Podcast - Howard Behar: Former President, Starbucks Coffee Company / Author: It's Not About the Coffee

As I read Howard Behar's new book, It's Not About the Coffee, I found myself thinking, "Hey! What's he been doing inside my brain?" So many of the ideas he talks about align directly with the ideas I focus on in my work, my blog, and this podcast.

When  Behar joined Starbucks in 1989, it was a small regional company with only 28 stores. Today, there are thousands of stores worldwide. While coffee obviously plays an important role in the company, for Behar it has always been about the people. And his single-minded commitment to making it about the people provided a key ingredient in Starbucks' growth and success.

Listen to this podcast and hear Behar's insights on:

• How living an authentic, "one-hat" life contributes to both happiness and success.

• How to do the groundwork for living that authentic life.

• How investing in self-exploration helped Behar recognize Starbucks as the perfect opportunity for him.

• His own vision of a successful life.

This is the first of two podcast featuring Behar. In the next podcast, he talks about:

• Ways to overcome fears and doubts.

• The value of celebrating failure.

• The keys to his success.

• Creating a culture of, "Yes."

Details:

Click here to listen or save the mp3:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Howard Behar

Length: 26:25

Enjoy!

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Click below (if you're on the main page) or scroll down (if you're on this post's page) for the transcript of this podcast.

Hello, and welcome to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast. I’m Curt Rosengren, and my focus is helping people create careers that energize and inspire them. It’s all about answering the question, how do you put your passion to work to make a difference that inspires you, in a way that lets you thrive?

In this series, you will find insights and inspiration from thought leaders and trailblazers – people who are crafting a life of Meaning, Abundance, and Passion.

Today’s podcast is the first of a two-part series featuring Howard Behar, former president of Starbucks International and Starbucks North America, and author of the book, “It’s Not About the Coffee: Leadership Principles from a Life at Starbucks.”

When Behar joined Starbucks in 1989, there were a grand total of 28 stores. Over the years, he left an indelibly positive mark on the company’s people-centric culture.

I have a friend who worked for Behar at Starbucks back in the 90’s. When I mentioned I was going to interview him, she made a comment that said a lot about his legacy there. “People didn’t follow Howard because he had authority,” she said. “People followed him because they loved him.”

“It’s Not About the Coffee” is a book that shares some of the ideas that made Behar so effective. It’s also a book that almost never got written.

Well, I never saw myself as a writer of books – actually as a writer of anything. And there were two women that I worked with inside of Starbucks. One was the head of marketing for the international business, when we first started international. And the other one was a consultant. And they kept pestering me after I retired to write all this stuff down that I talk about. And I kept telling them, I’m an in the dirt guy. I do it, and I’m conscious about what I do, and I teach it really well. But I never saw myself as writing it down.

Over a period of about a couple years I finally said, OK, if you’re so interested in it, you write it. You can interview me and other people and get the stuff down. So they did. They started the process. And then about half way in it, they were doing other things and they lost the energy, and I was hooked. Because it was interesting. It was forcing me to think about the things that I said a lot more than – when you just talk, talk’s cheap, as they say. Right?

So I had to start thinking about it. OK, what do I really mean here? And why do those words come out of my mouth, and how do they fit on a piece of paper, and how do I get my energy into the writing, and how does my voice come out here, versus just a book about some nebulous ideas that are certainly not new. So it became fun, and interesting. And so I got hooked on it and moved forward on it. And I think at the end of the day I realized that I was writing a book for myself, as a reminder of the things that I valued and what mattered to me.

I’m not a super-intelligent guy. I learn things in paragraphs. And I find something that fits me and I latch onto it and I make it mine in some way. I kind of dig deeper around. So this book kind of is my life through the lessons that I’ve learned. I mean it’s got the Starbucks logo on the cover, and it says It’s Not About the Coffee – those are all hooks, of course, to get people interested in the book, because everybody’s interested in Starbucks. But the truth is, almost all the stuff in there comes from sixty-three years of living. From mistakes and from successes and from failures and from pain and from happiness and joy and fun and agony. Everything. It’s all in there.

