> If this was not a PR move, but a desire to get a sense for work conditions, real problems, etc, it would not be publicized.
And it wouldn't work. I don't think a lot of people would be comfortable sharing real complaints with the CEO who parachuted in for a single shift. It will probably end up being a bit of a Potemkin village situation. The shift will probably be filled up with the highest-motivated, most ass-kissing employees, whose focus will be keeping the CEO comfortable.
Of course it is for PR, it would be really dumb to not publicize it.
It would absolutely work in a sense. Of course the CEO will not get a real experience and of course no one will bring any real grievances to him.
But the CEO will still get some exposure to day to day. It is still somewhat better than not doing it at all. It’s a good precedent to set and one can only hope more CEOs would follow
you are underestimating the impact of programs like this.
The CEO will quickly spot broken processes and inefficiencies. Ass kissing can't make up for business problems. Beyond that, by working in a different store, gets a feel on how generic the approach can be, and where they need local optimizations.
The only think you are taking out of the consideration is toxic lower management and asshole colleagues, but that's not something I'd expect the CEO to fix directly himself. If anything he is just bored of the ass kissers and good news shows, and wants to regain a feel of reality
> The CEO will quickly spot broken processes and inefficiencies.
They will quickly spot what they perceive to be broken processes and inefficiencies, but they don't have real experience of the actual work at that level to be able to safely move Chesterton's fence.
It would be better for the stated goal of understanding the culture & challenges of living as an actual barista at Starbucks, rather than just a publicity stunt.
Sure. But it'd also give them a level of empathy it seems many CEOs lack. I'd say that's worth 1/12 of their work and, if anything, might make them a more efficient and truly understanding leader the remaining 11/12 of the year.
Nope. The role of executives at large companies is to most effectively move resources away from labor and towards the owners of capital. They decide where to open the next branch to crush competitors who treat their workers and customers better; they negotiate deals with suppliers so those suppliers and their workers have fewer resources; they coordinate with other large competitors to hamper workers' attempts at improving labor conditions.
This, to me, doesn't qualify as work. Large company executives create no value. They only take and store value from those who actually perform real work.
you're conflating work and, uh, "activity", so you're just talking past the OP instead of understanding them.
a common usage definition of work being used here is in terms of creating "use value". the ceo's activities do not. they do generate profit for ownership though. which is not the same thing as "use value" and serves a different purpose in society.
Literally every time I've moved up the chain in my career I have done less work. I have seen the same in peers who have surpassed me. I have no reason to believe this changes by the time you reach CEO level.
The bit where they bring in a pro CEO in Silicon Valley who spends most of his time messing around with his horse-breeding hobby instead of running the business is basically just a documentary. Like most of the rest of the show.
This is how CEOs often manage to "do so much". All kinds of charity involvement, "advisor" work on other businesses, sit on boards, et c, then blog about how they still find time for their family and/or staying fit despite being so "busy". It's not because they're super-humans working 100 hours a week with perfect time-management discipline, but because a lot of them don't really do jack-shit for any of their "jobs".
> That would probably be the safest place to work, can't fire anyone with the risk of bad PR.
Why? Just as long as they don't fire someone on the spot, live on social media, I'm sure their PR team can handle it. E.g. make a statement "Joe Schmoe had persistent performance issues and was fired a month after the CEO visit, there's no connection to the CEO."
Depends on personality. Some will be excited to give him an earful about everything that makes their job difficult.
“And the handles on the carafes! You see this injection molding seam? You see where it is when I pick up the carafe for tbe 500th time today? You see these callouses? You’re not going to have callouses, you’re going to have blisters! Like everyone in the first week! And the packaging on these cups! You see this…”
But seriously, unless the whole shop is staffed by management, to get a taste of the job on some rotation, they will mostly just get in the way of front line people. In high school I hated, hated it when a boss would come in and do work. It just stunk the atmosphere.
