Book Review : How Starbucks saved my life.

Written by Michael Gill Publisher: HarperCollins, New Delhi 110001 ISBN-13 978-0-00-726767-5 ISBN- 10 0-00-726767-3 Price Rs 195/Reviewed by Prof M. Anil Ramesh, Director Academic, Siva Sivani Institute of Management. Check out my blog: dranil-marketingmusings.blogspot.com
How do you review a book that exists at different levels? A book that is deeply insightful and banal at the same time. But keeping arguments about the quality of the book aside an attempt is being made as the book is definitely worth reading by practitioners, managers and manager wannabes. All of us have an ingrained belief that getting a job is the most difficult thing and once a job is got one can relax and take things easy. Nothing can be far away from the truth. In the modern world getting the job is the easiest thing. It is like having a piece of cake. Holding on to the job, growing and finding a nurturing organization is a very big challenge. In the era of pink slips, downsizing, rightsizing and simply getting thrown out the challenge how do one keep ones job. How Starbucks saved my life is a true life story. It is written by Michael Gill. This true life story is being made into a movie and it will star Tom Hanks as the hero. Gill is a man born into riches. His Daddy is the renowned New York Writer Brendan Gill. He was educated at Yale and joined J. Walter Thompson the advertising agency. He quickly grew and becomes the creative director. After serving for 25 years at JWT which he considers his own company he is abruptly fired from his job. Gill tries to start his own consulting firm but fails. The losses that he faces are on many fronts. He loses out on the professional front and on the personal front. He has an illicit relationship and fathers a son. His wife divorces him and humiliatingly he has to give off his huge house as a settlement to his wife. The man who had it all lost it. He is at the nadir both professionally and personally. He was waiting for his non existent customers at the local Starbucks when an attractive Afro-American makes an outrageous offer. Would he be willing to work at Starbucks. Not as a MANAGER or in the advertising department but at 10 $ per hour. He would be a store hand or a barista. Gill is shocked and wallows in self pity. How he accepts the job and learns step by step and becomes a good employee is the rest of the story. His terror at handling the cash counter is graphically told. He is so terrified of the cash counter that he becomes the best toilet cleaner at Starbucks. He throws himself into work and becomes the proverbial funny guy. He is well liked by his colleagues and he learns to respect them as they are and not based on their qualifications or by fancy designations. At the end he touchingly describes how he likes his job at Starbucks better than the one at JWT. How he feels more respected and more needed. Gill is finally at peace with himself. But he faces a new challenge. He would have to relocate and be a part of the Starbucks in his own locality. The beauty of this book lies in the fact that it bring to life the horror that many of us are pretending does not exist or that it will not happen to us the fear of losing it all; that too when one is not in

ones prime youth. Losing a job in the late forties or early fifties. That is a stage when the employee slows down physically but is at the prime intellectually. He might not be looking young, fit and fresh but he has so much to offer. So should this axe called downsizing, right sizing or any other fancy term for denying someone his job, life and pride be wielded so mercilessly? What happens to the employee when he loses his job? No one else wants him too and it is a downhill slide from then on. But luckily in How Starbucks saved my life a way out is shown. Fictional and as clichd as it sounds it is still a solution. Gill plots the story with fine acumen. But the frequent flashbacks to the past interrupt the flow of the narrative. But there are lots of lessons to learn. Lessons on how not to rest on ones glory. Of how to recognize the danger signals of redundancy in the organization. Of being are of what is fashionable and what is not fashionable. The author seems to have a love-hate relationship with women. He appears to have very mixed feelings about them. He has stormy relationships with all of them including his wife, his mistress and his children. The only one with whom he has a normal working relationship is with Crystal his boss at Starbucks. I suspect that Gill has subordinated himself with Crystal as he was scared of losing his job. But at various times Gill appears to be very nave and almost as if saying I am the most innocent person in the world He does not appear to know the way the poor live in the USA and that for most people life itself is a struggle. For an advertising person who prides himself on being up to date about everything in life his naivety about the general things in life is little too hard to believe. Gill comes across as a person who tells a very gripping story about two giants in the USA, JWT and Starbucks. They are a study in contract. One is a huge advertising agency and the other is the brash confident newcomer from a new generation. The employees in JWT are painted in hues of black and grey where as the people at Starbucks are lily white. A little too hard to believe. And to say that Starbucks provide free health insurance for all its employees and gloat about it was too much of a syrupy gulab jammun to swallow. Gill observations are insightful and are funny at times. His take on the late coming of Linda smacks of wit. He says quote on the morning of our breakfast, Linda shows up late. Another bad sign. In corporate America the higher your status the tardier you are unquote. And his take on every client becoming an expert, two minutes after listening to advertising presentation is a real one. As a ex advertising man myself I can vouch for the fact that in advertising business every client and his employees are experts. They are very knowledgeable and can take design and media plan decisions very easily and very casually. The real insight in the entire book is the working environment and the type of care that the author says Starbucks takes of its employees aka partners and its customers. Starbucks allows any one liberal use of its restrooms including people who are not its customers. This comes as a surprise as even the best malls and shopping complexes have not so clean bathrooms in India. The work ethic of Starbucks is nicely detailed. The passion of Starbucks towards coffee is infectiously and one can almost feel aroma of the coffee coming out of the book! Even though the book appears to be a pitch for Starbucks and its way of life it has many lessons for the managers to be. Of how the life can go from riches to riches and from riches to rags. Whatever one wants to say at the end How Starbucks has saved my life will remain as a motivational book about a person who lost is all and has rediscovered it. Not the discovery of material wealth but discovery of being happy with the work he did and does. Thats one takeaway I am going to cherish.