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.
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