• Every company must stand for something. Starbucks stood for good coffee, especially for the dark-roasted flavor. That’s what differentiated it and made it authentic.
• You don’t just give the customer what they ask for. If you offer them something they’re not accustomed to, something so far superior that it takes a while to develop their palates, you can create a sense of discovery and excitement and loyalty that will bond them to you.
• To mean something to customers, you should assume intelligence and sophistication and inform those who are eager to learn. If you do, what may seem to be a niche market could very well appeal to far more people than you imagine.

You can reinvent almost every aspect of the business except one: Starbucks will always sell the highest quality fresh-roaster whole bean coffee. That’s our legacy.

• Life is like a series of near misses. But a lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It’s seeing what other people don’t see and pursuing that vision, no matter who tell you not to.
• In daily life, you get so much pressure from friends and family and colleague, urging you to take the easy way, to follow the prevailing wisdom, that it can be difficult not to simply accept status quo and what’s expected of you. But when you believe — in yourself, in your dream — you just have to do everything you possibly can to take control and make your vision a reality.
• No great achievement happens by luck.

• The most important commodity for a company is the relationship of trust and confidence it has with its employees. If their believe they’re not rewarded fairly for their work, the company’s future is compromised.
• Debt is not the best way to fund a company. Founders often take debt to retain control of the company but rather the best way to do that is by performing well and pleasing shareholders, even if his/her share is below 50%. Debt can greatly limit the possibility of future growth and innovation.

This is my moment. If I don’t seize the opportunity, if I don’t step out of my comfort zone and risk it all, if I let too much time tick on, my moment will pass. What if? Why didn’t I?

— Howard while he was deciding on leaving Starbucks to start his own company.

• Part of what constitutes success is timing and chance. But most of us have to create our own opportunities and be prepared to jump when we see a big one others can’t see.
• It’s one thing to dream, but when the moment is right, you’ve got to be willing to leave what’s familiar and go out to find your own sound.

• Being an underdog can be invigorating. Part of me relished the fact that so many people said that my plan couldn’t be done. No matter how many times people put me down, I believed strongly that I could pull it off. I was so confident of winning that I enjoyed being in a position where people’s expectation were so low that I knew I could beat them.
• If you stopped being a scrappy underdog, fighting against the odds, you risk the worst fate of all: mediocrity.
• People who succeed have an incredible drive to do something. They spend their energy to take the gamble. In this world, relatively few people are willing to take a large gamble.
• If you ask any of the initial investors why they took the risk, almost all of them will tell you that they invested in me, not the idea. They believed because I believed, and they prospered because they trusted someone in whom nobody had confidence.

• Whatever your values, guiding principles are you have to take steps to inculcate them in the organization early in its life so that they guide every decision, every hire, every strategic objective you set. Establishing the right tone at the inception of an enterprise, whatever its size, is vital for its long-term success.
• Don’t underestimate the importance of early signals you send out in the course of building your enterprise and imprinting your values upon it. When you take on a partner, and when you select employees, be sure to choose the people who share your passion, commitment, and goals. If you share your mission with like-minded souls, it will have a far greater impact.

Many of us face critical moments like that (while trying and failing to raise capital to buy Starbucks) in our lives, when our dreams seem ready to shatter. You can never prepare for such events, but how you react to them is crucial. It is important to remember your values. Be bold, but be fair. Don’t give in. If others around you have integrity, too, you can prevail.

• It’s during vulnerable times, when the unexpected curve balls hit you hard on the head, that an opportunity can be lost. It’s also the time when your strength is tested most tellingly.
• Every step on the way, make it a point to underpromise and overdeliver. In the long run, that’s the only way to ensure security of any job.

• Key Points while addressing Starbucks employees for the first time: (1) Speak from my heart, (2) Put myself in their shoes, (3) Share the Big Dream with Them.

• The thrill of business is the climb, its like climbing a steep slope, one that very few people have managed to scale. The more difficult the climb, the more gratifying the effort put in the ascent and the greater satisfaction upon reaching the summit.
• Is it a mere coincidence that coffee bars became popular at the same time as the Internet started growing? Devoid of day-today social interactions, people looked for a place to socialize and take a break. Such trends cannot be spotted. It’s to work on what you believe in, what you’re passionate about. So when such a paradigm shift occurs you’re ready take full advantage of it. Howard wasn’t interested in coffee since he figured out that coffee bars could become the “third place”, rather he was passionate about coffee and so he pursued it.

• Instead of traditional wisdom of cutting health-care benefits, Starbucks went the other direction by increasing it. This turned out to be their best decisions. Their core strategy: treat people like family and they will be loyal and give their all. Stand by people and they will stand by you.
• They gave all their employees (even part-time employees) a piece of the pie by granting stocks (called it Bean Stock). They justified it by explaining how this would enable each employee to have the same attitude as the CEO, thereby, adding value in several respects — to the performance of the business as a whole, to the bottom line, and to the morale and spirit of the workplace. They also stopped using the word “employee” and called their people as “partners”.
• If you treat your employees as interchangeable clogs in a wheel, they will view you with the same affection. Their passion and devotion is the number-one competitive advantage. Lose it, and you’ve lost the game.

