Ron Johnson used to do this when he headed Apple retail. Would just go into a store totally undercover to the customers (obviously staff would recognize him) and work for a bit.
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.
These "king gets wisdom from dressing as regular person" stories are great, and it's definitely a great idea for higher level folks to sample the ground truth themselves on a regular basis. CEOs are at a real danger of being surrounded by yes-men, and it's very possible that through conditioning and repetition they might actually start believing insane corporate positions.
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.
> Was there a manager in charge of the stores who did not notice the problem?
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 like your last paragraph a lot, one reason in my experience as to why a problem didn't get reported/fixed is that employees are unfortunately rarely rewarded for fixing processes in large structures (or just once, when the fix itself improves the productivity in a lasting manner).
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.
The CEO can easily see problems that the line workers don't see as problems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> The CEO working a single shift noticed something that needed to be changed? Did none of the thousands of workers who work those shifts every day notice that problem?
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.
>Was there a manager in charge of the stores who did not notice the problem?
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.
> 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.
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.
It could be that working in the store for a day is a good way to get candid and unfiltered input from those workers and managers.
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.)
Your last paragraph has a valid point, and the outcome of such a visit can simply be that: There are ideas, but for some reasons, they don't make it to the higher levels. Let's find out why!
Jeff Bezos used to do similar with Customer Support. He'd meet up with someone in customer support, and shadow their calls for the day. A number of features came out from it, like the ability for customer support to "pull an andon cord" and immediately yank a product from sale pending investigation by senior support staff.
It came about because the customer support rep anticipated all of the problems a customer was having with a particular product on a call. "We see this all the time with that product". That annoyed Jeff. There was wisdom, people seeing ways customers were having a bad experience, and they were powerless to do anything about it.
WestJet, Canada's second largest airline, used to do this a lot. I remember handing my coffee cup and trash to Clive Beddoe, one of the original founders, with a double take. They were largely employee-owned and it showed. Then they went public, grew on the backs of shareholders and were taken private again by PE. Now they're worse than Air Canada, the former poster child for terrible airlines.
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.
AC gets a lot of undeserved hate. They're better than all the US airlines, without exception and they're on par with a lot of continental European airlines. Much better than BA. There's things they could do better for sure, but onboard service, seats, lounges, ground staff - all solid. Huge improvements to Aeroplan after they bought it back.
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.
pricing stuff, metrics stuff, customer flow changes. Real day-to-day stuff.
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.
Why is why the user experience of Apple Retail has gone downhill after he left and Steve Jobs passed away.
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.
Ahrendts (of Burberry) was such a weird choice, unless Apple's goal at the time was to maximize in-person watch band sales.
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.
Was he the guy who promised to make their pricing easier to understand with clearly labelled discounts without coupons? He is. Then he probably did spend time in a store because confusion over sales and extra time at checkout were common at JC Penney. His plan would have made the shopping experience less complicated.
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.
I didn't see it that way. He took a big swing to do something different and was fired less than two years into it. Maybe you could argue that he was straining against something too strong to overcome or misapplying his lessons from a higher-margin brand, but it's also possible to say that he wasn't given enough time to see it through.
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.
Many years ago I did a few short weeks on an engagement at Wynn casino in Vegas. It overlapped with Christmas time and I was invited to a holiday dinner, which had several thousand people rotate through the huge conference room ballroom over an entire day. Everyone from casino from the dealers to cleaners and cashiers - and even us contractors - rotated through. It was very nice while also yet another unmemorable catered event. It would have remained unmemorable for me except for this part. Someone later asked me if I had some cake, and I said yeah, I went by the cake table and some guy in pink shirt served me a slice, I asked for a small one and he took care of it. Well, apparently that was Steve Wynn, the owners, he I guess did that at the holiday dinner, meeting everyone in a marathon session. I don't know if that is still true but I thought that was a nice way to meet everyone eye to eye.
Reminds me when I was a bank teller - the area manager would come into our branch sometimes trying to like disguise himself...? But it was always SO obvious after about 10 seconds that it was him while he'd sit in the lobby and observe.
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.
I recall Amazon used to do something similar. Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. The goal isn't PR or worker morale - most people see through stunts like that. The real goal is to help leaders better understand their product, its problems, and customer frustrations.
> Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts.
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.
This should absolutely be a thing for vertical integration developers. If you're developing cashier software for Target, you should have to use it under realistic circumstances sometimes. Same for Amazon driving software, helpdesk software, sales, etc.
> There's so many pain points in many customer service organizations that are easily solvable if a developer understood
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.