As Behar sees it, people are going to be happiest and most successful if they align what they do with who they really are. It’s a level of personal authenticity he calls it one-hat living, wearing the hat that really fits you and not changing hats based on what you think others expect. As so often happens in life, he discovered the importance of one-hat living by doing the opposite.

I learned the lesson early on in my career. I was working for a company called Grantree Furniture Rental. I was living in Portland, Oregon. I got promoted to Vice President. It was the first time I ever became an officer of a company. And I was so excited, and I remember calling my mom and saying, you won’t believe this. And told my wife. It was just a big deal when you’re young.

And so here I am thinking I’m the world’s greatest, and one day I’m sitting at the elevator and the chairman of the board / CEO comes up to me and says, we’re glad you’re here and glad we were able to promote you and, now that you’re an officer I want to give you some feedback. And he said, you know Howard, I’ve watched you a lot, and you’re so passionate about everything you believe in. You always are wearing your feelings on your sleeve. And I said, yeah, that’s true. I’ve always been kind of recognized for that. I was outspoken. I said what I thought.

And he said, you know, now that you’re an officer, you’ve got to rethink who you are and how you act. Oh, man! Here’s the chairman of the board – I just get promoted, I’m two weeks into this job and we’re standing at the elevator and he’s coaching me on who I am. And I went home that night and I was talking to my wife and I said, you know, I’ve got to adjust. I don’t know what to do here. 

I made some conscious decisions. You ever hear that expression, sitting on your hands? I’d go to meetings, and I would literally and physically sit on my hands as a reminder to shut up. I’d create little signs. Honest-to-god, I’d write it in little small type so nobody else could see it, and I’d say, Howard, shut up, and I’d have them in front of me.

And it started to make me anxious. And the anxiety started to come out in bending paper clips. And, oh, that’s expensive bending paper clips, so I started tearing up little pieces of paper, and I’d roll them up and throw them under the table. People could always tell how stressful the meeting had been by the pile of paper.

About six months went by and somebody I had worked with, somebody who had been my advocate to be an officer of the company, came to me and said, Howard, what happened to you? We’re not getting out of you what we thought we were going to get, which was this outspoken partner and everything. And I related the story about Walker Trace and what he had said to me, and he said, you’ve got to fix that. You can’t live like that. And he was right, I couldn’t. I had started to do the same thing in other parts of my life. Because I thought, well, OK, if it’s not working here, then maybe it’s not working at home, and I started putting on figuratively different hats for everybody that I came into contact with, trying to moderate my behavior and be what I thought they wanted me to be.

Finally it just blew up. I couldn’t deal with it. I went to Walker and I said, this isn’t working for me. I can’t do what you want me to do. I’m driving myself nuts. Which was hard, because that was a big deal, that promotion, and going to the chairman of the board and telling him that I can’t do – I said, maybe you’ve got the wrong guy. And we had a great conversation and he kind of loosened up, and I went back to being what I was.

I realized at that point in time what I was trying to do, and then I thought to myself, how many times had I done that to somebody else, shut them down? Maybe not in the same way that Walker had. I just made a vow at that point in time – and I was about 28 at the time, 29 – I said, I’m never doing that again. People are going to take me like I am. And that’s where the one hat came from. And I coined the term in my head as one hat, you know, wearing my hat, and being who I was.

Behar offered some ideas on laying the groundwork for a one-hat life.

One-hat living is being totally in synch with who you are as a human being. And it takes work, right? You’ve got to be thinking about, what are your values? What matters to you? How do you want to live your life? Even when you’re young, what do you want to leave behind fifty years from now? It’s so far out there in the future for young people. It’s hard for all of us when we’re young to think like that, but you need to start thinking about that. And how you want to treat other people. How you want to be treated. And you’ve got to write those things down, because if you don’t, then it’s just talk. And they’re not written in stone just because you write them down, but it’s kind of like painting a picture of yourself in words.

