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)
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