like what? I'm curious. There's nothing that shows the flaws of a process like running it yourself.

When it came to the areas he wasn't as comfortable in, say the genius bar, he still deeply understood the customer experience, but never tried to do the job if he wasn't able.

Boy, I'm coming off like a fanboy here... It was just a truly impressive and inspiring thing to see as one of the regular employees. If I worked at Starbucks it's what I'd want to see, not some propped-up press tour.

[0] http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...

Spending one day a month so you can say to fellow executives "I actually went and touched the problem, we need to fix it" and so employees can say to each other "he actually came and touched the problem, he must be working on fixing it" has real value.

Actually learning about the problem and coming up with a solution is best done by listening to the people like you said, but there's a role for the other thing too.

Yes, I realize this toxic environment is present in 95% of all companies in the U.S. That makes it worse, not better.

Being conscientious takes effort almost by definition. All of us need reminders to put that effort in.

That's why people talk about "getting a seat at the table." If you are physically in a room with someone and they hear your voice and see your face you become more real to them.

We face a choice of either denying the messy parts of human nature (and seeing how that goes) or adapting our processes to account for them.

You could apply this to literally 99% of any employer in the world.

That's kind of the problem that Starbucks is having right now.

Or rather, it's a symptom of the war its executives are waging on its employees. The former are going to need to do a hell of a lot more then a shift a month to rebuild that trust.

This is the most direct way of accomplishing that.

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.

Or, consequences of lossy compression as information gets summarized before being transmitted up the management ladder.

And it isn't always a bad management call! Sometimes they're making the right call on the data they have, but they're missing critical data.

E.g. Not realizing that 1/5 a store needs to be used for ad hoc inventory because too much product was flooded during holidays, ergo it cannibalizes display space, ergo the sales rates of various SKUs are all out of whack (to come up with a contrived example)

I get it, at some point you have to admit that you're not going to get 100% truth from people. But that doesn't mean you don't talk to different people at different layers of the company.

This clip always resonated with me, re: high level leadership: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gguxM8eABP8 (as context, one subordinate he's talking about is presented as a terrible leader, the other as a great one)

Specifically, the point being made that all information is... uncertain. And how a good leader makes good decisions within that uncertainty, instead of picking winners.

It's easy to make the right decision when you have all the facts, but you can't have all the facts when you need to make 15+ decisions in a day.

The only solution was to take an entire day from the CEO to figure out that the goals were unrealistic? Wasn't the very first clue that stores were generally unable to meet the expected attach rates?

It just highlights this dumb idea that executives are these ungodly force multipliers. I bet if anyone had bothered to ask the day-to-day labor about the proposed attach rates (and actually listened) they wouldn't have had to burn a day's worth of CEO compensation to figure out they weren't achievable.

Of course, I would have made the same mistake as Johnson. But it is always a good reminder of how differently people’s brains work.

By removing the price war, pricing their product at value. You now can compete on a more simple message of quality: "Our product is worth $10 more because X". The best part of this is...that's exactly what Walmart is actually doing. Walmart is actually rather sale-resistant and they frame it as a 'rollback' rather than X% off. Walmart's message is purely the regular price, not the value.

The issue you of course run into for JCP though, is in the interm, as the market changes, you need to throw a bunch quarters made up of that built up growth hacking debt of ever increasing sales in the trash. That just won't fly on Wall st.

What JCP really need is a reboot though, they are doomed either way due to their leases. Organizationally, I would be trying to get rid of those as fast as possible and get into outdoors small-medium retail. They have a great brand but have insanely expensive locations.

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.

Department stores had already been declining for a long time before he came along, though.

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.

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.

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.

In the bay area though, that was just Thursday. No warning, could and did happen any time.

The difference was incredibly stark. I wonder if that's true for Starbucks in Seattle.

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.

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.

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.

    S s;
    S *p;

    s.field
    p->field

    s.field
    p.field

I was able to see this only via broader experience with other languages. I never even noticed the issue before.

C++ addressed this not by fixing it, but by introducing the reference type. But the C++ ref type brings along with it all kinds of new problems, which I won't get into here.

your language is too sloppy for me, a pointer-to-a-struct contains a value (could say "is" a value), and some struct-members might resolve as values, but a switch from a struct to a pointer-to-a-struct is not a switch between a value and a reference; while you might call a pointer "a reference", a struct is never a value. Or did you mean a "dot" r-value and a "dereference to an" r-value? This all makes a difference because C is a call-by-value language, and you can't pass a struct, so it's an important distinction to maintain.

