Posted by Michelle Holliday on 01 Feb 2010
I had a great time presenting a workshop at the McGill Business Conference on Sustainability this Saturday and got some really good questions and comments.
One was about Starbucks and why it started out feeling so alive and authentic and doesn't anymore, for anyone involved.
The person who raised the question said that when she started working there, the baristas had thorough training and were able to make coffee drinks to order. More recently, coffee making has been automated and the baristas seem to receive less training, and so they are less able to interact knowledgeably with customers. The result has been a loss of the full sense of Mastery, in which the employee is able to bring some unique part of themselves to their work. This seems to be the first part of the problem.
But that also seems to be a symptom of a bigger issue. In my talk about the Engagement Competency Model, I pointed out that the central column of competencies represents the infrastructure that supports the connection between employees and customers -- that allows life to flow from one to the other. That central infrastructure is the only part of the organization that is lifeless -- life resides with the employees and with the customers. What I see happening in many large (and even not-so-large) companies is that the conversation between employees and customers becomes automated in the interest of control and predictability. In these cases, it's the lifeless central infrastructure that's talking to the customers. This is why you get the sense that you're talking to a machine, even if you're actually talking to a human being. And this kind of experience is dehumanizing for both employee and customer. In addition to feeling dissatisfying, letting the machine do the talking also limits evolution and innovation, both of which rely on the spark of life that only the human spirit can provide.
In contrast, think about the examples of Southwest Airlines, Google and Apple. The connection between living employees and living customers is retained, even though some parts of that conversation are necessarily automated. Along the same lines, another workshop participant described a trend he noticed in New York on a recent trip. On advertising billboards, companies are no longer listing their www.companyname.com address. Instead, they're listing the company's Facebook address. As long as the conversation that happens there is between real human beings, this is a fantastic trend in the right direction.
I worked for several years with a chain of coffee shops in Montreal, helping them craft a manifesto and a subsequent set of strategies and actions. Within their manifesto, they said, "We consider carefully what we automate and at what cost we gain efficiency and speed." This may be be a helpful thought for Starbucks -- and so many others -- to consider.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michelle Holliday has 20 years’ experience in brand strategy, with particular expertise in authentic marketing. She founded Cambium after observing that the predominant organizational concepts and ways of working are neither optimal nor sustainable. And she is driven by the desire to help usher in an expanded set of beliefs and practices based on a view of organizations as living systems. [Read more]
Very interesting post Michelle. Thank you
Do you feel Starbucks evolved in that "mechanical" direction because it made it more profitable? What might have prevented this?
Thanks for your great questions, Seb. Yes, I do think they evolved in a "mechanical" direction because it made them more profitable, most notably through continuous and rapid growth of the total number of stores.
As for what could have prevented it, we have to look at the underlying assumptions behind the choice to mechanize and standardize.
The prevailing assumption in business is that (1) scalability and rapid growth are fundamental to increasing profit and, therefore, success, and (2) scalability relies on standardization.
In order to answer your question about what could have prevented Starbucks' mechanization, we first have to ask the heretical question: is scalability and rapid growth really all it's cracked up to be? It's very nice for owners (including employees, in Starbucks' case) who increase their personal wealth, as well as for customers, who can count on a predictable (and often less expensive) product anywhere in the world. But what do we currently sacrifice to get these outcomes?
- We often lose the local flavor of smaller competing businesses. We know that the resilience of a living system (like an economy) relies on diversity. The recent financial crisis is evidence of the need for higher levels of resilience in our economic system and many believe that encouraging diversity is one important solution. (See www.moveyourmoney.info for one example.)
- When growth is achieved through standardization of even human beings, we lose the spark of the human spirit, in all its passion, connectedness and self-organizing capability to learn and evolve. We become less human, less fully alive, both in working for standardized organizations and in doing business with them. And that feels bad, which contributes substantially to the physical and mental health problems that plague our society. These resulting problems then put a strain on the economy as externalized costs.
- Historically, rapid growth and increasing profit have been seen as the primary goals, with preserving Earth's life support systems given secondary consideration (at best). What will be the impact of more of those non-recyclable cups piling up in more landfills (or oceans and rivers) around the world? Of more coffee beans being transported to more locations? Is it really responsible to grow rapidly if it brings you increasing monetary profit but jeopardizes life on Earth (including your own)? Might it be wiser to halt growth plans until you can be sure they are truly life-sustaining?
This isn't an anti-globalization tirade -- it's an invitation to standardized, high growth companies to explore how they might achieve reasonable growth in ways that do not sacrifice the resilience of the global economy, the human spirit and the Earth's life support systems.
Within the current mechanistic understanding of organizations (and ourselves), such an exploration is simply not possible. It will not compute, and we will remain stuck in a trade-off mentality, in which we must choose between individual economic livelihood and environmental sustainability. The needs of our souls do not even factor into the equation.
But as we shift into an understanding of organizations and economies as living systems, new solutions begin to surface, along with new priorities and new concepts of value. And the examples of Google, Southwest Airlines and others help us see that profitability and scalability can be accomplished without the sacrifices described above.
Indeed, the market is shifting so that consumers are increasingly unwilling to accept those sacrifices in exchange for predictability and a lower price. They're demanding personalization, authentic relationship and responsibility.
This may be why 2008 saw Starbucks' stock price hit rock bottom after a steady and extended decline, suggesting that across-the-board standardization works for a time but in the long run does not drive sustainable shareholder value. And it may be why a 2008 quarterly report describes the company's "transformation agenda" focused on "Re-igniting the emotional attachment with customers and restoring the connections customers have with Starbucks ® coffee, brand, people and stores." I believe that no amount of savvy, standardized marketing can accomplish these goals. I believe that they can only be achieved by inviting the human spirit back into the equation, enabling employees to feel Mastery, Membership and Meaning and inviting customers to look beyond the commodity to find a sense of Community and authentic Heroic Cause. These are aspects of the Engagement Competency Model, and they are based on a view of organizations as living systems.
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