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Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

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Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#311

Post by jrockway »

logicalmonster wrote: post #77
whack wrote: post #13

I 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…

> Alas, Google has no customer service, so their developers shall be placed in the void until morale improves.

We had customer support for Google Fiber, and engineers could pair with a CSR to listen to calls whenever they wanted to. We were widely regarded as having excellent customer support, and of course, customers were calling us about our highest priority but most difficult to fix bugs.

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#312

Post by toyg »

logicalmonster wrote: post #205
toyg wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But are there Apps out there where you can pick between say "Beginner and Expert" modes Yes, plenty. They've never been particularly popular, because they tend to impose an "all or nothing" switch to the user: by going Expert, you're suddenly overwhelmed by loads of options you don't know and don't understand. People mostly prefer a gentler path, where you become familiar with one feature at a time when you need it…

1) Just thinking out loud here, but some games have the most complex and information dense user interfaces you'll ever see. And sometimes they solve this problem by introducing new features in sort of a well-designed, first-class tutorial over the course of a few missions in a single-player campaign. Maybe Apps can try the same approach? 2) I can't help but think that many UI problems would be solved by Apps replacin…

> some games have the most complex and information dense user interfaces

Completely different audiences and incentives. Gamers game because they want to; most people use apps because they have to, to get shit done and pay the rent. Gamers are motivated to inspect capabilities in order to get an advantage, to solve the gameplay puzzle, even just to kill time; people are motivated to get the hell out of apps as quickly as possible and go shopping.

I don't care about the capabilities of MS Word, I just want to type some stuff out. I don't care that Outlook can read RSS feeds, I just want to send an email. I skip every single onboarding wizard I can skip, because I honestly don't give a shit about 90% of "features" out there. If people cared about advanced features, we'd all be using Emacs.

> many UI problems would be solved by Apps replacing meaningless icons with actual text labels

I don't disagree in principle, but the reality is that text takes a lot of screen real estate, scales badly, and most people think text-heavy UIs just look ugly. We could definitely have better and more meaningful icons though; the "material" anti-skeuomorphing bullshit has inflicted a lot of damage on the credibility of UX practitioners, over the last decade. The 90s in comparison were a dream.

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#313

Post by pkaye »

dahwolf wrote: post #310

One of my recurring revenge-porn dreams is as follow. I'm the owner (so not CEO) of a massive multinational. I'm mysterious and not really publicly known. The actual CEO is the public face. Next, I apply for a role in one of the branches, say a local sysadmin, get the job and start working there. I do my job, intentionally fuck up a few times, and take note of any dysfunction in the organization. There's lots, manage…

Isn't that the premise of the Undercover Boss show?

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#314

Post by karaterobot »

wintogreen74 wrote: post #280
bmj wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, fixing the problem is great, but if the CEO needs to personally witness the issue for it to get fixed, then there must be thousands of other issues not being fixed. Keep in mind in a corporation like Starbucks, the CEO is likely a hundred or more levels removed from the daily operations of a cafe. That's a lot of internal politics for even a motivated regional manager to navigate.

>> Keep in mind in a corporation like Starbucks, the CEO is likely a hundred or more levels removed from the daily operations of a cafe. Really? You think there's a hundred or more executives/managers/supervisors between the CEO and someone on the floor of a SBUX? I'd bet closer to 10.

This is an example of calling someone out for a misstatement that does not change the meaning of their message, and so was probably not necessary to make.

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#315

Post by nijave »

indymike wrote: post #295
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These "king gets wisdom from dressing as regular person" stories are great, and it's definitely a great idea for higher level folks to sample the ground truth themselves on a regular basis. CEOs are at a real danger of being surrounded by yes-men, and it's very possible that through conditioning and repetition they might actually start believing insane corporate positions. However, there's a real smell of something g…

> Was there a manager in charge of the stores who did not notice the problem? Probably. But there are often three to six layers of filters between the CEO and a service worker. Those managers may not see the effect of a small problem across the entire system. Sometimes those managers have incentive to hide problems to protect their bonus. Other times, the problem seems unimportant. In Starbucks case, a company with a…

>But there are often three to six layers of filters between the CEO and a service worker.

