Starbucks CEO will work a shift at the company’s cafes once a month
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
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 inauthentic. Then again maybe it's better this way than leaking it to a reporter and pretending that it was discovered organically. Guess we'll have to wait and see if anything actually comes out of it to know if it's just a stunt, but I'd put my money on it.
However, there's a real smell of something going wrong from them as well. The CEO working a single shift noticed something that needed to be changed? Why? Did none of the thousands of workers who work those shifts every day notice that problem? Did they have no way to report it? Did those reports not get evaluated properly? Was there a manager in charge of the stores who did not notice the problem? 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.
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 great employer reputation is suddenly facing unionization, so there is a problem there. Unions don't happen because employees are happy.
> 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.
In retail, nothing reveals subtle and not so subtle issues faster than being at the point of interaction with customers. Things that might look great on paper or sound good in a meeting at corporate sometimes aren't a good idea. Also, what works in one region, or even at a store across town, might now work well in another. You won't see any of this from a board room or flying in a Gulfstream.
I guess one important thing to look out for to judge this as either a PR stunt, or an actual well meaning practice - will be toi see if store managers get any advance notice that the CEO is gonna be working there.
If an ambitious career oriented manager knows the boss is gonna see everything that hopes on tomorrow, you can bet there's be extra staff rostered on the day before to make sure everything is better-that-normally prepped for the next day, that all the most compliant staff and the staff who are most beholden to the manager will be rostered on and they'll all be coached about what to say and threatened if they say the wrong thing, and probably a whole bunch of friends of the manager will show up as stooges on the day cosplaying happy and satisfied "ordinary customers".
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.
So a real blocker in my opinion is that there is no clear incentive structure to even think or care about a fix in the first place.
The CEO will care much more about it because their compensation/position is essentially tied to improving this side of the business.
In my experience, the existing process has a way of appearing invisible such that any change will feel like more work, even when it isn't. It's hard to improve things when your coworkers perceive you as trying to give them more work.
The lack of compensation always baffled me. If an employee comes up with a change that saves the company $x, why don't they get bonused <$x for the year? Win/win.
Make it subject to approval or somesuch, to prevent gaming and weed out edge cases, but every employee should be incentivized to find a way to do their job better.
For example, I happily programmed in C for many years while not even noticing severe problems with the language. Later broader experience with other languages led me to wonder why I didn't see the problems with C before, even though they were negatively affecting my work.
S s;
S *p;
s.field
p->field
s.field
p.field
I was able to see this only via broader experience with other languages. I never even noticed the issue before.
C++ addressed this not by fixing it, but by introducing the reference type. But the C++ ref type brings along with it all kinds of new problems, which I won't get into here.
your language is too sloppy for me, a pointer-to-a-struct contains a value (could say "is" a value), and some struct-members might resolve as values, but a switch from a struct to a pointer-to-a-struct is not a switch between a value and a reference; while you might call a pointer "a reference", a struct is never a value. Or did you mean a "dot" r-value and a "dereference to an" r-value? This all makes a difference because C is a call-by-value language, and you can't pass a struct, so it's an important distinction to maintain.
This kind of change might be something a student or newb might encounter, but an experienced C programmer is going to have a sense from the start whether to go with a static/local struct or a malloc'ed one. Maybe on more common a struct containing a struct might switch to a struct containing a pointer to another struct.
personally, I use hungarian and ps->x vs s.x is a nice reinforcement of what hungarian is trying to reinforce. Using parenthesis to illustrate a sort of precedence, I guess I associate the (pointer->) like that as opposed to the (.member) though I can't defend that as making an inordinate amount of sense :)
As soon as you have been in a place 3 or 6 months you are used to all the workarounds and the reasons why things can't be done.
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.
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.
But that's just direct bosses-boss levels. Doesn't take into consideration things like... PMs, suppliers, customers, Health & Safety (which will vary by locale), unions, security, accounting, HR, public relations & the media, the board of directors, and all of the myriad depts. that will pop up in odd or varied ways.
Maybe not 100 levels, but certainly dozens and dozens of interested parties.
/sarcasm
Sure, ideally you can get all your actionable information from your metrics, but in reality sometimes to understand what's really happening you just need to step through the code one statement at a time.
