211–220 of 353 posts
As can having execs be familiar with the boots on the ground business, so it's not just numbers abstractions.
Issuing a press release looks like a different or additional goal. Such as customer/investor PR for the company, internal messaging (reaching vast low-level employees via public news outlets), or personal brand.
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Was his demonstration helpful? Or do you mean that he was only able to do the tasks faster because he was rushing them, or that fast completion of these tasks was not really meaningful to the overall performance of the store?
No there was no useful tips or anything new to his demonstration, only speed. If the completion of these tasks was meaningful to the performance of the store, it was only in his opinion. The store was already in the best shape it had ever been because of our hard work between the announcement and the day of his visit.
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pricing stuff, metrics stuff, customer flow changes. Real day-to-day stuff. One of the ones I personally witnessed related to the services that salespeople were expected to sell along with the computers. There was some kerfuffle going on about stores not meeting the expected "attach rates". He spent a whole day selling computers, and could not meet the expected attach rates himself. Couple weeks after that changes to…
There are a whole class of problems that fall into the "seems like a good idea/measure at some management level, based on the data and worldview they have, but fail in reality, due to some detail at the ground level" category. Or, consequences of lossy compression as information gets summarized before being transmitted up the management ladder. And it isn't always a bad management call! Sometimes they're making the r…
I get it, at some point you have to admit that you're not going to get 100% truth from people. But that doesn't mean you don't talk to different people at different layers of the company.
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I haven't worked retail, I know its unpleasant but is there really that much skill to it?
I have never worked as a barista, but I have worked as a line cook. It's not hard to cook one thing. It takes some time and practice to cook many things at once at a speed that keeps up with a good lunch rush. You can also easily compound the situation by trying to go too fast anyway, resulting in orders being sent back.
Oh, 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.
1. under the current CEO Starbucks has racked up numerous labor violations for union busting
For most of that time, there was something called 'store appreciation', around November, where everybody salaried had to travel to a WalMart store and work a full day there. And it had to be a Saturday, in addition to the normal Monday-Friday.
Most of my peers really complained about it, and it was kind of a pain in the ass, but it was usually illuminating and interesting. More than once, my experience there directly illuminated stuff I was working on or could work on back in tech land.
Inspired by that, I started to strongly encourage everyone on my team to spend a day in the NOC or Field Support (the two help desks we supported more than others) once a quarter or so. Again, a lot of complaining but most of the time we'd come back with some really useful insights.
EDIT: To be clear, 'everyone salaried' definitely included all of the executives, who would make a big deal out of it during big meetings, and often talk about their own personal findings.
It went back to a very "in the store, hands on" style from the founder, Sam Walton.
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> Occasionally fairly major changes like what? I'm curious. There's nothing that shows the flaws of a process like running it yourself.
Probably better to just listen to the people that do it all day than to think you pop in as an outsider and have some special insight.
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I think you'd be surprised what even a little manufactured exposure can do. It doesn't need to be undercover. At almost every company I've worked at that asks for feedback I recommend some version of this. Some things I think you could learn in only a few hours at a Starbucks: * "Wow that machine is a pain in the ass to use" * "3 customers got angry at me because ____" * "Making ___ the way Jane showed me was much ea…
Sure, there are a few things. That's why I qualified my statement. But they're necessarily going to be minor things, not the larger persistent problems that only become clear once you've spent some real time working.
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People need performance and narrative. Spending one day a month so you can say to fellow executives "I actually went and touched the problem, we need to fix it" and so employees can say to each other "he actually came and touched the problem, he must be working on fixing it" has real value. Actually learning about the problem and coming up with a solution is best done by listening to the people like you said, but the…
You're describing an incredibly toxic environment. Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust. Yes, I realize this toxic environment is present in 95% of all companies in the U.S. That makes it worse, not better.
You could apply this to literally 99% of any employer in the world.