I recall Amazon used to do something similar. Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts. The goal isn't PR or worker morale - most people see through stunts like that. The real goal is to help leaders better understand their product, its problems, and customer frustrations.
I worked at a small (in Amazon scale - still the largest in the country) home grocery delivery service and everyone pre corona had to spend their 2 first weeks in the warehouse. Everyone had done it, including managers and c-level
The couple of people I personally know that have worked at Amazon warehouses says they're pretty well ran in comparison to other warehouses.
And I know personally that my experience working in a small-business warehouse back when I was young was absolutely garbage. Smaller businesses rarely get any news coverage, but I worked in a warehouse with zero ventilation, no safety training, no safety equipment, nobody trained in logistics, broken and improper lifting equipment, etc. This is par for the course at a workplace with zero outside scrutiny.
Amazon warehouses are at least run by professionals in logistics, have proper safety procedures, equipment, training, etc. As I understand, the 'bad' part is the volume. But at the end of the day, even a well-run warehouse job is a warehouse job. It is physical work.
In the UK I did some work with HMV doing Dev work on their stock systems.
Similar situation where they would send everyone in the company to work in the store, so you would actually use the system you've developed in the real world and understand why everyone always hates the software.
They want them to understand customer frustrations, not employee devastation. Plus, make the C-suite realize how they treat the "lowest" employees of the company and they might not want to work there anymore, have to tread carefully there.
My first career was a chef. When I asked a friend of the family who owned a restaurant when I was teenager what steps I should take to become a chef, the advice he gave was "Get a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant because the most important thing you need to know is to respect your dishwasher because anytime everything goes wrong and you are in a jam, it is your dishwasher who will save you." Unknown to me the restaurant that hired me when I was 17 as a dishwasher was also one of the most prestigious restaurants in California in the early 90s which lead to years cooking in Michelin Star restaurants. Good advice.
Reminds me of something that my father told me:
"Always be nice to nurses and janitors. Nurses run hospitals. Janitors run buildings. Secretaries run offices."
In the case of offices, the receptionist is the most important and powerful person there. They are the ones who have the ear of everybody else, have control of access to everyone else, know how things really work (as opposed to how everyone says they work), etc.
A good or bad word from the receptionist can literally make or break business deals.
If it's anything like the small, dinky restaurant i washed plates for, the reality is that the restaurant doesn't have enough plates and pans to satisfy every order on a busy night without washing something. Pans in particular are reused multiple times during a shift, and they better be well-scrubbed, because you don't want your fancy ingredients tasting of something else.
A line cook can't stop what they are doing for even 5 minutes during a 4 hour period of time. There might be a lull for 15 minutes between seatings to run to the bathroom, but sometimes not. It is brutal work. Because of the thin margins in restaurants, they tend to be under staffed. When something needs to be fixed during service, maybe a plumbing problem, the ice machine broke, or a purveyor didn't deliver the correct items so someone needs to run to the supermarket, it is usually the dishwasher who fixes the problem. The pay is awful for a dishwasher. Likely, especially in California, the dishwasher in the restaurant you are eating at isn't legally allowed to be in the United States. Other times, the dishwasher will have a criminal record and can't find other work. Another dishwasher in Portland had his entire face tattooed with body modifications. They are in that position for a reason. The point is paying the dishwasher in respect if not higher wages is important to the survival of a restaurant. A chef depends on this person who is in the lowest social position to have his or her back.
Jeff Wilke (former ceo of amazon retail) used to do that during Q4 peak. It was also pretty common for engineering teams to signup to do a day in the FC so they could see what it was like.
Bezos would do one day a year operating the customer service lines.
In this documentary about Kawasaki, they also mention that everyone has to expend some time in the production line, it seems like a great way to motivate your engineers to improve the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg32DlveFiE
I know of several restaurant chains who do this - it's seen as very important for restaurant head office workers to understand exactly how the restaurants work and the problems that they experience.
And depending on the franchise owner, could also be the franchise.