When you put all these words together and they paint a picture of yourself, then you should be looking for things to do, places to work, wherever you’re going to live your life, your significant other in your life, that fit with that. Because that’s how you’re going to have a happy, productive life. If you’re constantly in conflict with your values and how you live your life, where they don’t match with each other, it’s a recipe for disaster in life. You will see problems, and you will have problems, and you will be unhappy.

Figure out who you are. Live your life according to that. You’ll change, and you re-write, right? Your life is a work of art. You’re always adding colors or taking away a little bit, or if it’s music you’re always adding a few notes or taking out a few notes. Or if you’re writing a book, you’re always re-writing a chapter, even after the book is done. So that’s what one-hat living is about. It’s just being in tune with yourself. And it takes work. It is not easy. It is not easy, and you’ve got to just have the patience to do it.

We spend more time planning vacation than we do planning our lives and who we are. And we need to spend the time. Go take a weekend. Go take a day. Go someplace where you’re totally – wherever it is that you are relaxed, whether it’s by the sea, or in the mountains, if it’s in your home, or wherever it is – and just start writing things down. What do you like in life? And there’s all sorts of good – if you want a formal process, there’s great formal processes that you can go get books on. But you don’t even have to have that. Just go write down things that matter to you. Spend that time. If there’s one thing, a gift you’re going to give yourself as a human being, sit down, spend the time, and think about yourself. What matters to you? What do you like in life? What do you dislike in life? What are your values?

So I think it’s taking the time to understand who you are, writing it down. Like I said, painting a picture with words of who you are, goals that you have, what you want to be, what you want to learn, what you want to accomplish. All that stuff. How much money you want to earn, what kind of house do you want to live in, what’s your spiritual life going to be like, what do you want to introduce your children to? What kind of marriage do you want? How do you want to spend your off time? How much time? Is work important to you, or is it more important to go skiing? All that stuff matters. Why should we live our lives not thinking about and living according to our plan? So it’s important where you choose to go to work. If you like to be in a place that doesn’t have a lot of rules and regulations, you’ve got to write that down. Why shouldn’t we think about those things before we take a job?

I think we spend so much time living, right, that we don’t take a little time for thinking and planning. And I think that if you do that, then a picture of you starts to develop that you can actually look at.

And that really helps you in terms of focusing on the things that you want to do and not getting caught up in the heat of the moment.

It’s not just an abstract philosophy for Behar. He points out how taking his own advice and doing the deep self-exploration helped him recognize the Starbucks opportunity as a perfect fit.

Lynn and I, about every two years we go away and we go away and we have what we call the Behar family retreat, a little planning session. And we each go into separate rooms and we write down the things, our goals for ourselves as individuals in probably eight or nine different areas. Spiritual, material, children, travel, whatever it happens to be. Career, charitable, all those things. And we come back and we present to each other. And then we have a couples deal, what we want our marriage to be like.

So if you go back into my area and look at the goals that I had, and you look at Starbucks, boom, right there. Almost seamless.

I wanted to work in a company where people got to vote. That’s where the person sweeps the floor should choose the broom came from. A company where everybody participated in the equity. Long before I went to Starbucks. I sat down with Howard Schultz, we’re talking about those things, and he says, this is the things I believe in. I’m thinking to myself, did he read my notes? I knew the place I wanted to be.

I’m just going to do it again in a week. Lynn and I are going to Hawaii, and the primary purpose outside a little R&R time and to give a speech for a couple companies in Hawaii is to re-look at my life. Who am I today? What do I want to accomplish? Have my values changed? Is there anything that’s changed in me? Are my goals changing? What does my next five to ten years look like? Because I need it now. I’m feeling uncomfortable. Most of the things I feel innately, they feel good, but I’m uncomfortable that I haven’t spent the time working on it, seeing, does it fit, and being really intentional. Now my intuition is working for me, but it’s not enough. For me, anyway.

For Behar, being aligned with who he is, what he wants to do, and how he wants to be isn’t just a nice-to-have luxury, it’s a vital piece of the mix.

