,800 stores in 15 countries, operating revenue of US$2 billion, and an annual stock growth rate of 49%. By 2007, its revenue had reached US$14.9 billion, and it had opened more than 17,000 branches in 49 countries, including more than 11,000 in the United States alone. The development of
in the past twenty years has been like riding on a flying carpet, but it is a rule and necessity that prosperity must inevitably decline. How to get through it, through the mud? In 2008, Starbucks encountered Waterloo. Schultz said that sometimes, when it comes to collapse, all it takes is one thread to come off and a sweater is completely ruined.
The problems faced by Starbucks at the time were: 1. The strong aroma from Sumatra and Costa Rica disappeared; 2. The smell of burnt cheese from the sandwiches spread throughout the store; 3. The coffee machine blocked the view; 4. Store selection There are problems with address, product sales, training, packaging, storage, etc.
At that time, Howard wrote an internal email to remind his partners to return to their original aspirations and restore their fine traditions and enthusiasm, which was used as an article by the media.
"Comparable store sales" (the year-on-year increase or decrease in profits of existing stores) used to be Howard's source of happiness. It is now only 1%, the worst result since 1992.
So, he came out again in 2008. Facing the dramatic changes in consumer behavior and the raging economic crisis and global recession, he felt that the chess he learned in the park as a child influenced him. We have to go back to the details, back to the details of the Starbucks experience: friendly and professional coffee mixers, fresh but familiar store decoration styles, a variety of lifestyle drinks, store managers who are proficient in team + finance, economy and spirit A satisfying partner.
He also invited SYP Partners for consultation, starting with music and art, then moving on to macro business topics, and finally a heart-to-heart conversation between partners. The plan they gave was a business design based on keywords such as reputation/inspiration/attachment/sense of local core area/ethics and environmental protection/new products/high efficiency and high profits. Whether in China or in the West, the humanistic spirit is a good medicine.
In February 2008, it closed its doors to train 135,000 baristas. Let them return to the mental and spiritual environment of how to make a latte and continue to think about how to do better. Let management put down their egos and think of themselves as sole traders again.
His famous saying is "Mud on your hands", which is said to have come from the poster "The world belongs to the few who work hard" designed by Starbucks.
That store manager meeting cost $30 million. They deliberately chose to hold it in Orleans . The hurricane disaster occurred in 2005. It has been three years and some areas have not been repaired yet. Their method is to do charity first, planting 6,500 pieces of coastal turf in the park, painting 86 houses, providing 50,000 hours of volunteer service, etc.
Their original intention is to have a positive influence in their own neighborhoods. When coffee is no longer a necessity of life during depression, how to survive is to provide a sense of culture and atmosphere, a sense of inner dependence, hope, confidence and pleasure.
He told the employees that during the recession, everyone has the responsibility and obligation to communicate and pay attention to everything they observe, experience, and learn. Every customer has the right to enjoy the perfect drink and to be treated politely in a hot and cold world.
Their prescription is that energy is in everyone.
In 2008, Starbucks’ stock price fell by 80%, but it still did not cut back on health insurance. Short-term thinking is a systemic crux of modern capitalism, Schultz said. remember that short-sightedness also includes endless complaining and indulging in the real difficulties and pain of the moment. This sentence is inspiring.
They closed 600 stores and also laid off employees. he said nothing can be done is the beginning of change . Although his mother suffered from depression, she had to use electroconvulsive therapy when it was severe. When his father was injured at work, his mother was in the ambulance and would receive calls from debt collectors.But my mother would still keep the house clean and tidy, and cook delicious meals. She always believed that a child who grew up in a low-rent house might be successful in the future, because she believed in the American Dream, Kennedy, and believed in everything Everything is possible, and you can protect the ones you love by standing up.
His management philosophy is the entrepreneurial spirit of governance. Provide an uplifting experience that enriches people's every day. As a result, starting in 2011, Starbucks has been profitable for 30 consecutive quarters.
Don’t be a bystander in the changing situation. In a crisis, everyone still needs to fight in good faith and persevere in good faith. It takes the mental strength to actually change something. should be a reassurance to those around you, rather than a cause of anxiety and fear. Schulz's wife Shirley and their daughter are strong and compassionate people. They were Schulz's reassurance and healed his childhood loneliness and despair about his family.
What surprised him was that a soldier was also affected by his spirit. Although his body was covered with injuries and was mutilated, he always believed that his good luck was coming because he had lost too much.
Poor or no work can make people lose their vitality. The source of dignity is happiness, self-respect, self-love and pride. Self-esteem and being worthy of the respect of others are what Schultz's father lacked after being fired due to a work injury, so he can relate to it. He believes that small businesses should be allowed to develop, because that is where the most jobs are created, and small businesses are the engine of local economic development. He proposed the initiative at Starbucks:
"Small businesses are the backbone of the American labor force. The development of small businesses determines the increase of jobs. We have ways to help small businesses grow. Just visit a Starbucks store or createjobsforuse.org website to create for America Job opportunities, donate $5, all of this money will be used to maintain and create new jobs in small businesses in various communities across the United States, and you will get a wristband to show your contribution."
Starbucks donated $5 million, the original intention of an enterprise. The more it is oriented to social needs and social development, there is often more room for development of . This event raised more than $1 million in two weeks. In total, 800,000 wristbands were sold. Together with , Citi, and other large companies, we donated 15.2 million US dollars. CDFIS (Community Development Financial Institutions) across the country used this money as principal to lend $106 million and create 5,000 jobs.
Angels are among people because people can help each other and some people just need a lifeline to spontaneously move up. The era of crossing the river by feeling the stones requires entrepreneurial spirit, curiosity, and bravery.
In January 2022, Starbucks stock price was around US$116, and now it is only around US$70. I wonder what Schultz’s prescription is when faced with unprecedented inflationary challenges? However, his life also shows that people do not just have to overcome difficulties and obstacles once or twice, nor do they just have to be a hero once or twice. The times ask questions at any time, and we can answer them at any time. "The creations of heaven are not made of things, they are just covered with grass." Creation is a rough idea, and destiny is also a probability, and the details are still within us.
- Author: Qin Shuo, founding editor-in-chief of Moments. Personal WeChat public account with the same name: Sister Shui (id: shuijie0 0 0 0 0).
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》Picture | Visual China 》
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