Number of words – 360

If you look back at the history of Starbucks, it thrived not because of its coffee but because of the experience it offered to customers. It was Schultz who bought that why to the company when he arrived in 1982, 10 years after Gordon Walker, Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl first started selling coffee beans in Seattle. In the early days it was about the coffee. Schultz, frustrated that the founders of Starbucks couldn’t see the larger vision, set out to put the company on a new course, the course that ultimately turned Starbucks into the company we know today. Schultz has been enamoured of the espresso bars of Italy, and it was his vision of building a comfortable environment between work and home, the third space as he called it, that allowed Starbucks to single handedly create a coffee shop culture in the United States, that had until then only existed on college campuses.

That was the time when Starbucks stood for something. It reflected an underlying belief about the world. It was that idea that people bought, not the coffee. And it was inspiring. But Starbucks, like so many before it, went to the inevitable split. They forgot about why the company was founded and started focusing on the results and the products. There was a time when Starbucks gave you the option to sip your coffee out of a ceramic cup and eat your Danish off a ceramic plate. Two perfect details that helped bring the company’s belief to life in a place between work and home. But ceramic crockery is expensive to maintain and Starbucks did away with it, favouring the more efficient paper cups. Though it saved money, it came at a cost: the erosion of trust. Nothing says to a customer, “We love you, now get out”, like a paper cup. It was no longer about the third space. It has become about the coffee. Starbucks’ why was going fuzzy. Thankfully, Schultz was there, the physical embodiment of the way, to remind people of the higher cause. But in 2000 he left, and things got worse.

Excerpted from ‘Start with Why’ by Simon Sinek