So here was this little company, Starbucks. 28 stores. I had been a customer for almost seventeen years. I loved the coffee. It was like, from the day I got in there, it was just the magic fit. Just like somebody had put a glove on my hand, and it was sewn so perfectly to my hand that you could see every wrinkle and everything, and it just fit. It was so comfortable. And to me that’s always been what’s important, is the place I worked, I had to be totally aligned with the values of the organization. Primarily how we treated each other, how we treated the people we worked with, how we treated the people we served.

And then what we did. I tend to need to be around things that are more social in nature that involve people, and creativity, and creative goods or something like that. And when those things are in a line – the values, my values, and the product – it’s like it’s effortless. It doesn’t mean it’s without pain, or there isn’t agony, or the decisions aren’t tough, or all that stuff. But everything is fairly clear. And my life is seamless. When it’s not like that, my life is pure hell. And no matter how much money I made, if I wasn’t aligned with what the values of the organization was, I was miserable. And that just seems to be how I’ve had to live my life. It was about keeping peace in my brain. About being one with myself.

While he has definitely found success in his career, for Behar the standard measures of success have always been secondary.

And a lot of people hope and wish for stuff, whether it’s material things, or great recognition, which can be in the form of a promotion to an officer like I was. And once you’re there you start to realize how meaningless it is. It’s just like having things. You’re sitting in a beautiful place here, but I grew up in a 900 square foot house. I was just as happy then as I am now. Do I like this? Yeah, you bet I do. This is nice. But I can tell you tomorrow I could leave this place, wouldn’t even think about it.

But the truth of the matter is even when I had nothing materially, I still had to have the other. I had to be in tune with myself, and that’s where I had peace. Whether I went and bought a used sofa and bricks for a bookcase, which I did for a lot of my life, it didn’t make any difference as long as I was happy doing what I was doing.

Hell, I was 43 years old, or 44 when I went to work at Starbucks. Lynn and I between us had $140,000 to our name. I had worked in the corporate thing, I lost a lot of money in a business I had been in. We had a nice house we were making payments on. We said, let’s get out of here. We don’t need this. And I went, and we took the $140,000 and we bought $132,000 house. At the time you could buy a house for $132,000. Put $70,000 of the $140,000 down because I could afford so much a payment, I think five or six hundred a month. I took the other $70,000 and I invested, when I got the invitation to join Starbucks, and I put it in Starbucks when it was a private little company. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I always needed a piece of the action.

I said to Howard, what can you afford to pay me? He gave me a number. And I said, fine, and it was a third of what I had been making. And I said to Lynn, we’re going to have to just cut back. I had two kids, one going to college at that time, one wasn’t even living with us but came to live with us at that time, and we figured it out. We just cut our lifestyle. It didn’t matter. We still had the same friends. But I had to do what I loved to do. I had to do something that had meaning. It just didn’t make any difference.

The title of Behar’s book is, “It’s Not About the Coffee,” which is to say, “It’s About the People.” That might well have been the title of his career as well.

Somebody asked me probably the single most important question that I’ve ever been asked. It was a mentor of mine, and I reported directly to him. It was in the furniture business, and the question was, Howard, is it furniture you love, or is it people you love? You would think that would be an easy question to answer, because furniture is just an inanimate object, but I’d been in it so long, and I loved the process of it and the creativity of it, it took me a while, about a week. I kept going back and forth thinking about it. And one morning I woke up and I said, Howard, you dummy. Of course you know what you love. You love people. So from that moment forward, that was in my mid-twenties, I tried to become a conscious competent about myself. That was a journey. And about people, about understanding people. And I need to have a lot of human interaction. I need lots of conversation. I love to be coached, from superiors, or from people that report to me – I don’t care who’s giving me the information, who’s helping me to be a better person, I love it. I love to read all about it. Anything to do with human beings, I’m interested in, in our journey. So that’s why I love work, and that’s what’s turned me on this whole time.