This kind of change might be something a student or newb might encounter, but an experienced C programmer is going to have a sense from the start whether to go with a static/local struct or a malloc'ed one. Maybe on more common a struct containing a struct might switch to a struct containing a pointer to another struct.

personally, I use hungarian and ps->x vs s.x is a nice reinforcement of what hungarian is trying to reinforce. Using parenthesis to illustrate a sort of precedence, I guess I associate the (pointer->) like that as opposed to the (.member) though I can't defend that as making an inordinate amount of sense :)

In my and others' extensive experience in C, almost everyone is wrong about where their programs are consuming time. Profiling almost always produces surprising results. Being about to easily refactor programs to experiment with different data organizations is a superpower for a language.

C programs are difficult to refactor, and so they tend to persist with their earliest design decisions despite changing requirements and profile results.

As soon as you have been in a place 3 or 6 months you are used to all the workarounds and the reasons why things can't be done.

The job of the CEO is to know as much as possible and take responsibility for it.

That doesn't always happen, but it should.

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.

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.

In my experience, the existing process has a way of appearing invisible such that any change will feel like more work, even when it isn't. It's hard to improve things when your coworkers perceive you as trying to give them more work.

The lack of compensation always baffled me. If an employee comes up with a change that saves the company $x, why don't they get bonused <$x for the year? Win/win.

Make it subject to approval or somesuch, to prevent gaming and weed out edge cases, but every employee should be incentivized to find a way to do their job better.

Sales is another job where value is very clear, hence good sales people are often some of the highest paid people in a company.

Companies can ignore that for awhile, but eventually it needs to be true.

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.

Really? You think there's a hundred or more executives/managers/supervisors between the CEO and someone on the floor of a SBUX? I'd bet closer to 10.

But that's just direct bosses-boss levels. Doesn't take into consideration things like... PMs, suppliers, customers, Health & Safety (which will vary by locale), unions, security, accounting, HR, public relations & the media, the board of directors, and all of the myriad depts. that will pop up in odd or varied ways.

Maybe not 100 levels, but certainly dozens and dozens of interested parties.

/sarcasm

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.

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.

In my experience, each layer also tends to lessen the severity/criticality. Even when everyone is well intentioned and truthful, you end up with a lot different story/description when it reaches the end of the chain.

I guess one important thing to look out for to judge this as either a PR stunt, or an actual well meaning practice - will be toi see if store managers get any advance notice that the CEO is gonna be working there.

If an ambitious career oriented manager knows the boss is gonna see everything that hopes on tomorrow, you can bet there's be extra staff rostered on the day before to make sure everything is better-that-normally prepped for the next day, that all the most compliant staff and the staff who are most beholden to the manager will be rostered on and they'll all be coached about what to say and threatened if they say the wrong thing, and probably a whole bunch of friends of the manager will show up as stooges on the day cosplaying happy and satisfied "ordinary customers".

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.

An interesting thing happened at a company I worked for: the engineers were, during a time of intense labor pressure, asked to staff the fulfillment center. The fulfillment staff worked under a supervisor, and were supposed to perform the same rote tasks all day long: hook this device up to the bench, pack this box, unpack that box, and so on. The engineers worked under their engineering managers, and were supposed to perform the _exact samesame_ rote tasks all day: configure devices, pack and unpack boxes.

What really happened was that the engineers found all sorts of ways to optimize the process as they went - and they made them largely without asking anybody. They then shared the optimizations with the other engineers, who followed suit. And they were rewarded by engineering management for finding those optimizations. Later, they propagated back down to the supervisors, who propagated them down to the fulfillment staff.

If the fulfillment staff deviated from their rote tasks, though? They'd have most likely been fired.

But it sure as hell sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would have happened at Amazon.

(And, as a plot twist, those same engineers went back to their coding jobs earning 8 or 10 times what the fulfilment staff make, and started on a project using machine vision to algorithmically detect "rote task violations" and have the computer fire people for them...)

But the major factor is I wasn't scared to make or suggest changes in how I worked. Everyone else on the line needed that t-shirt printing job so they just did what they were told. I wasn't afraid of being fired or reprimanded for making changes so I was much more free with my words and work.

It is a sham when it's used to counter disagreements from employees.

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.

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.

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.)

Yeah, nah.

Can you imagine any low level AppleStore worker giving Steve Jobs "candid and unfiltered input"???

If that's what you're after, you don't send in a very public top-of-the-org-chart face. At least not in any place with at-will (or right-to-work, whichever it is?) employment laws, where they could fire you on the spot for no reason at all. (Most likely not the CEO doing the firing, but the workers direct or one up or regional manager - who'd just been shown up as worthy of "candid and unfiltered input")

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.

I'll also give AC credit: they have to fly a lot of not great routes as a national mandate, and that means cutting corners to make things profitable; the challenges of flag carriers, etc. etc.