My first McJob was at an owner-operated McDonalds where the owner would roll in at lunch on a Saturday in his BMW Z4, see the lunch rush, wash his hands, throw on some gloves, and call out to turn on the other side of the grill for assembly and start packing orders himself on that side to help out the workload.
Gained a lot of respect as an impressionable young adult on what a good leader looks like at that job because his efforts trickled down to his store manager and the managers underneath them.
I don't know if it's still the case but you used to have to go to Hamburger U before you could own a McD's so you knew how to do the job. I actually see it all the time and you can always tell who the owner is, instead of some really uninterested 17 year old you get a middle aged man in a pressed (insert fast food name) polo who is super happy to take your order.
Our Owner/operator was a former bicycle salesman who knew hot fries, and that was it. I wouldn't say he was hands off (he insisted that I violate civil rights/labor laws may he rot in hell), but he really didn't understand much more than squeezing out every penny.
The worst thing was that Ray Kroc's wife live in the next town over and routinely came through our drive thru. Once the lot was being re-surfaced and she was royally pissed that the drive thru was closed and she had to come inside and mingle with the hoi polloi.
Apparently this is why some of the McDonalds restaurants in the Oak Brook / Chicago area are very good (or at least perfectly to spec)... they are owned by corporate and used for executive training.
> Executives would sometimes take customer service shifts.
This won't happen among most companies, but I'd love to see that become a common practice with at least some high-level developers.
There's so many pain points in many customer service organizations that are easily solvable if a developer understood the frustration and waste with many customer service tasks. Nothing motivates more than having to do some annoying manual billing process that's error prone or looking up customer information by logging into 5 different systems.
Alas, Google has no customer service, so their developers shall be placed in the void until morale improves.
When i started at Shopify we had to setup a store and do some customer support. It was a great way to understand the product, especially since my role wasn't going to be customer facing at all.
This should absolutely be a thing for vertical integration developers. If you're developing cashier software for Target, you should have to use it under realistic circumstances sometimes. Same for Amazon driving software, helpdesk software, sales, etc.
When I worked for a large logistics company we’d have a few days a year where we’d go downstairs and shadow someone using our software. It was very informative. The UX people were redesigning workflow to be “easier” and less information dense and the experienced people (who worked mostly on commissions mind you) where very pissed and wanted their hot keys and their at a glance information.
>The UX people were redesigning workflow to be “easier” and less information dense and the experienced people (who worked mostly on commissions mind you) where very pissed and wanted their hot keys and their at a glance information.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the UX people were wrong though. Even if their changes made the experienced people slightly slower, it could be worth it if it significantly sped up onboarding.
The math isn't straightforward. With a high enough rate of churn, there can be more onboarding work hours than post-onboarding work hours, especially if the onboarding ramp up time takes a while (as it presumably would if you only optimized for experienced use). And high rates of churn are not exactly uncommon.
Also, everybody goes through onboarding, and initial impressions have a lot of power. It's pretty easy to create a system that everyone hates just because it's a little difficult during onboarding. Social reinforcement can be stronger than reality.
(Personally, I still lean towards optimizing for experienced use, if you can do it without sacrificing the onboarding experience too much. Hotkeys that the new employee never needs to see or know about are a typical example, though I prefer a smoother ramp by mentioning the key on applicable menu items. The newbie can ignore it, the intermediate user can learn from it, the experienced user can ignore the menu.)
I suppose that the Devil's Advocate sort of counterargument is that for many startups or businesses on the bubble of survival, their most important task is for paying customers to understand the basics of their software and get hooked with a paid subscription quickly. From that perspective, it's ok if customers don't absolutely LOVE the software in a year or two, as long as they like it just enough to be paying today.
> Why optimize for the one-time thing at the expense of the everyday use?
