Cherish and Challenge Your Legacy | How to Deliver World-Class Customer Experiences – Leading the Starbucks Way
This is the final post in a 5-post series about my book Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles to Connect with Your Customers, Your Products, and Your People. In the context of Cherish and Challenge Your Legacy, I asked, then CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz what he wanted his legacy to be. He responded, “I want to…
Reach for Common Ground | How to Deliver World-Class Customer Experiences – Leading the Starbucks Way
This is the third in a 5-post series, How to Deliver World-Class Customer Experiences – Leading the Starbucks Way, as we continue through the business concepts in my book Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles to Connect with Your Customers, Your Products, and Your People. In the context of my principle, Reach for Common Ground, I highlight…
Savor and Elevate | How to Deliver World-Class Customer Experiences – Leading the Starbucks Way
For context and based on requests, I’m in the process of presenting key concepts from my ten McGraw-Hill customer experience and leadership books. This is the first in a five-post series, “How to Deliver World-Class Customer Experiences – Leading the Starbucks Way.” The story of Starbucks’ meteoric growth during the 1990s and early 2000s is well…
When the Customer Experience Goes Awry [Differentiation Through Service Recovery]
Forgive me for sounding braggadocious, but I AM PERFECTLY IMPERFECT! But then again so are you and so is your business. Unfortunately, some leaders either don’t know they are imperfect, or they seek to fool consumers into thinking their businesses are flawless. In those environments, team members read the invisible handwriting on the wall and…
Howard Schultz: A Leader, A Teacher, and An Inspiration
As best I can remember I first met Howard Schultz in 2005 during work with Starbucks that led to the publication of my first of two books about the company, The Starbucks Experience. I was on one of the many maze-like floors at Starbucks world headquarters in Seattle (formerly the Sears fulfillment center back in the…
Starbucks: Greatness Personified/Excellence Diversified – What About You?
I met him while working with Starbucks around the time I wrote my first book about the company titled The Starbucks Experience. I’d venture to say that Starbucks might have been little more than one man’s vision if it wasn’t for his leadership strengths. He was one of the original architects of the brand – a…
The Risk of Excellence: Avoiding Customer Experience Mediocrity
Some years ago, I had the good fortune of working on an article draft with John Timmerman and Curt Coffman. John is currently Executive Director of Digital Transformation at Gallup and Curt has co-authored perennial bestselling books like First Break All the Rules and Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch. The article we worked on together…