Probably better to just listen to the people that do it all day than to think you pop in as an outsider and have some special insight.

Any human in the world will believe someone if they experience for themselves. Sometimes it's necessary.

Possibly so, but the man was one of the best salespeople I've ever met. Ice-to-eskimos level, all while being completely genuine. He had a genuine interest in and deep understanding of the customer experience and was easily the equal of any full-time sales staff.

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.

Reminds me of seeing the chairman of a major fashion label do the same thing - dude was so slick, saw him sell the hell out of the place to 3 women before I left.

Disagree. Experiencing something yourself is a whole nother ballgame from being told about it. "You can't tell people anything" [0]. Recognizing this applies to oneself shows intellectual humility IMO.

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

People need performance and narrative.

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.

You're describing an incredibly toxic environment. Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust.

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

I don't know if toxic is the word for it. No human has infinite capacity for logic or empathy.

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.

> Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust.

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

> You're describing an incredibly toxic environment. Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust.

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.

Why not both?

That would work, if Starbucks had that kind of a culture, but they don't.

It is a good way to get exposed to the baristas once a month. When I was a barista there, I saw my manager's manager a few times. I think I knew the name of that person's manager? I think there's at least 2 more layers before the executive in charge of all of the stores.

This is the most direct way of accomplishing that.

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.

There are a whole class of problems that fall into the "seems like a good idea/measure at some management level, based on the data and worldview they have, but fail in reality, due to some detail at the ground level" category.

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)

Sure, the decisions by management may make sense based on the data they have, but how stupid are management that they trust information filtered through layers of underlings?

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.

It's not 100% truth -- it's that you can't even get 100% detail.

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.

I feel like this just highlights the incompetence of executives and management at various levels more than anything else.

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.