I'm not necessarily endorsing this perspective, and it depends on the specifics, but there are cases where this makes business sense. If you take a task that requires an expensive expert and make it something that an unskilled worker can do then you you can lower overall labor costs even if each user is less efficient in the new system.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Here's a great article that explains how users can be sorted into categories (from beginner to student to expert) and what each of them wants and needs.
It is possible to achieve both. Making an explicit choice to degrade the ability and satisfaction of experienced employees is just optimizing for staff churn.
> The UX people were redesigning workflow to be “easier” and less information dense and the experienced people (who worked mostly on commissions mind you) where very pissed and wanted their hot keys and their at a glance information.
It was very eye opening.
Just curious. Many applications have some kind of "Settings" or "Preferences" section with some kind of App UI customization being possible. Often it's just a set of fairly simple features like picking a favorite background color for your App or being able to upload your own avatar or something.
But are there Apps out there where you can pick between say "Beginner and Expert" modes and have a radically different UI and UX depending on how experienced and comfortable you are? (Gmail sort of has a touch of that concept with the ability to either have a dense or comfortable email layout, but that's barely scratching the surface of what's possible)
PS: I realize that trying to develop, maintain, and support mobile and desktop versions of different versions of the same App would morph into a significant and unpleasant challenge, but being able to pick the type of UI might be a possible solution that pleases more types of users.
> But are there Apps out there where you can pick between say "Beginner and Expert" modes
Yes, plenty. They've never been particularly popular, because they tend to impose an "all or nothing" switch to the user: by going Expert, you're suddenly overwhelmed by loads of options you don't know and don't understand. People mostly prefer a gentler path, where you become familiar with one feature at a time when you need it particularly badly.
This, in theory, would suggest that the best approach is to morph the interface over time, making those advanced-but-useful features easier to access once discovered. But most people also hate interfaces that change, so in practice that approach doesn't work well. Maybe it will all be solved by a ML engine that looks at what you do every day and automatically serves you the features it thinks you'll want; but Microsoft kinda tried that in a bunch of places and I don't think it was particularly successful.
1) Just thinking out loud here, but some games have the most complex and information dense user interfaces you'll ever see. And sometimes they solve this problem by introducing new features in sort of a well-designed, first-class tutorial over the course of a few missions in a single-player campaign. Maybe Apps can try the same approach?
2) I can't help but think that many UI problems would be solved by Apps replacing meaningless icons with actual text labels. I can't remember what half the random symbols on software I use daily for hours means. If something is a sharing icon or a saving icon, I have no clue half the time. But simply having text labels on buttons and links everywhere would make all software a lot more explorable and understandable.
> some games have the most complex and information dense user interfaces
Completely different audiences and incentives. Gamers game because they want to; most people use apps because they have to, to get shit done and pay the rent. Gamers are motivated to inspect capabilities in order to get an advantage, to solve the gameplay puzzle, even just to kill time; people are motivated to get the hell out of apps as quickly as possible and go shopping.
I don't care about the capabilities of MS Word, I just want to type some stuff out. I don't care that Outlook can read RSS feeds, I just want to send an email. I skip every single onboarding wizard I can skip, because I honestly don't give a shit about 90% of "features" out there. If people cared about advanced features, we'd all be using Emacs.
> many UI problems would be solved by Apps replacing meaningless icons with actual text labels
I don't disagree in principle, but the reality is that text takes a lot of screen real estate, scales badly, and most people think text-heavy UIs just look ugly. We could definitely have better and more meaningful icons though; the "material" anti-skeuomorphing bullshit has inflicted a lot of damage on the credibility of UX practitioners, over the last decade. The 90s in comparison were a dream.
I don't think we really disagree on much, just having a conversation with some random points to feel out what I think about this.