Obviously, he's much more intelligent than all those other people, that's why he's the CEO and way richer than them. Rich people are more intelligent and better than poor people in most aspects. That's why the laws favor them.
An interesting thing happened at a company I worked for: the engineers were, during a time of intense labor pressure, asked to staff the fulfillment center. The fulfillment staff worked under a supervisor, and were supposed to perform the same rote tasks all day long: hook this device up to the bench, pack this box, unpack that box, and so on. The engineers worked under their engineering managers, and were supposed to perform the _exact samesame_ rote tasks all day: configure devices, pack and unpack boxes.
What really happened was that the engineers found all sorts of ways to optimize the process as they went - and they made them largely without asking anybody. They then shared the optimizations with the other engineers, who followed suit. And they were rewarded by engineering management for finding those optimizations. Later, they propagated back down to the supervisors, who propagated them down to the fulfillment staff.
If the fulfillment staff deviated from their rote tasks, though? They'd have most likely been fired.
But it sure as hell sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would have happened at Amazon.
(And, as a plot twist, those same engineers went back to their coding jobs earning 8 or 10 times what the fulfilment staff make, and started on a project using machine vision to algorithmically detect "rote task violations" and have the computer fire people for them...)
But the major factor is I wasn't scared to make or suggest changes in how I worked. Everyone else on the line needed that t-shirt printing job so they just did what they were told. I wasn't afraid of being fired or reprimanded for making changes so I was much more free with my words and work.
Along similar lines why did the manager's manager not notice the problem? IF the CEO can spend time investigating how the lowest tier workers operate, surely every manager can spend time looking at the tier of workers below his immediate tier.
If they have a good CEO, they will realize there is an issue with the reporting system and fix that. If not, at least the glaring issue gets resolved, and perhaps someone else is able to use this as evidence to improve the reporting system in the future.
Nobody at the store has any influence, the area managers complain but the project for the new system is low priority.
The CEO has the ability to see that this is a problem and the project needs increased priority.
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.)
Yeah, nah.
Can you imagine any low level AppleStore worker giving Steve Jobs "candid and unfiltered input"???
If that's what you're after, you don't send in a very public top-of-the-org-chart face. At least not in any place with at-will (or right-to-work, whichever it is?) employment laws, where they could fire you on the spot for no reason at all. (Most likely not the CEO doing the firing, but the workers direct or one up or regional manager - who'd just been shown up as worthy of "candid and unfiltered input")
The job of the CEO is to know as much as possible and take responsibility for it.
That doesn't always happen, but it should.
It is a sham when it's used to counter disagreements from employees.
When a company is young and wants to engage employees I think this type of signaling can work great. When you're the established, mature incumbent and your employees feel they need to unionize to get fair treatment, this is a stunt for the public and not going to change anything internal.
After a lot of bouncing around the US it's a treat to fly. I feel like hating on them is something of a Canadian pastime.
I'll also give AC credit: they have to fly a lot of not great routes as a national mandate, and that means cutting corners to make things profitable; the challenges of flag carriers, etc. etc.
like what? I'm curious. There's nothing that shows the flaws of a process like running it yourself.
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 pricing and program benefits were announced. I later learned that the need for changes had become a very high priority the same day as his visit.
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 right call on the data they have, but they're missing critical data.
E.g. Not realizing that 1/5 a store needs to be used for ad hoc inventory because too much product was flooded during holidays, ergo it cannibalizes display space, ergo the sales rates of various SKUs are all out of whack (to come up with a contrived example)
The only solution was to take an entire day from the CEO to figure out that the goals were unrealistic? Wasn't the very first clue that stores were generally unable to meet the expected attach rates?
It just highlights this dumb idea that executives are these ungodly force multipliers. I bet if anyone had bothered to ask the day-to-day labor about the proposed attach rates (and actually listened) they wouldn't have had to burn a day's worth of CEO compensation to figure out they weren't achievable.
When it came to the areas he wasn't as comfortable in, say the genius bar, he still deeply understood the customer experience, but never tried to do the job if he wasn't able.
Boy, I'm coming off like a fanboy here... It was just a truly impressive and inspiring thing to see as one of the regular employees. If I worked at Starbucks it's what I'd want to see, not some propped-up press tour.
[0] http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...
