Starbucks: The Moby Dick of Beans

Many are unaware that “Starbucks” was Captain Ahab’s first mate in Moby Dick.  Melville was brilliant.  Ahab gets killed by the whale, and Starbuck, now free from his oppressive and compulsive amputee master, goes on to start a billion dollar coffee chain…only in America.  (Was that how it ended?  I don’t remember, I just remember Melville spending whole chapter describing various kinds of whales).

My wife alerted me to this Costco Connection (April 2011) article, The Big Four-oh.  The article discussed the Starbucks (the coffee chain) CFO’s book, and his company’s metamorphosis to save itself.  I found the following passage seemed appropriate:

“There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”
– Moby Dick, Herman Melville

This passage speaks of tactics, not strategy.  For the record, strategy is “a plan, method,  or stratagem for obtaining a specific goal or result.”  Tactics are the maneuvers to achieve that strategic goal.  In other words, strategy is the horizon, and tactics is the path to getting there.

The article does not speak of a bad Starbuck’s strategy, but tactics. In the article, the author says, ” But while the company was growing stores–and thrilling Wall Street with short-term results–it wasn’t growing  a business.  Costs weren’t being watched, supply chains broke down, shortcuts such as re-streaming milk crept into the operations and at times you couldn’t even smell coffee in a Starbucks, thanks to food…”

This is an area that we stress to our clients.  Dreaming up a strategy is fine, but if your house is not in order where you can get reliable metrics, then you cannot tell if the gorge you are soaring in is leading you down to the pigeons, or keeping you up with the condors (well, eaglesis a better analogy, but I like California Codors since I watched two soar in the mountains while backpacking 25 years ago–there were only about 20 alive at the time).

If this is still Latin to you, then I suggest you buy a quick read, Achieving Strategic Alignment by Barry MacKechnie.  I had lunch with Barry through an introduction by a Bernstein Growth Wealth Management superstar, Andrew Hicks.  The book, which can be read in two hours (three for me), not only discussed strategy, but gave a play by play approach to tactics.  In other words, the book illustrated how to break down your journey to baby steps.

I cannot  stress this concept enough.  Dreaming (or even  strategical planning) without tactics, is about as effective as Captain Ahab’s desire to kill Moby Dick.  If you choose to obsess about the whale, and not on the harpoon, you will just loose another leg.

Successful implimentation of a strategic plan occurs with one eye on the horizon and the other on your next step.