1) I understand that the motivation for playing games is far different from the motivation for work. My main point is just to indicate that there's some games that basically simulate entire economies (on a planetary or even galaxy-wide scale) and a large amount of intricate detail. Using some approaches from games to display UI might help in the business world too. (and might have other benefits)
2) Text taking up more real estate than an icon can in a sense sometimes be considered a big feature rather than a bug. A big part of good UI design is picking and choosing what UI items belong on a particular screen. Icons IMO can lend themselves to bad overall practices because you can fit more junk into every single screen. If you need to fit every single possible command into one screen, the command line is the best method for that.
> The UX people were redesigning workflow to be “easier” and less information dense
I never really understood why they focus on these two things. They're good for rank beginners, I suppose, but once you've even approached competency, those "easier" workflows inevitably end up being a huge pain in the ass, and lower information density is actively a terrible thing.
> They're good for rank beginners, I suppose, but once you've even approached competency,
It's because you're aiming for a system where you don't need to reward the competency of long term employees and can instead just pluck random people off the street, pay them next to nothing and replace them when they quit.
This is a constant fight. The UI design people want a bunch of pretty white space, and the actual users want dense information. Despite people insisting they're "data driven", the design people rarely seem to appreciate the feedback.
This rings so true. As a designer it's invaluable to have teammates with domain expertise—they have a much better idea about customer pain points. Honestly, they can usually articulate the problems better than customers can in interviews.
Where I work it's not uncommon for people to come into engineering through support > support engineering > software engineering. At one point our top AE decided he didn't want the stress of selling and went from AE > PM > UI Engineer. These have always been some of my favorite engineers to work with.
> There's so many pain points in many customer service organizations that are easily solvable if a developer understood
AND if a developer actually has the opportunity to do something about it. Many companies overbook their developers time such that deadlines are constantly missed, where in that prioritization is their room for significant improvements to other services?
If the Engineering Manager is judged by their project throughput how does the EM feel about their reports working outside of that scope?
If there's value in Customer Service there should be a distinct team working on it and it shouldn't become a second job existing employees have to work.
100% agree, especially if it is industry specific specialty software. Seen so many applications that have processes that only make sense to the people that developed it and are at best tolerated by the users that have no other choice than to use it.
> Alas, Google has no customer service, so their developers shall be placed in the void until morale improves.
We had customer support for Google Fiber, and engineers could pair with a CSR to listen to calls whenever they wanted to. We were widely regarded as having excellent customer support, and of course, customers were calling us about our highest priority but most difficult to fix bugs.
If developers spent more time in sales or customer service...many of them would quit out of frustration, but some would refactor the world, also out of frustration.
The main reason you do this is to weed out executives who are mostly interested in the prestige. People like that are much more likely to be good at shifting the blame for problems than actually fixing or preventing problems.
That's what I asked my boss to do for me. Pair me with someone using our tool so they can ask me to do real world tasks and see how I can handle it. Should be later this month. And will try to do one session every month or so.
The issue in my opinion is their day or two on the job really doesn't give them a good picture of what's going on. Sure they might see a few things but they could just as easily be an anomaly as they could be systemic. I wish upper management that are brought in from the outside would be required to work a month or two in the field and live on those wages. For example at Starbucks in the 2 days he works he might see that the espresso machine is getting loaded wrong 40% of the time slowing up the line. Seeing this he might go back to the mothership and decide everyone using the espresso machine needs more training to reduce the failures. What he is missing is that there are supposed to be three people working not two and the person making espresso is working his fifth double shift this week because the wages are so low they can't pay their rent and is making errors because he's tired. He would have also missed that the manager had sent a worker home that day and the day before because it wasn't busy and the manager wanted to improve his margins. He also missed the next day when it was really busy that same manager was demanding that an employee on their day off come in and work because they were busy and if they didn't come in they would be fired (leaving them even more short of people and creating more delays). It's like a person who fasts for 24h saying they know what it's like to be starving. If you really want to see what's going on a day or two simply won't cut it you need some time for things to sink in and if you don't know what's really going on how can you run a business properly?
You’re making a lot of assumptions about how dumb he will be. Like you think he will just overfit on every detail instead of asking the store manager or employees about what he experienced? You think he will not work in more than one store, in more than one geography? Cmon man.