Now on top of that, I love the creative aspects of work. The product, or the services. I love puzzles. And I’m a capitalist pig. I admit it. I love – I grew up in retail. My dad had a little mom and pop grocery store. When I was six years old, out in front of the store with this orange crates and a little cash drawer, and I would sell gum – that I would steal from my dad, of course, because I had zero cost of product.

Then I come to Starbucks. Here I am, out of work. I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life. I’d been president of a land development company, a recreational land development company that failed, and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up. Lynn and I had long conversations about it. She was working at Group Health, she was a clinical social worker in oncology, and I said, you know, I’m forty-four. Who knows? We’ve got to start saving money for retirement, but I’ve got to do what I love to do, and I’ve got to find that kind of thing. I tried to buy my own business a few times. It didn’t work out. And then I meet Howard Schultz. A guy named Jeff Brotman, who was on the board, and here was this little tiny coffee company that I had been a customer of. I never thought about going to work there, you know. And I turned right, and developed a relationship with Howard, and like I said, from day one it was like a glove that fit my hand.

There’s something about coffee. It’s just mystical. It’s not just coffee. It’s much more than that. You go into a Starbucks store – you don’t even have to go into a Starbucks. In the morning I get up and I have that cup of coffee and I read the newspaper. There’s something about the taste of it, and the warmth in my hands, and when it’s really good, it just makes you feel good. It just is additive to life, and that’s the way I always saw Starbucks. I saw Starbucks as a human experience. Even though it was a coffee company, or product, I always thought of it as a human company. That’s why we named the book, “It’s Not About the Coffee.” It’s about the people.

There was a lot of consternation in the company – when I first joined Starbucks, there was this little handbook that all companies have. Didn’t say a word about people till like page eight or nine. It was all about the coffee, and its commitment to the coffee. Well, coffee’s important. It’s our art, our music, literature, whatever. It’s where we express our creativity. People make all of it happen. And if you go into a Starbucks today, it’s about people. When we are successful, we do that well. When we fail, we do that poorly.

While important, loving what he does has been only part of the equation. For Behar, it has also been about the difference he has been able to make in people’s lives.

You know, Starbucks, when we were young, you know every organization works on mission statements and all sorts of things. We had this guy name Jim Collins who wrote a book called Built to Last. And in the book there’s a concept that he has called a BHAG, a big hairy audacious goal. And a big hairy audacious goal is defined as something that’s waaay bigger than yourself. It’s a goal that unifies the organization and is meaningful. And at Starbucks it goes like this: “To be one of the most well known and respected organizations in the world, known for nurturing and inspiring the human spirit.” Known for nurturing and inspiring the human spirit. That last one – known for nurturing and inspiring the human spirit – that put definition to everything that I have wanted to accomplish in my life. It happened to be Starbucks. I was part of that process, but it was everybody doing it, from baristas to store managers to everybody.

So when I look back at my life twenty or thirty years from now and I’m in some nursing home someplace and they have a television in front of me with a continuous loop of University of Washington Husky football wins, and I think I’m watching new games all the time, I’ll know that my life has been fulfilled. I will have had a successful life when somebody says that about me. That he truly nurtured and inspired other people to be all they could be. And that is it. That is it. I get everything out of that. I get everything out of that. It just fulfills my life.

I asked him what difference it made when he had that.

Well, it just puts me in synch with everything. If I act in that way, I have peace that’s unbelievable. I sleep. I go to bed easy. I feel like, when I’ve helped somebody in a day, if they’ve had something they’ve been dealing with, or if they just wanted an ear, maybe they don’t want any solutions, they just want an ear, and they’ve gone away and they’ve said thank you, you could have just handed me a check for ten million bucks. It just goes through my body. The feeling is unbelievable.

Thank you for listening to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast. If you’d like to know more about Howard Behar and his book, “It’s Not About the Coffee,” you can go to www.howardbehar.com. And if you’d like to know more about how I can help you discover work that energizes and inspires you, please visit me online at www.passioncatalyst.com.