The Starbucks Experience- 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary
In The Starbucks Experience, author Joseph Michelli has used incredible access to the inner workings of this hugely successful company to dissect the specific ways in which the Starbucks business model was able to grow a single coffee shop in Seattle into a multi-national corporation with over 11,000 locations today.
Basically it all boils down to relationships. At Starbucks, the relationship is king, whether it’s the employee/customer relationship, the manager/employee relationship, or the grower/company relationship. The author has distilled Starbucks’ incredible recipe for success down to five tenets or principles that he feels Starbucks has successfully applied to both employees and customers alike.
1. Make it your own.
2. Everything matters.
3. Surprise and delight.
4. Embrace resistance.
5. Leave your mark.
Under the umbrella of these five basic principles falls things such as cultivating an eye for detail and a commitment to quality among its employees and suppliers, empowering employees to take the customer’s experience to the next level by allowing them to make decisions that benefit the customer and encouraging them to approach unusual requests with a “how” instead of a “yes” or “no,” and looking for ways to benefit and bolster the community, including having a policy that they never try to beat resistance, but rather strive to join it.
With plenty of anecdotes from satisfied customers and enthusiastic and inspired partners (AKA Starbucks employees), this book provides an intricate example of a business that is not only successful financially, but also socially, and it makes a compelling case for the fact that in the modern marketplace, the two are increasingly impossible to separate. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to take their customers’ experience to the next level.
The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary
Author: Joseph A. Michelli
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Copyright: 2007
Pages: 193
Binding: Hardcover
List Price: $24.95
One Response to “The Starbucks Experience- 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary”
We have to get this one in the office…..looks great!
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