Book Review - How Starbucks saved my life - Part - III

But at various times Gill appears to be very naïve and pretending to be 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 a 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 provides 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 an 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. That’s one takeaway I am going to cherish. 

Book Review - How Starbucks saved my life - Part - II

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 terrified of the cash counter. To avoid the cash counter 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. 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 one’s 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 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 clichéd 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 one’s glory. Of how to recognize the danger signals of redundancy in the organization. Of being aware 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 women with whom he has a normal working relationship is with Crystal his boss at Starbucks. I suspect that Gill has subordinated himself to Crystal as he was scared of losing his job.

Book Review - How Starbucks saved my life - Part - I

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“How Starbucks saved my life”.By Michael Gill

Publisher: Harper Collins, New Delhi – 110001

ISBN-13 978-0-00-726767-5 ISBN- 10 0-00-726767-3

Price – Rs 195/-

  

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 is how does one keep one’s 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 as 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 worker. He would be a store hand or a barista. Gill is shocked and wallows in self pity.

Book Review - Games Indians Play - Part - III

His takes on crabs in the bucket, FDI, institutes of higher learnings, entry of foreign universities into India, name changing companies, all appear filled with so much commonsense that one is left wondering why does it happen? Common sense is not every common. So is our behaviour at railway crossings. We risk our limbs and lives only to save a few seconds! One should see the confusion and chaos at the gate of a just lifted railway manned crossing to see how well India functions or does not function. 

Raghunath takes on another of Indian’s peculiar traits. We are great talkers. Television is full of people who keep talking about all and the sundry for hours together. The juicier the talk better are the ratings. It is not for anything that Amartya Sen dubbed us as the ‘argumentative Indians’ we can talk the hind legs off a donkey. Talk, talk and more talk.

We brazen things out, we lie with gay abandon, have no sense of fair play and dangerously as a group we have come to accept these. In modern India corruption is seen as a necessary evil. Corrupted people are not only tolerated but even admired. The honest ones are pitied. “These guys are fools, they don’t know how to take advantage of the situation” we seem to be saying to ourselves.

So which India would we want to live in? India that we are justifiably proud of or an India that grabs attention for all the wrong things. Like 26/11 attack or something else that could have been avoided easily if we were vigilant enough.

Love him or hate him, like the book or hate the book, agree with him or disagree with him, one cant ignore neither the book nor its author. Raghunath raises very pertinent questions. If we are the way he says we are then it is time for us to improve. If we are not it is up to us to prove that we can stand up and be counted as decent and good citizens of this great country. The Indian government could subsidize this book and see that it reaches many more readers.  The government would be doing a great favour to it self.

A book of this magnitude is too important to be written only for English readers. Efforts should be taken to see that the book is translated into all the Indian languages so that the message reaches even more people. All in all a seminal book about Indian behaviour in public. One of the books that administrators should read and keep as a ready reckoner.

Book Review - Games Indians Play - Part - II

 

Some of the questions that the author poses in chapter 1 are very thought provoking like not who but why? That is not who does it but why do we do it? Why do we urinate on the roads, why do we spit on them, why do we write our name on Tajmahal, WHY, WHY, WHY. We can literally feel the anguish of the author ringing in our ears.

How does an anarchy like India function? Is it that we are lucky, divinely blessed or is there a method in madness in the way we do things? We are like this only! We proudly exclaim.     

Prisoner’s dilemma given in chapter 3 is very interesting and explanation of satisfaction points, dissatisfaction points, temptation points and punishment points are very thought provoking. In the era of dwindling profits, recession, focus on CRM practices the theory is of paramount importance. Examples of chilli powder exporters behaviour throws light on why many Indian businesses are not trusted. They are only getting their temptation points. Same is the case of a Joint venture between Indian companies and a foreign company. Are Indian bureaucrats listening? Can we hope that issues like Suzuki Motors Japan and Indian government slugging it out in the International court of justice be avoided in the future.  The author pigeon holes questions raised in the book into twelve canons of Indianness which are

1. Low trustworthiness,
2. being privately smart and public dumb,
3. fatalist outlook,
4. Being too intelligent for our own good,
5. A abysmal sense of public hygiene,
6. lack of self regulation and sense of fairness,
7. reluctance to penalize wrong conduct in others
8. mistaking talk for action
9. deep rooted corruption and a flair for free riding
10. Inability to follow or implement systems
11. A sense of self worth that is messaged only if we have the ‘authority to break it’
12. Propensity to look for loop holes in laws.

Very puzzling. Why would we deliberately bear with injustice, why is that we don’t have clean habits and when some one has we don’t appreciate them, why is that we can’t have self control and can’t stand up to injustice. Why is that we think that authority and position gives people the right to break rules and regulations? Why the question resonates through out the book

Book Review - Games Indians Play - Part - I

Games Indians play by V.Raghunathan an academician is a must read page turning thriller genre. It is rivetingly attractive. Having read it start to finish on three occasions I can vouch for the fact that it should be made a compulsory read for all management students.

The million dollar question that haunts all Indians is”why do Indians behave the way they behave”: We drive without licenses, we drive wherever we want, we jump queues, we spit on the road, we bribe merrily. Worst of all we pretend as if we are very law abiding and everyone else is the law breaker. Like the saying “we get the government we deserve”. Like the people so the rulers.

On the flip side the Indian Diaspora is growing. Indians have made their presence felt though out the world. They are brainy and virtually dominate the software field. They have given the world the number zero, they are admired for their industrious nature, figure among the richest in the world. In short the world toasts the success of Indians. We pride in reflected glory and pat ourselves on the back saying “Indians have arrived?” Arrived from where and going where?

That the paradox that this book addresses and addresses very dramatically. Raghunath has many questions but unfortunately furnishes no answers. There seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel. But Raghunath has to be appreciated for bringing such uncomfortable truths to the forefront. It can be the starting point of a conversation. People would laugh at some of the anecdotes but soon light would dawn on them. Raghunath is talking about you, me and os. Self flagration has never been so painful and so embarrassing.

The author uses very simple language and weaves a tapestry of emotions. We laugh, empathize and feel sad the way things are in India. Raghunath makes no claims about the empirical validity of the things. But they are abundantly clear that they exist. Liberal doses of game theory are used in the book. Is it a deliberate push to make it a part of a compulsory read for a course in operations research?