Honestly I think you're making as many assumptions as the parent commenter--I agree you're right that the portrayal of the exec is really biased towards assuming stupidity, but it really depends on the quality of the executive and the people that hired them. It's completely possible to get a total dumbass, and also possible to get a genius.
Eh, I think it depends on how canny the executive running the experiment is and how much experience they have in the particular part of the industry. I worked in restaurants when I was younger and now have done a lot of sales-side and logistics management, and it wouldn't take more than a day of working in a new restaurant for me to accurately understand some of the major issues going on. You just have to be open-minded, identify the best employees, and let them freely bitch at you for about two hours while trying to do the work with them. That'll give you a good sense of the big blockers at that particular restaurant. Same is true for any software org.
The difference will be if you think that you're going to come up with better prescriptions for success than they are (and this is where the level of executive cleverness comes into play). One day per month in a Starbucks shop and then giving technical directives wouldn't make any sense, but one day per month in a Starbucks shop and then redirecting budgeting at a corporate level might.
I would believe that's the case if Narasimhan were working a full shift, but he's only working half a shift once a month. At that point why bother? What are you going to learn in 4 hours a month where all the employees are on their best behavior and the store is made immaculate prior to your arrival?
The new Starbucks CEO is Laxman Narasimhan. Google says he's worth about $20m.
The previous Starbucks CEO was Howard Schultz. He's worth about $3.7b
Can somebody who is worth between $20m and $3.7b really just... hang out broad daylight behind a counter at a Starbucks from a security perspective?
Obviously I get the gap between $20m (he's just starting out, I'm sure his net worth will grow to at least $50m shortly if he does well at Starbucks) and $3.7b is huge. But at what point is going outside (without security? where people know you will be?) kind of a risk?
What exactly do you imagine is going to happen? There are lots of very rich people walking around in public all day long with little ill effects? The most you can get by robbing him is the stuff he has in his wallet, which is pretty much going to be similar to someone with a much lower net worth. If you walk around in Palo Alto, you will likely bump into a billionaire or two on a typical day.
I'm not a criminologist, but I would assume that personal safety has more to do with the environment a person occupies. Poor people are more likely to be victims of crimes than the rich. Being a recognizable celebrity or a target of organized criminals may be exceptions to the rule. How many people would recognize the Starbucks CEO on the street if they saw him?
If they were paid the minimum wage too it might drive home a greater understanding of their employees as well, though unfortunately the large existing bank accounts of the CEOs ensures that any lesson that might come with that small paycheque is not likely to sink in.
yeah, one day is not going to cut it. Full immersion requires a lot more time. Also with a single day at once location, you risk being seen as "the special guest" and treated differently, while this kind of thing would smooth out over the course of several weeks.
It should be a shift swap. He works as a barista for barista pay and the person he takes the shift from should be CEO for a day for CEO pay. Business Insider says[1] the new CEO's compensation is something like $28 million, so the barista should get around $115k for the day's work.
Maybe then both parties will come to realize whether or not the 3 orders of magnitude difference in pay is warranted.
I'm saying if the CEO wants to work as a barista then they should find a barista that wants to see what the CEO job is like and swap jobs and pay for a day. I doubt either party will be particularly good at the other person's job, but that's not really the point of the exercise. Both would get a glimpse of the other person's working life.
I used to work in tech for a large retail company and when you joined the company you had to work 3 days straight at one of the stores. Honestly it was brutal and they put me to work. It made me thankful to work at the corporate office if anything.
Try a couple of months at the wage they pay those poor bastards. That's the thing about "having to work the floor". If I'm the CEO, I'm making $10MM a year and frankly busting ass for 4 whole hours at $5000/h isn't a big deal. It's a completely different experience when you have to bust ass all week at $8/h
It's a nice gesture, but this sort of ear-to-the-ground work is something that everyone over a VP level should be doing in such a high-touch customer-facing business.
