Book Review : Onward
How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul
Usually, nytimes bestsellers are read due to the hype and marketing (sometimes deservedly so) around them. This is a story whose genesis is flipped.
I didn’t own a copy of this book, my wife did. And while I had seen it around the coffee table a couple times; I wasn’t going to spend a couple hours of my life listening to yet another billionaire, under the pretense of humility, gloat how their vision and perseverence saved their company and of course, changed the world. Plus, I’m Starbuckphillic. Mostly the former. However, one bright sunny day in the summer of ’23 as me and my wife made our way to a table at a Thai place in the eclectic Fremont neighborhood where I work; a familiar figure caught my eye. My multi-modal natural perceptron returned a high probability of face-match but the name hadn’t yet reached my lips.
As I sat down, my parietal lobes, furiously scanning my internal troves to place that person, my eyes locked with a woman sitting between me and this person. The gleam and the imperceptible nod re-inforced my mind that the person I passed by was someone of importance. There were 3 tables, including ours, that were occupied and yet there was an stillness to the place as our collective minds were heading towards the final piece of the puzzle. Then in a moment free of hallucinations, which would put GPT-4 to shame, the phrase CEO of Starbucks landed on my head’s runway. Reflexiviely I pulled out my phone, and googled the same and bam Mr Howard Schultz’s smilling face loaded on the screen and my confidence level bolted to certain. I gesticulated at my wife and announced, still in hushed tones but with the excitement of a child in the chocolate aisle of a supermarket, my discovery. She couldn’t believe it, and I don’t blame her; How could a billionaire and public persona of his stature be dining in a humble $$ eatery.
Fast-forward to the end of the meal and I summoned up the courage to walk up to Mr Schultz who was joined by his lovely wife Sheri. I was nervous and tentative, not quite sure the ettitquite of interrupting someone of such stature. However, what transpired next blew my mind away and instantly made me admire him and want to read his book, so much so that that was my book of choice, alongside QED by Richard Feynmann(review coming shortly) on my transcontinental flight home. Instead of it being a curt exchange, like I was expecting, Mr Schultz’s face lit up like he was meeting an old-friend and his trademark million-dollar smile manifested radiating warmth and quickly dissolving my anxiety away. We ended up conversing for no less than 5 minutes, but what felt like an hour; he asked about where we grew up, what we do etc; way higher octane than the curt nod and way more substantiative than brief small talk that I expected. The icing on the cake was a photo that his wife so generously offered to take which will be a life-long cherished memory no doubt.
A great side-effect of this encounter was that when I read the book, I felt Mr Schultz reading out the book to me, in his voice, his warmth, wisdom and kindness and that made the book a lot more personable and digestible.
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But given the increasingly burnt cappucinos I’ve been dreading to sip at the local Starbucks, maybe it’s time Mr. Schultz does a 3rd rodeo. Reshape starbucks from the bean-counter that it’s become to the bean-lover it was.