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 there's a role for the other thing too.
This is the most direct way of accomplishing that.
From CEO of Dixon, to CEO of Burberry and finally Apple veteran, Deirdre O'Brien. The improvement she made was like many of the recent Mac changes, reverting back to old design.
Seems Tim eventually realized selling luxury trench coats isn't very similar to premium computer hardware/software. Meanwhile investors had to pay nearly $200 Million in comp for the privilege of her leading this "town square" fantasy (not sure I'd ever consider a store in the mall a community fixture) while ignoring the internet exists.
Would have rather put ChatGPT in charge of the stores and spent that $200M on improving the software that a Billion Apple users spend time with every day.
The problem is it didn't translate into improved performance. The opposite actually. Because what customers say and what customers do aren't always the same thing. They may complain that there are too many coupons. But when given the choice they preferred using coupons.
So he got sacked and JC Penney went back to the old pricing scheme. By becoming even more risk-averse no one after him even tried to pull the company out of its death spiral. In hindsight the plan would never have succeeded because the customers who would have appreciated the simpler pricing had already left. The JCP shoppers at that time were coupon hunters who resented the changes. He ignored the existing customers while chasing ex-customers who didn't want to return.
By removing the price war, pricing their product at value. You now can compete on a more simple message of quality: "Our product is worth $10 more because X". The best part of this is...that's exactly what Walmart is actually doing. Walmart is actually rather sale-resistant and they frame it as a 'rollback' rather than X% off. Walmart's message is purely the regular price, not the value.
The issue you of course run into for JCP though, is in the interm, as the market changes, you need to throw a bunch quarters made up of that built up growth hacking debt of ever increasing sales in the trash. That just won't fly on Wall st.
What JCP really need is a reboot though, they are doomed either way due to their leases. Organizationally, I would be trying to get rid of those as fast as possible and get into outdoors small-medium retail. They have a great brand but have insanely expensive locations.
Of course, I would have made the same mistake as Johnson. But it is always a good reminder of how differently people’s brains work.
It's like if someone would have taken over Kodak at the turn of the century to go all-in on digital. It would have hurt the company in the short term and kicked against their core business but maybe they would have come out on the other side better off. Impossible to say if the scenario isn't allowed to happen.
His tenure coincides with the beginning of the decline of department stores in general, so you'd have to show that JCPenney fared uniquely worse to say that he ran it into the ground. It still exists, unlike Lord and Taylor and Sears. Doesn't seem to have fared much worse than Macy's, though I didn't do a ton of research here.
Department stores had already been declining for a long time before he came along, though.
Starbucks doesn’t have a good track record for replacement CEO for Howard Schultz (founder/CEO).
So I’m sure these kind of announcements is to instill confidence with Wall Street that this CEO will work out.
I think it's probable that they wouldn't.
Outside the bay area, eh, 50/50, you're right.
It was also impressive how fast word would go down the teller line that "corporate" was in the branch and everyone would sort of shape up for the hour they were around.
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 annoying manual billing process that's error prone or looking up customer information by logging into 5 different systems.
Alas, Google has no customer service, so their developers shall be placed in the void until morale improves.
It was very eye opening.
I never really understood why they focus on these two things. They're good for rank beginners, I suppose, but once you've even approached competency, those "easier" workflows inevitably end up being a huge pain in the ass, and lower information density is actively a terrible thing.
Just curious. Many applications have some kind of "Settings" or "Preferences" section with some kind of App UI customization being possible. Often it's just a set of fairly simple features like picking a favorite background color for your App or being able to upload your own avatar or something.
But are there Apps out there where you can pick between say "Beginner and Expert" modes and have a radically different UI and UX depending on how experienced and comfortable you are? (Gmail sort of has a touch of that concept with the ability to either have a dense or comfortable email layout, but that's barely scratching the surface of what's possible)
PS: I realize that trying to develop, maintain, and support mobile and desktop versions of different versions of the same App would morph into a significant and unpleasant challenge, but being able to pick the type of UI might be a possible solution that pleases more types of users.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the UX people were wrong though. Even if their changes made the experienced people slightly slower, it could be worth it if it significantly sped up onboarding.
AND if a developer actually has the opportunity to do something about it. Many companies overbook their developers time such that deadlines are constantly missed, where in that prioritization is their room for significant improvements to other services?
