[image by Brian]

Goal for June: Read a book a day. Follow my reading list here.

So apparently I’m not alone in my reading goal — lotsa summer reading challenges’re popping up, as Sassymonkey points out on BlogHer. Most notably, Alice at Get Lit’s vowed not to buy a new book until she’s read at least 5 books already on her shelves.

Green reading tip: Read the books you own.

I’m proud to say I’ve gotten my shelf of unread books down to 8. One that’d been sitting there for a long, long time: Howard Schultz’s Pour Your Heart Into It. Yes, it’s by the former CEO of Starbucks, detailing how he made Starbucks such a success.

A Starbucks employee sent me this back in the day, but I put it off partly cuz I’m not a huge fan of ghostwritten books (the book’s written “with” Dori Jones Yang”) and partly cuz I get enough of Starbucks as it is. But due to a sense of duty of sorts, I finally finished it –

Reading this book was like entering into a mindset I understand on an abstract level but can’t on a human one. Case in point: Schultz writes that when Starbucks started up and decided to grow fast, “Our little management team didn’t examine our motives for wanting to grow fast. We set out to be champions, and speed was part of the equation.”

But — why not? Aren’t motives sort of, important? Not examining one’s motives seems an almost sure way to end up with a rather vacuous life — if a wealthy one — later on….

I did find out some interesting historical deets. The original Starbucks peeps trained at Peets, then left and started Starbucks, later buying Peets. Schultz joined Starbucks at this point, but left to start a new chain called Il Giornale. Then the people who owned Starbucks sold the mermaid to Schultz, keeping Peets.

Schultz’s seems to see unionization as both his own personal failing and an attack against the company at large — that if employees really UNDERSTOOD Starbucks’ mission, they would be happy, and won’t unionize. Apparently, when Il Giornale bought Starbucks, employees were unionized — but dissolved union ties after the buy. It’s perhaps unsurprising that attempts to unionize NYC stores now are being met with much acrimonious contention on Starbucks’ end.

Often, Pour Your Heart read like a PR defense. Schultz whines that Starbucks can’t meet all the various activist calls, framing critiques against Starbucks’ business practices as strange, strident demands made by fringe weirdos. He even goes so far as to blame bad, bad landlords for Starbucks’ now-infamous predatory practices that drive out local competition, arguing that Starbucks didn’t MEAN to unfairly outbid local biz, but instead got MISLEAD by evil landlords.

Riiiight…. Even Major, the Starbucks employee who sent me the book, grinned while saying Starbucks is “very good at getting retail space” and tried to frame predatory practices as just good old American competion. And Winter of Starbucking — a hero of sorts for Starbucks — said Starbucks likely unfairly drives out local biz —

Book read: Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang, Pour Your Heart Into It

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