• Figure out what you want to be in the next two years and hire executives who had already built companies of that size. Hiring ahead of the growth curve seems costly at the time, but its a lot wiser to bring experts before you need them than to stumble ahead in green, untested people who are prone to make avoidable mistakes.
• Building infrastructure before you need it would not only fund the expansion itself but also to respond quickly to problems and opportunities as they arise.
• When companies fail, or fail to grow, it’s always because they fail to invest in the people, the systems, the processes they need. Most people underestimate how much money it will take to do that. They also tend to underestimate how they are going to feel about reporting large losses. Unfortunately, that’s a given in the early stages of retail development, unless you raise money by franchising. Huge investments upfront mean not only potential annual losses but also a dilution of the founder’s shareholding.
• You can’t create a world-class enterprise without investing in it. In a growth company, you can’t play catch-up. But you also can’t just excuse losses in the early stage of the business without examining each expenditure. Growth covers up a lot of mistakes, and you have to be honest what’s right and what’s wrong about your operations.

Once you’ve figured out what you want to do, find someone who has done it before. Find not just talented executives but even more experienced entrepreneurs and businesspeople who can guide you. They know where to look for the mines in the minefield. If they have thought and acted boldly in their own careers, and proven successful, they can help you do the same. If they share your values and aspirations, and if they freely share their counsel, they can help you through rough patches and celebrate your victories as their own.

• To a lot of entrepreneurs, hiring more seasoned executives can be threatening, and actually delegating power to them is even more so. Even to Howard whose identity was tied to that of Starbucks, every suggestion for change made him feel that he had failed some aspect of his job. He had to constantly remind himself: These people bring something I don’t have. They will make Starbucks far better than I could alone.
• Many business visionaries have failed because they could not execute. Processes and systems, discipline and efficiency are need to create a foundation before creative ideas can be implemented and entrepreneurial vision can be realized.
• The most successful examples have been led by both a visionary, like Walt Disney, and a business-like implementer, like Roy Disney. That kind of joint leadership works even better if the two partners have a strong bond and trust and confidence like the one Orin and Howard had.

In football, it’s often said that “Offense scores points; defense wins games”. In business, the front run is what the world sees: in our case, the coffee, the stores, the style, the brand. But the back room is where we win. The efficiency of the back room is really what’s made Starbucks a financial success. That’s been Orin’s crucial contribution to the company. He’s made me look better than I am.

• As you’re growing a business, you never know the long-term implications of decisions you make. The executives you hire, the plants you build, the decisions you make on how to raise capital lays the foundation that makes a smooth and rapid national rollout of the vision possible.
• Like parents struggle to raise a child, founders bring values to the workplace and figure out how to apply them even as the company is moving and changing by the day. What the founders must do is to honor the individuals around them by letting them paint colors and make mistakes without telling them they were wrong.

• Whether I am hiring a key executive, a joint venture, I look for the same kind of qualities I most look for in a spouse: integrity and passion.
• Relationships and loyalty have become undervalued commodities. So many of us have lost sight of vital importance of dealing with people we can trust. Adversarial or distant relationships are not the best way to do business. There is much to be gained by enlisting partners and colleagues who are committed to the same goals.
• The most enduring lesson from Wall Street: how artificial the stock price is. It’s all too easy to regard it as the true value of your company, and even the value of yourself.
• It is critical to exert strong consistent leadership through both good and bad times, to be able to temper the morale swings of those around you. Most important advice is to do what’s right for the company, not for the stock price.

Not every company leads as charmed a public life as Starbucks has. If it’s been a wild ride for us, what must it be like for those whose companies do a stumble? Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

• The balancing act is tough — harmonizing the needs of the family, the needs of the business, the needs of marriage, and individual needs, too. Sometimes I wonder: When is there time for me? What do I get out of this?
• One of the greatest responsibilities of an entrepreneur is to imprint his/her values on the organization. It’s like raising kids. You start with love and empathy, and if you’ve imprinted the right values in them, you can trust them to make reasonable decisions. Sometimes they will disappoint you, and sometimes they will make mistakes. But if they have absorbed good values, they will have a center line to return to.
• At a certain stage, an entrepreneur has to develop into a professional manager. That often goes against the grain. Early on, I realized that I had to hire people smarter and more qualified than I was in a number of different fields, and I had to let go of a lot of decision making.
• To stay vigorous, a company needs to provide a stimulating environment for all these types: the dreamer, the entrepreneur, the professional manager, and the leader. If it doesn’t it risks becoming yet another mediocre corporation.

• When things are going well, when the fans are cheering, why change a winning formula? Because the world — customer’s needs and tastes, competition, employees, managers, shareholders — everything changes.

Nontraditional results are more likely to arise from someone who can think out of the box. You’re not likely to find such a person by looking inside the box.

— Howard when he hired an immunologist to lead his R&D team

• Build a Brand first with the people and then with the consumer — best way to exceed expectations of consumers is to hire the best and train them
• How Starbucks created a brand?
  • Nothing matter more than the taste of the coffee
  • People and coffee go hand-in-hand, each one is incomplete without the other — not in coffee business serving people but people business serving coffee
  • Spent more on training people than advertising
  • Starbucks experience comprised of satiating each sense —
    • Aroma: brewing coffee, banned smoking, no perfume/cologne, no soup/cooked food/etc.
    • Sound: signature classical or jazz music, cashier calling out your name
    • Touch: style of chairs, edges of countertops, texture of floor, cleanliness, having mystery shopper to evaluate each store
    • Look: colorful banners, posters
• Great brands stand for something bigger than themselves. Disney stands for fun, family, and entertainment; Nike for superior athletic performance; Microsoft for every computer on the desktop.