If the Engineering Manager is judged by their project throughput how does the EM feel about their reports working outside of that scope?
If there's value in Customer Service there should be a distinct team working on it and it shouldn't become a second job existing employees have to work.
Where I work it's not uncommon for people to come into engineering through support > support engineering > software engineering. At one point our top AE decided he didn't want the stress of selling and went from AE > PM > UI Engineer. These have always been some of my favorite engineers to work with.
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.
The difference will be if you think that you're going to come up with better prescriptions for success than they are (and this is where the level of executive cleverness comes into play). One day per month in a Starbucks shop and then giving technical directives wouldn't make any sense, but one day per month in a Starbucks shop and then redirecting budgeting at a corporate level might.
In the case of offices, the receptionist is the most important and powerful person there. They are the ones who have the ear of everybody else, have control of access to everyone else, know how things really work (as opposed to how everyone says they work), etc.
A good or bad word from the receptionist can literally make or break business deals.
And I know personally that my experience working in a small-business warehouse back when I was young was absolutely garbage. Smaller businesses rarely get any news coverage, but I worked in a warehouse with zero ventilation, no safety training, no safety equipment, nobody trained in logistics, broken and improper lifting equipment, etc. This is par for the course at a workplace with zero outside scrutiny.
Amazon warehouses are at least run by professionals in logistics, have proper safety procedures, equipment, training, etc. As I understand, the 'bad' part is the volume. But at the end of the day, even a well-run warehouse job is a warehouse job. It is physical work.
Bezos would do one day a year operating the customer service lines.
Similar situation where they would send everyone in the company to work in the store, so you would actually use the system you've developed in the real world and understand why everyone always hates the software.
> “You’re doing what Bob Iger does at Disney!” Jack tells Gavin. “He makes every manager wear the Goofy suit one day out of the year.”
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 worth will grow to at least $50m shortly if he does well at Starbucks) and $3.7b is huge. But at what point is going outside (without security? where people know you will be?) kind of a risk?
If I was worth $3b (like the previous Starbucks CEO), I'd be worried about being held up at gunpoint/abducted/held hostage for ransom.
I am lead to believe Tim Cook doesn't just walk around like you and I?
My first McJob was at an owner-operated McDonalds where the owner would roll in at lunch on a Saturday in his BMW Z4, see the lunch rush, wash his hands, throw on some gloves, and call out to turn on the other side of the grill for assembly and start packing orders himself on that side to help out the workload.
Gained a lot of respect as an impressionable young adult on what a good leader looks like at that job because his efforts trickled down to his store manager and the managers underneath them.
The worst thing was that Ray Kroc's wife live in the next town over and routinely came through our drive thru. Once the lot was being re-surfaced and she was royally pissed that the drive thru was closed and she had to come inside and mingle with the hoi polloi.
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, management are bullies.
Fast forward a few months and at the weekly all hands meeting, it is me sitting at the head of the table. The local manager aggressively insists that I move, but I remain seated. He gets security involved but security does nothing. He tells me I'm fired but I don't blink.
As the dust settles, I open the meeting and immediately fire all of management, whom are physically thrown out. Next, I give all staff a raise and do something nice and personal for each of them.
Everybody claps. Then I wake up from the cat sitting on my face.
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.
They can keep their 20% discount though on the after-work course "5 ways to financial success" so that personal issues stop disrupting productivity.
Otherwise store management spends a huge amount of time trying to tidy up before “corporate” comes by.
At least that was my experience when things like this happened at the fruit stand.
I had my hand in a cast at the time in a work related incident, so I only did some menial tasks. The regional manager focused on me for a time, and was extremely frustrated with how slow I was. He proceeded to show me how much quicker he could do those menial tasks with just one hand. It was weird. I feel like the disconnect he had with the realities of the stores is on an entire other level than not being there to witness it.
As long as you spring it on them they won't have a chance to tidy up first. They'll still be on their best behavior and follow every rule to a T once the exec shows up though.
I think it's worth something.
Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan told employees Thursday that he’ll work a half day every month at one of the coffee giant’s locations.
Something tells me it'll be something like 1-5pm; not the 7am rush.
