Starbucks Experience and the Idea of Small Win

For those of you not wanting to add on additional calories, ask the barista to make your drink "skinny".
They will use nonfat milk, no whip, and sugar-free

“Many great ideas start small at the beginning” (Richard Angelus)

When Howard Schultz founded what would become Starbucks, the baristas wore bow ties, nonstop opera music played, and the store had no chairs. “We made a lot of mistakes,” Schultz regularly acknowledges. Schultz and his team learned from them as they did countless other experiments. Drawing upon his observations of Italian coffee houses, Schultz’s grand vision was to create a different kind of coffee experience that he called the “Starbucks experience”: where people experience great coffee in a communal place. As for the specifics, the Starbucks store and experience of today looks almost nothing like Schultz’s original concept.

The Starbucks we know emerged by carefully adapting to customer feedback through a series of small wins. In fact, Schultz described Starbuck’s mentality as: “the value of dogmatism and flexibility.” As long as ideas were in accordance with company principles, Schultz believed they should just say yes to customer requests.

So, for example, Schultz was initially determined to avoid using non-fat milk since he didn’t think it tasted as good as regular milk and because it was at odds with the Italian coffee experience. When customers kept requesting non-fat drinks, Schultz relented. The success of those drinks became an important small win and soon much more: non-fat milk would grow to account for almost half of Starbucks’s lattes and cappuccinos. “In hindsight, the decision looks like a no-brainer,” Schultz wrote in Pour Your Heart Into It, but that direction wasn’t obvious; it was the fast pace of sales that proved the point.

[Reference: Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries by Peter Sims (Free Press, 2011), page 146-147]

Small wins, win.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Improving the Quality of Your Creativity

“Creativity is originality plus usefulness” (Russell Eisenman)

If we wish to improve the quality of our creativity (whatever our preferred creativity may be), subjecting it to evaluation by experts and by ourselves is a powerful way to improving it. Below are some ways to improving the quality of our ideas. Try them out on your ideas. They will provide useful prompts both to increasing their originality, usefulness and also their appropriateness. Here are some suggestions:

§  Get feedback on your idea from some non-experts too (beside from the experts). The non-expert can often see problems that experts may not, and ask questions that can make you review some aspect of your idea, and make suggestions that can improve it. Get feedback from both.

§  Take some time off from your idea. Idea is “exhilarating but it is also fatiguing”. You will come back to your idea refreshed and very likely spot flaws or improvements that you overlooked earlier.

§  Try many small improvements to your idea. Each improvement makes and may provoke many small changes and adjustments. The more of these improvements and adjustments are made, the more distinctive and effective your idea may become.

§  Think of the “customers” or beneficiaries of your idea. What would they find interesting and useful about your idea and what would they consider objectionable? By taking the perspective of your idea’s “customers,” you may be able to think of ways to increasing the impact of your idea.

§  Think of effective ways of making others aware of your idea. It would be a shame of you have an idea and nobody becomes aware of it. Appropriate publicity may earn you the additional bonus of attracting to you others working on similar matters, and interacting with them may stimulate you into further idea.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Characteristics of a Creative Person #3: Eager to Test New Ideas

“To swear off making mistakes is very easy.

All you have to do is swear off having ideas”

(Leo Burnett)

Even before a new idea is completely finished, refined, formulated, etc. it can be put before others for feedback and evaluation. A creative person does this because the input of others will no doubt have a beneficial effect on the quality of the idea as it reaches maturity. Keeping a new idea under wraps until it is unveiled as new policy excludes most of what’s good about the creative process.

Not only do people resent new ideas being forced upon them without the opportunity to participate in the development of the idea, it’s possible that there was a better idea available that nobody got the opportunity to promote. Perhaps the new idea, once it’s launched, proves to be a failure. The liabilities and vulnerabilities of the new idea could have been exposed in a less embarrassing development process that encouraged input from others. Creative people put new ideas out for maximum scrutiny as soon as possible in order to tune up the program.

A creative person is eager to test new ideas

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

*I recommend you to read Danny Cox and John Hoover’s Seize the Day (Book-mart Press, 1994), “Step Two: Developing Strengths” page 77-118.