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Pour Your Heart Into It summary

Name: Pour Your Heart Into It
Rating: 4.6 (37 reviews)
Author: Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang

Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang

How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time

4.6 (37 ratings)

18 mins

Topics

Strategy Leadership Success

Table of Contents

Pour Your Heart Into It
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Get business advice from a coffee master.

What makes a great cup of coffee? According to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, his coffee deli became so hugely popular because it has always had extremely high standards for their products and work environment.

The story about Starbucks shows that the success of a business depends on the authenticity of its product, and that trust, brand renewal and strong principles are essential to keep a business growing.

In these blinks you’ll learn

how low fat milk threatened Starbucks’ very high standards;
why spending more than you have might actually not be such a bad idea; and
how an experiment in 1988 made coffee-flavoured ice cream possible.

Success in business comes from selling an authentic product.

If you bring up Starbucks in conversation, chances are pretty much everyone will know what you’re talking about. You know Starbucks as a successful business, but have you ever wondered how it came to be?

The secret to Starbucks’ success is, for founder Howard Schultz, no secret at all. Plain and simple, the success of Starbucks lies with the brand’s authenticity, achieved by selling only the highest quality coffee.

Back in 1981, Starbucks was just a small retail store. It sold exclusively dark-roasted Italian style coffee, which may be ubiquitous today, but was still a novelty back then. By roasting the coffee dark, the coffee grows in strength, gains a more powerful aroma and has the distinct taste of authentic Italian coffee.

Starbucks never compromised its beans, and became known for its premium-quality, dark-roasted flavor profile that its founders were so passionate about. Because of those early business decisions, Starbucks had an undeniable feeling of authenticity about it since the start.

The company has held true to its authentic coffee profile, in tough times to the present day. In 1994, coffee prices shot to an all-time high on the world market, from $0.80 to $2.74 in a matter of days, after a frost that destroyed much of Brazil’s coffee plants.

During this coffee crisis, a lot of shareholders promoted the purchase of cheaper beans, to keep the price of a cup of joe stable. But Starbucks was unwilling to compromise quality and continued to sell the highest quality coffee they could, instead reducing other costs to account for the higher price of beans. When the world coffee market recovered, Starbucks had an even stronger customer base because its quality remained consistently high.

In business you have to be stubborn to succeed.

From what we’ve learned in the first blink, Starbucks adheres to uncompromising business practices. So what kind of person does that make its founder? You could probably describe Howard Schultz as stubborn. In fact, that quality is what led Howard to become a part of Starbucks in the first place.

After tasting the great coffee at its store in 1981, Schultz knew he wanted to become head of marketing in the Starbucks retail stores. The original founder, Jerry Baldwin, was interested. But his partners thought Schultz had too many new ideas and was too eager to create change. So Baldwin declined to hire Schultz.

It’s vital to build trust with your employees.

We’ve seen that it pays to be stubborn when dealing with people at the top of the food chain. But with everyone else vital to your business, your focus should be entirely different: build a relationship of trust with your employees.

The Starbucks management team has worked hard to nurture that trust. It’s reflected in the company motto: “Treat people like family and they will be loyal and give their all.” The Starbucks family receives a great benefit package and even part-time employees are offered stock options – Bean Stock – so they are partners, not just employees. Employees are also encouraged to voice their opinions at the quarterly Open Forums, a source of valuable feedback.

Not only does a good business need strong values; it needs to stick to them no matter what.

We’ve all got those friends that seem to be changing their values on a whim, chasing the latest fads and trends. If they’re an acquaintance, we’ll tolerate that kind of behavior, but how would you like it if your business was changing its core principles from week to week? Neither employees nor customers would put up with it for very long, which is why it’s crucial that a business stands by its values.

As we know, the core value of Starbucks is authenticity. So, taking this principle seriously has sometimes meant denying customer requests.

It pays to invest above the curve.

We all know it’s wise to be cautious with our money, be sparing and only spend what we can afford. But in business, it’s a different game where it’s often necessary to take big risks. The truth is, if you want to be successful, you’ve got to take the plunge and invest.

Starbucks’ impressive and rapid growth wouldn’t have been possible if it hadn’t started “investing above the curve,” which means investing in themselves even before they needed it.

Invest in people who are smarter than you and then let them do their job.

Let’s face it: we can’t do everything ourselves. Still, superiors often feel threatened by their brightest employees, rather than tapping into their skills as an asset. Schultz, on the other hand, was smart enough to give the reigns to those with expertise in their specific areas.

For example, when confronted with the challenge of creating a sales computer program for hundreds of stores, Schultz hired a programmer who had worked on the McDonald’s sales program. Having worked in a company that was far bigger than Starbucks, she was well-suited.

Working with others can revitalize your brand, or even revolutionize your product.

If you want to get ahead in business, the old “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mantra won’t cut it. Brand renewal, on the other hand, will boost your success; the key is to change things before they stop working.

Starbucks managed to apply brand renewal to a product as old and traditional as coffee. And, the company applied renewal at a scientific level. Don Valencia, a biomedical scientist, began experimenting with coffee in 1988. His research led him to develop a coffee extract, which he then refined until it was completely indistinguishable from real, freshly-brewed coffee.

It’s important for a company to stick to its principles and ensure its employees are happy.

It’s a classic story for big chains to sell their soul in order to stay ahead in the game, but the same isn’t true for Starbucks. Instead, the company takes the initiative to stay intimate with its employees – no easy feat when there are about 25,000!

By offering Bean Stock (stock options) Starbucks generates a sense of partnership among its employees. It tends to offer higher hourly wages than the industry standard as well other benefits, such as health insurance for employees and their partners. Schultz communicates personally with each store via email and voicemail, and each region holds quarterly meetings for store managers so that management remains in touch with the base.

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What is Pour Your Heart Into It about?

Pour Your Heart Into It takes you on the enthralling journey of how Starbucks came to be a success story. It sheds light on its beginnings, reveals how the quick growth rate was possible and sets out to explain how businesses can learn from its strategies and principles.

Best quote from Pour Your Heart Into It

We dont manage the business to maximize anything except the quality of the coffee.

—Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang

Who should read Pour Your Heart Into It?

Anybody interested in coffee company chains
Anybody interested in rapidly-growing companies
Anybody interested in brand development

About the Author

Howard Schultz is an American businessman and Starbucks Chairman and CEO. From a modest background and the first person in his family to go to college, he grew the small coffeehouse into a billion dollar company. In 2007 he won the FIRST award for Responsible Capitalism.

Dori Jones Yang is an American author. She studied in Princeton and John Hopkins University.

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