11am-6pm seem to be peak hours for cafes near me - and google data confirms this. Why would 7am be peak time there?
During the less busy times, he might learn something, though. Especially if he talks with his partners. They still call the workers at Starbucks "partners," right?
I dont think undercover bossing is helpful. But a CEO working a barista or manager shift at a store and dealing with customers and all the shit employees deal with it going to be insightful for the CEO. Hopefully that will help set policy and make work better for those workers.
When it's just the CEO for one day a month...it's like when you see a frontpage news article declaring that your governor recently undertook a choreographed ride on the local subway to better understand their constituents' public transit concerns. Instead of making them seem relatable and trustworthy, it highlights how grossly out of touch they are.
I hope he rotates through a few different stores, though. Otherwise, he may become myopic to the quirks of one particular location.
CEO fielded 4 calls before he figured out what happened. No idea if he solved the problems or not.
I kinda dreamt since that day that any product managers would work some time taking support calls for their products and it'd be a better world because they'd realise all the issues we've been raising about their product are real.... But instead we were just lowly support folks who didn't know about product development and they continued to be "agile"
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.
One of the higher ups had worked his way up from the bottom of the totem pole. He would come and work the frontline and the employees were generally appreciative.
One of his subordinates followed his lead - except he had no idea what he was doing. He was slow, got in people’s way, and did things no frontline employee would ever be allowed to do - just give stuff away constantly.
At the end of the day, the CEO isn’t ever going to be under the same pressure or constraints as a normal employee. This is extremely likely to just end up being a vanity project.
I also don't see it as some veiled attempt to act like he's trying to empathize with every aspect of the workers' lives. Not that a lot of people are suggesting this, but some are, and it seems like an incorrect impulse to assume that. As the new CEO, he wants to see the operating conditions of their stores, where they make most of their money. Seems like a decent idea to me, and is presumably different from what the previous CEO was doing.
It's all dependent upon the intent of the CEO or person coming in and doing the work. Just as an anecdote, I have seen too many times where a superior comes in with the intent of doing the work to prove it can be done better, rather than to understand the realities of what employees are dealing with, and the results are negative. I frequently had a COO who would come to my warehouse, get on the front line with processing equipment (just as an aside, this was an ITAD company processing end-of-life IT equipment for data sanitization and remarketing, so it's tech-related), and take a cavalier, "SEE! I could go through ALL of that in X amount of minutes! I don't understand why people can't move fast enough blah, blah, blah."
What he never realized is that he didn't do all the work. He'd capture only what he looked at in the system, never put anything away, and left a massive pile of work, and garbage, behind him that my team always had to clean up. He wouldn't take the time to do the rest of the work that the team has to do themselves day in and day out. He half-assed it and berated us at the end, and I could never get him to understand this. It's not that it "didn't always work out perfectly", it's that it made morale plummet every single time it happened.
So yeah, I share your sentiment, but to a point - it's reliant upon the person diving in to keep an open mind and actually give a shit about it instead of just using it as a, "Look at me, I'm a man of the people!" opportunity.
1. under the current CEO Starbucks has racked up numerous labor violations for union busting
Working a half day per month will tell you very little of importance in any workplace. And, if you're the CEO of the company and all of the other employees (and especially management) knows you're the CEO, working that half day will tell you exactly nothing.
* "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 easier than the training"
* "I hate it when customers pay using ____"If he's serious about this, he should go in, in disguise, without anyone at the store knowing who he is (including top management).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_Boss_(British_TV_se...
“And the handles on the carafes! You see this injection molding seam? You see where it is when I pick up the carafe for tbe 500th time today? You see these callouses? You’re not going to have callouses, you’re going to have blisters! Like everyone in the first week! And the packaging on these cups! You see this…”
Why? Just as long as they don't fire someone on the spot, live on social media, I'm sure their PR team can handle it. E.g. make a statement "Joe Schmoe had persistent performance issues and was fired a month after the CEO visit, there's no connection to the CEO."
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.
Article sez he 'plans to work a shift', then later sez 'he'll work a half day every month'. So I guess they mean a corporate shift?
Hearing problems/complaints directly from the voice of the customer, then having to explain a sometimes cumbersome workaround to solve them, is invaluable. Plus you buy goodwill with your support team for walking a day in their shoes.