In my experience, each layer also tends to lessen the severity/criticality. Even when everyone is well intentioned and truthful, you end up with a lot different story/description when it reaches the end of the chain.

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#316

Post by karaterobot »

I know there are companies that make everybody (PMs, engineers, whatever) take a turn doing customer support. This sounds a bit like that: make people who are normally at a distance from the actual customers and their needs get a face full of it.

I've spent a lot of time building software for people who aren't me, largely in domains where the users are experts in something I've never done. Even though I'm not a CEO, and this would be more of a lateral move on the org chart, I've always really wanted to actually spend a couple weeks just doing some version of their jobs instead of mine. I think it would be worth several years of just asking them questions about what they need.

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#317

Post by rfrey »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #224
daedalus_j wrote: post #109

Ron Johnson used to do this when he headed Apple retail. Would just go into a store totally undercover to the customers (obviously staff would recognize him) and work for a bit. Occasionally fairly major changes, both to the staff side and to the customer experience, were made based on his visits. I don't recall ever seeing a press announcement about it. Saying you're doing it to win brownie points sure makes it seem…

These "king gets wisdom from dressing as regular person" stories are great, and it's definitely a great idea for higher level folks to sample the ground truth themselves on a regular basis. CEOs are at a real danger of being surrounded by yes-men, and it's very possible that through conditioning and repetition they might actually start believing insane corporate positions. However, there's a real smell of something g…

It could be that working in the store for a day is a good way to get candid and unfiltered input from those workers and managers.

Agreed that information should flow up the chain freely, but there are a lot of incentives working against that, some of which are just human nature (e.g. desire to fix the problems in one's own backyard without escalating.)

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#318

Post by KerrAvon »

Brendinooo wrote: post #200
tssva wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if he did the same thing at JC Penny when he was running it into the ground.

I didn't see it that way. He took a big swing to do something different and was fired less than two years into it. Maybe you could argue that he was straining against something too strong to overcome or misapplying his lessons from a higher-margin brand, but it's also possible to say that he wasn't given enough time to see it through. It's like if someone would have taken over Kodak at the turn of the century to go a…

Yes, we don't actually know whether it would have worked. He said upfront that it would need more time; apparently he didn't manage upward effectively enough and for some reason the board didn't feel desperate enough to give him more runway.

Department stores had already been declining for a long time before he came along, though.

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#319

Post by dahwolf »

pkaye wrote: post #313
dahwolf wrote: post #310

One of my recurring revenge-porn dreams is as follow. I'm the owner (so not CEO) of a massive multinational. I'm mysterious and not really publicly known. The actual CEO is the public face. Next, I apply for a role in one of the branches, say a local sysadmin, get the job and start working there. I do my job, intentionally fuck up a few times, and take note of any dysfunction in the organization. There's lots, manage…

Isn't that the premise of the Undercover Boss show?

No, my story is much better.

Undercover Boss doesn't fire anybody as far as I know. The premise of Undercover Boss is a company that is starving their employees. To distract from this awkward reality, the Undercover Boss picks an employee that is double-starving, say a single mother.

And then radically improves her life. Everybody claps and is in tears not realizing that everybody else continues to be fucked.

Not my approach. I achieve total justice.

Re: Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month

#320

Post by [deleted] »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #252
whack wrote: post #13

I 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.

I have a dumb question related to this. The new Starbucks CEO is Laxman Narasimhan. Google says he's worth about $20m. The previous Starbucks CEO was Howard Schultz. He's worth about $3.7b Can somebody who is worth between $20m and $3.7b really just... hang out broad daylight behind a counter at a Starbucks from a security perspective? Obviously I get the gap between $20m (he's just starting out, I'm sure his net wor…

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