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Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
91–100 of 353 posts
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#92Ah yes, the CEO is slumming it. I would be more impressed if he accepted cafe pay for one month instead.
The CEO is probably independently wealthy, so shutting off his pay for one month does nothing. I think this is a great opportunity to get to know what it's like to work at this level, the type of people, etc. If this person has a heart, it should enable good changes in the company based on bottom-up feedback.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#93I recall Amazon used to do something similar. Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. The goal isn't PR or worker morale - most people see through stunts like that. The real goal is to help leaders better understand their product, its problems, and customer frustrations.
> Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. This won't happen among most companies, but I'd love to see that become a common practice with at least some high-level developers. There's so many pain points in many customer service organizations that are easily solvable if a developer understood the frustration and waste with many customer service tasks. Nothing motivates more than having to do some annoy…
This should absolutely be a thing for vertical integration developers. If you're developing cashier software for Target, you should have to use it under realistic circumstances sometimes. Same for Amazon driving software, helpdesk software, sales, etc.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#94This is good. But it should be unannounced. He should just show up and work.
Part of the reason to do this is for employees to know that the CEO understands their job and their concerns. The vast majority of employees will not be working at a store the CEO visits, so it makes sense to announce it internally. It sounds like that's what they did, and CNBC got a hold of that email.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was not expecting this Reddit level of comments on HN. Really hoping you are sarcastic.
Literally every time I've moved up the chain in my career I have done less work. I have seen the same in peers who have surpassed me. I have no reason to believe this changes by the time you reach CEO level.
The bit where they bring in a pro CEO in Silicon Valley who spends most of his time messing around with his horse-breeding hobby instead of running the business is basically just a documentary. Like most of the rest of the show.
This is how CEOs often manage to "do so much". All kinds of charity involvement, "advisor" work on other businesses, sit on boards, et c, then blog about how they still find time for their family and/or staying fit despite being so "busy". It's not because they're super-humans working 100 hours a week with perfect time-management discipline, but because a lot of them don't really do jack-shit for any of their "jobs".
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#96Fantastic. Now stop sourcing 1% of your coffee unethically (as per your statement that 99% of your coffee is ethically sourced)
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#97Oh, the cynicism. I'm not exactly sure how this will go down for Starbucks per se, maybe it is PR-ish -- but to pull the camera back a bit, I think it would be tremendously helpful to normalize this idea everywhere, even if it may not always work out perfectly.
>... I think it would be tremendously helpful to normalize this idea everywhere, even if it may not always work out perfectly.
It's all dependent upon the intent of the CEO or person coming in and doing the work. Just as an anecdote, I have seen too many times where a superior comes in with the intent of doing the work to prove it can be done better, rather than to understand the realities of what employees are dealing with, and the results are negative. I frequently had a COO who would come to my warehouse, get on the front line with processing equipment (just as an aside, this was an ITAD company processing end-of-life IT equipment for data sanitization and remarketing, so it's tech-related), and take a cavalier, "SEE! I could go through ALL of that in X amount of minutes! I don't understand why people can't move fast enough blah, blah, blah."
What he never realized is that he didn't do all the work. He'd capture only what he looked at in the system, never put anything away, and left a massive pile of work, and garbage, behind him that my team always had to clean up. He wouldn't take the time to do the rest of the work that the team has to do themselves day in and day out. He half-assed it and berated us at the end, and I could never get him to understand this. It's not that it "didn't always work out perfectly", it's that it made morale plummet every single time it happened.
So yeah, I share your sentiment, but to a point - it's reliant upon the person diving in to keep an open mind and actually give a shit about it instead of just using it as a, "Look at me, I'm a man of the people!" opportunity.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#98Fantastic. Now stop sourcing 1% of your coffee unethically (as per your statement that 99% of your coffee is ethically sourced)
I don’t know the details around this, but it seems like it would be near impossible to get 100% ethical sourcing, because no matter how good your process of vetting suppliers is, at Starbucks scale, you’re going to get fraud. A shady supplier just needs to bribe or blackmail one of your procurement staff to look the other way.
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#99I know things are bad in the economy but dang..
Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
#100The only way things like this really work is by not giving any heads up to the store or the store management. Otherwise store management spends a huge amount of time trying to tidy up before “corporate” comes by. At least that was my experience when things like this happened at the fruit stand.
It's funny because it reminds me of stories my grandparents told me about communism in Eastern Europe where the higher ups would come inspect their factories and the execs would know in advance and prep everything to look perfect.