Nothing worse than a CEO who does not understand how their business works at the lowest level. Unless this somehow does not matter for business profitability or future (which there are examples of but much less than many people would think).
In my experience, upper management has this problem of getting accurate information. This happens for many reasons and is really, really, really hard to fix. It usually requires conscious, serious and sustained effort from the manager demonstrating his/her people that it is safe to bring information whether good or bad.
I bet the a shift once a month is good investment of time as long as he won't be placed in a bubble -- a model Starbucks location where everything works perfectly because the CEO works there once a month.
It does not matter if you pick random locations, people will still modify what they are saying when they see you.
But it helps a bit. There is higher chance you will finally meet some people who are not afraid to tell the truth. There is also chance you will start seeing some patterns. It is probable that managers will clean up a lot of stuff when they suddenly get to know about a visitation, but they won't clean up everything and you will get at least some glimpses. Visit enough restaurants enough times and glimpses may form an image of reality.
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.
No matter what he does, he knows he gets go to home to a safe place with plenty to eat at the end of the day. You can't simulate the effect of the lack of that certainty on someone's work.
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.
On a personal level, however, it would only work for me if Mr Narasimhan decided he didn't like the taste of the coffee and changed it; I haven't visited a Starbucks in decades because I find their brew quite unpleasant!
But seriously, unless the whole shop is staffed by management, to get a taste of the job on some rotation, they will mostly just get in the way of front line people. In high school I hated, hated it when a boss would come in and do work. It just stunk the atmosphere.
> Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan told employees Thursday that he’ll work a half day every month at one of the coffee giant’s locations.
contradiction in the first sentence. doesnt leave this stunt in good light
I did a quick search and see a Starbucks shift consists of:
> Evening shifts are around 3pm - 7pm or 4pm - 8pm. Morning Shifts 4 a.m. - 1 p.m. Midday Shifts 8 a.m. - 4 p.m
We few, we happy few, we band of baristas;
For any to-day that boils a brew with me
Shall be my bestie; be they ne'er so vile,
This day shall glow up their selfie post;
And customers in Bed-Stuy now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their socials cheap whiles any speaks
That pulled with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
If you think he’s a bad CEO, you shouldn’t want him there at all. If you think he’s a good CEO you shouldn’t want him dropping his work for a month.
Now... CEOs with "push-button menu option" based call centers under them should be mandated to call monthly and complete some task.
I'm there a lot (some would say too much, but I wholeheartedly disagree!), and it's odd to pass through without seeing him. He works the register, he takes orders in the drive through, he directs traffic in the parking lot, he carries orders out-- everything. I'm certain that he's done shifts in the kitchen as well, just that I couldn't seem him to know.
Just today, I went into the restroom to wash my hands and he was cleaning the stall.
All these folks are so out of touch with reality.
Only in a very dysfunctional company will this lead to any meaningfull improvement.
And it wouldn't work. I don't think a lot of people would be comfortable sharing real complaints with the CEO who parachuted in for a single shift. It will probably end up being a bit of a Potemkin village situation. The shift will probably be filled up with the highest-motivated, most ass-kissing employees, whose focus will be keeping the CEO comfortable.
It would absolutely work in a sense. Of course the CEO will not get a real experience and of course no one will bring any real grievances to him. But the CEO will still get some exposure to day to day. It is still somewhat better than not doing it at all. It’s a good precedent to set and one can only hope more CEOs would follow
The CEO will quickly spot broken processes and inefficiencies. Ass kissing can't make up for business problems. Beyond that, by working in a different store, gets a feel on how generic the approach can be, and where they need local optimizations.
The only think you are taking out of the consideration is toxic lower management and asshole colleagues, but that's not something I'd expect the CEO to fix directly himself. If anything he is just bored of the ass kissers and good news shows, and wants to regain a feel of reality
They will quickly spot what they perceive to be broken processes and inefficiencies, but they don't have real experience of the actual work at that level to be able to safely move Chesterton's fence.
I think that reasoning might have some flaws.
Complete waste of time that could be better spent improving their conditions.
Maybe then both parties will come to realize whether or not the 3 orders of magnitude difference in pay is warranted.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/starbucks-ceo-salary-laxman-...
The CEO should just go work in a coffee field for a day. What an ass