100% agree, especially if it is industry specific specialty software. Seen so many applications that have processes that only make sense to the people that developed it and are at best tolerated by the users that have no other choice than to use it.
This rings so true. As a designer it's invaluable to have teammates with domain expertise—they have a much better idea about customer pain points. Honestly, they can usually articulate the problems better than customers can in interviews.
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.
> Alas, Google has no customer service, so their developers shall be placed in the void until morale improves.
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.
When i started at Shopify we had to setup a store and do some customer support. It was a great way to understand the product, especially since my role wasn't going to be customer facing at all.
If developers spent more time in sales or customer service...many of them would quit out of frustration, but some would refactor the world, also out of frustration.
The issue in my opinion is their day or two on the job really doesn't give them a good picture of what's going on. Sure they might see a few things but they could just as easily be an anomaly as they could be systemic. I wish upper management that are brought in from the outside would be required to work a month or two in the field and live on those wages. For example at Starbucks in the 2 days he works he might see that the espresso machine is getting loaded wrong 40% of the time slowing up the line. Seeing this he might go back to the mothership and decide everyone using the espresso machine needs more training to reduce the failures. What he is missing is that there are supposed to be three people working not two and the person making espresso is working his fifth double shift this week because the wages are so low they can't pay their rent and is making errors because he's tired. He would have also missed that the manager had sent a worker home that day and the day before because it wasn't busy and the manager wanted to improve his margins. He also missed the next day when it was really busy that same manager was demanding that an employee on their day off come in and work because they were busy and if they didn't come in they would be fired (leaving them even more short of people and creating more delays). It's like a person who fasts for 24h saying they know what it's like to be starving. If you really want to see what's going on a day or two simply won't cut it you need some time for things to sink in and if you don't know what's really going on how can you run a business properly?
Eh, I think it depends on how canny the executive running the experiment is and how much experience they have in the particular part of the industry. I worked in restaurants when I was younger and now have done a lot of sales-side and logistics management, and it wouldn't take more than a day of working in a new restaurant for me to accurately understand some of the major issues going on. You just have to be open-minded, identify the best employees, and let them freely bitch at you for about two hours while trying to do the work with them. That'll give you a good sense of the big blockers at that particular restaurant. Same is true for any software org.
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.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about how dumb he will be. Like you think he will just overfit on every detail instead of asking the store manager or employees about what he experienced? You think he will not work in more than one store, in more than one geography? Cmon man.
My first career was a chef. When I asked a friend of the family who owned a restaurant when I was teenager what steps I should take to become a chef, the advice he gave was "Get a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant because the most important thing you need to know is to respect your dishwasher because anytime everything goes wrong and you are in a jam, it is your dishwasher who will save you." Unknown to me the restaurant that hired me when I was 17 as a dishwasher was also one of the most prestigious restaurants in California in the early 90s which lead to years cooking in Michelin Star restaurants. Good advice.
They want them to understand customer frustrations, not employee devastation. Plus, make the C-suite realize how they treat the "lowest" employees of the company and they might not want to work there anymore, have to tread carefully there.
I worked at a small (in Amazon scale - still the largest in the country) home grocery delivery service and everyone pre corona had to spend their 2 first weeks in the warehouse. Everyone had done it, including managers and c-level
Jeff Wilke (former ceo of amazon retail) used to do that during Q4 peak. It was also pretty common for engineering teams to signup to do a day in the FC so they could see what it was like.
Bezos would do one day a year operating the customer service lines.
In this documentary about Kawasaki, they also mention that everyone has to expend some time in the production line, it seems like a great way to motivate your engineers to improve the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg32DlveFiE
That's what I asked my boss to do for me. Pair me with someone using our tool so they can ask me to do real world tasks and see how I can handle it. Should be later this month. And will try to do one session every month or so.
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?
What exactly do you imagine is going to happen? There are lots of very rich people walking around in public all day long with little ill effects? The most you can get by robbing him is the stuff he has in his wallet, which is pretty much going to be similar to someone with a much lower net worth. If you walk around in Palo Alto, you will likely bump into a billionaire or two on a typical day.
I'm not a criminologist, but I would assume that personal safety has more to do with the environment a person occupies. Poor people are more likely to be victims of crimes than the rich. Being a recognizable celebrity or a target of organized criminals may be exceptions to the rule. How many people would recognize the Starbucks CEO on the street if they saw him?
I would believe that's the case if Narasimhan were working a full shift, but he's only working half a shift once a month. At that point why bother? What are you going to learn in 4 hours a month where all the employees are on their best behavior and the store is made immaculate prior to your arrival?
