Tourists Bring Home Souvenirs. Explorers Bring Home Stories.

Tribal Truth 28. Foster Customer Devotion

Tribal Truth 29. Walls Talk. Take a Moment to Listen.

Tribal Truth 30. Access Alters How a Business Achieves Success

Tribal Truth 31. Everything Matters

PART 3 TRE: More Tribal Truths—Creating the Kind of Workplace You’d Like to Work In

Tribal Truth 32. Make the Company Something to Believe In

Tribal Truth 33. The Employee Experience Matters

Tribal Truth 34. Live Your Mission (Statement)

Tribal Truth 35. Practice Passionate Followership

Tribal Truth 36. People Quit People (Not Companies)

Tribal Truth 37. Brands Are Made Possible by People

Tribal Truth 38. Abhor Complacency. Resist Conservatism. Fight Conceit.

Tribal Truth 39. Build Bridges Between Old Employees and New Employees

Tribal Truth 40. Hire Passion over Experience

Tribal Truth 41. Participation Is the Price of Admission

Tribal Truth 42. Encourage Healthy Dialogue

Tribal Truth 43. Radically Simplify Your Organizational Chart

Tribal Truth 44. Always Measure Your Comparable Job Performance

Tribal Truth 45. Marketing Has Two Audiences

PART 4 INFINE: Some Parting Truths

Tribal Truth 46. Profit Is a By-Product

Tribal Truth 47. Be Mission-Driven to Change the World

Notes

Action Steps: From Ideas to Implementation

Afterword: Join the Conversation: Learn through Sharing

Resources: The Starbucks Executive Bookshelf

Author Appreciations

INTRODUCTION
What Is Tribal Knowledge?

When Howard Schultz took the reins of Starbucks Coffee in 1987—a mere six stores, along with his own trio of Il Giornale coffee bars—he had the grandiose dream of changing the way Americans drink coffee. Almost 20 years later, Starbucks is by far and away the leader of an industry it created—cozy, welcoming coffeehouses serving specialty coffee and espresso beverages. It is a remarkable story that happened in remarkable ways.

For most Americans who grew up prior to the 1990s, coffee was a necessary, though hardly enjoyable, part of the day. It didn’t taste good—that wasn’t the point. Just as we do not expect cough syrup to be delicious, most of us didn’t demand much from a cup of coffee except a jump start to our mornings, and maybe a jolt of caffeine to pull us out of our post-lunch comas.

Americans had become accustomed to drinking coffee from cheap, inferior robusta coffee beans, scooped out of three-pound tin cans, flavor nuances scorched beyond recognition from cooking on a heated plate for endless hours, and served with powdered creamer to mask its unbearable taste. Then in 1971, Starbucks was founded in Seattle’s Pike Place Market by three friends (Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Zev Siegel) who all shared a passion for great-tasting, European-style coffee made from dark-roasted arabica beans.