If they were paid the minimum wage too it might drive home a greater understanding of their employees as well, though unfortunately the large existing bank accounts of the CEOs ensures that any lesson that might come with that small paycheque is not likely to sink in.
And depending on the franchise owner, could also be the franchise.
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.
Apparently this is why some of the McDonalds restaurants in the Oak Brook / Chicago area are very good (or at least perfectly to spec)... they are owned by corporate and used for executive training.
I know of several restaurant chains who do this - it's seen as very important for restaurant head office workers to understand exactly how the restaurants work and the problems that they experience.
The main reason you do this is to weed out executives who are mostly interested in the prestige. People like that are much more likely to be good at shifting the blame for problems than actually fixing or preventing problems.
One of my recurring revenge-porn dreams is as follow.
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.
I saw this happen too. Lots of people doing overtime to tidy up the store for when the regional manager came by.
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.
Was his demonstration helpful? Or do you mean that he was only able to do the tasks faster because he was rushing them, or that fast completion of these tasks was not really meaningful to the overall performance of the store?
It's really obvious when you put a c-suite 40-something or 50-something exec on a blue collar team: nobody's gonna be fooled for a minute. It's like that SNL skit of Kylo Ren from Star Wars going undercover in the employee cafeteria.
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.
to be fair half of what made that funny/awkward is Kylo fishing for compliments. If Narasimhan is chill, it might be less super-awkward. Plus, who knows Narasimhan. This is the first I've heard his name. I wouldn't be surprised if most starbucks counter employees don't know the name of the CEO, much less what he looks like.
Assuming he actually works the whole shift, he still can experience what works as a barista in his company is like (workload, how to deal with customers assuming they don't recognize him) somewhat truthfully.
If he and executive come in on a regular basis at the same stores, it won't be a such a big deal after a while. They'll get to know the staff at the store, they'll know the routine. Like if Tom Cruise was your neighbour, it'll just be "Hi Tom".
It's less about seeing how x store runs and more about seeing how the job for x employee is, no?
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.
It's funny because it reminds me of stories my grandparents told me about communism in Eastern Europe where the higher ups would come inspect their factories and the execs would know in advance and prep everything to look perfect.
It's a nice gesture, but this sort of ear-to-the-ground work is something that everyone over a VP level should be doing in such a high-touch customer-facing business.
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.
A little bit of knowledge can be less than useless. It gives the impression of understanding while passing over the harsher realities. The way that such a move is enacted matters.
Is this shift scheduled on a random Saturday/Sunday with ~48 hours notice. Does the shift last 8 hours? Does his replacement randomly show up 30 minutes late and he needs to work an extra 30 minutes with zero notice? Does he need to open the shop bright and early after closing the night before? If the CEO is insulated from these rather common experiences then the exercise masks the problems with a veneer of understanding.
Once when I was working our incoming phone support a tech accidentally added our CEO's office number to the round robin system for incoming support calls.
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.
Yeah, I don't see the big deal. He's the new CEO and appears to be setting the tone, informing people of one of his first efforts. Stating it publicly seems uncontroversial for a business with publicly-traded stock.
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.
>... I think it would be tremendously helpful to normalize this idea everywhere, even if it may not always work out perfectly.
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.
Given how unpleasant the relationship between the current CEO and their baristas have been [1], this can not start well, unless the new CEO takes some steps to make friends first.
1. under the current CEO Starbucks has racked up numerous labor violations for union busting
Part of the reason to do this is for employees to know that the CEO understands their job and their concerns. The vast majority of employees will not be working at a store the CEO visits, so it makes sense to announce it internally. It sounds like that's what they did, and CNBC got a hold of that email.
Any CEO doing this for the right reasons - I.e., to help ensure the product is good - would whip the marketing department right into shape and tell them to keep a lid on it.
This is good, right? Then a team of <trolls/activists> can all arrive at the same time and order a big pile of 'secret menu' 19-ingredient monstrosities from the CEO.
And it really should be a week or two. You can grind through hell on optimism for a day. Doing it day in and day out is the hard part and may highlight different negative aspects of the job compared to just showing up for 8 hours
I once took a cab in the middle of the night. The cabby was a elderly gentleman who did not seem to know his way around very well. It was a long ride so we got talking. Turned out he was the new boss of the company (a fairly big company, lots of cars) who wanted to get to know the circumstances under which his drivers worked. He had been working the night shift for a couple of weeks.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bezos would do one day a year operating the customer service lines.
> “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?
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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