When it's just the CEO for one day a month...it's like when you see a frontpage news article declaring that your governor recently undertook a choreographed ride on the local subway to better understand their constituents' public transit concerns. Instead of making them seem relatable and trustworthy, it highlights how grossly out of touch they are.
Once when I was working our incoming phone support a tech accidentally added our CEO's office number to the round robin system for incoming support calls.
CEO fielded 4 calls before he figured out what happened. No idea if he solved the problems or not.
I kinda dreamt since that day that any product managers would work some time taking support calls for their products and it'd be a better world because they'd realise all the issues we've been raising about their product are real.... But instead we were just lowly support folks who didn't know about product development and they continued to be "agile"
A little bit of knowledge can be less than useless. It gives the impression of understanding while passing over the harsher realities. The way that such a move is enacted matters.
Is this shift scheduled on a random Saturday/Sunday with ~48 hours notice. Does the shift last 8 hours? Does his replacement randomly show up 30 minutes late and he needs to work an extra 30 minutes with zero notice? Does he need to open the shop bright and early after closing the night before? If the CEO is insulated from these rather common experiences then the exercise masks the problems with a veneer of understanding.
This is only going to be remotely effective if the workers aren't aware he's CEO. Heck even the franchise-owner is going to have the store cleaned probably, ask his friends to come by and compliment the store.
I'm not exactly sure how this will go down for Starbucks per se, maybe it is PR-ish -- but to pull the camera back a bit, I think it would be tremendously helpful to normalize this idea everywhere, even if it may not always work out perfectly.
Yeah, I don't see the big deal. He's the new CEO and appears to be setting the tone, informing people of one of his first efforts. Stating it publicly seems uncontroversial for a business with publicly-traded stock.
I also don't see it as some veiled attempt to act like he's trying to empathize with every aspect of the workers' lives. Not that a lot of people are suggesting this, but some are, and it seems like an incorrect impulse to assume that. As the new CEO, he wants to see the operating conditions of their stores, where they make most of their money. Seems like a decent idea to me, and is presumably different from what the previous CEO was doing.
One of the higher ups had worked his way up from the bottom of the totem pole. He would come and work the frontline and the employees were generally appreciative.
One of his subordinates followed his lead - except he had no idea what he was doing. He was slow, got in people’s way, and did things no frontline employee would ever be allowed to do - just give stuff away constantly.
At the end of the day, the CEO isn’t ever going to be under the same pressure or constraints as a normal employee. This is extremely likely to just end up being a vanity project.
>... I think it would be tremendously helpful to normalize this idea everywhere, even if it may not always work out perfectly.
It's all dependent upon the intent of the CEO or person coming in and doing the work. Just as an anecdote, I have seen too many times where a superior comes in with the intent of doing the work to prove it can be done better, rather than to understand the realities of what employees are dealing with, and the results are negative. I frequently had a COO who would come to my warehouse, get on the front line with processing equipment (just as an aside, this was an ITAD company processing end-of-life IT equipment for data sanitization and remarketing, so it's tech-related), and take a cavalier, "SEE! I could go through ALL of that in X amount of minutes! I don't understand why people can't move fast enough blah, blah, blah."
What he never realized is that he didn't do all the work. He'd capture only what he looked at in the system, never put anything away, and left a massive pile of work, and garbage, behind him that my team always had to clean up. He wouldn't take the time to do the rest of the work that the team has to do themselves day in and day out. He half-assed it and berated us at the end, and I could never get him to understand this. It's not that it "didn't always work out perfectly", it's that it made morale plummet every single time it happened.
So yeah, I share your sentiment, but to a point - it's reliant upon the person diving in to keep an open mind and actually give a shit about it instead of just using it as a, "Look at me, I'm a man of the people!" opportunity.
Given how unpleasant the relationship between the current CEO and their baristas have been [1], this can not start well, unless the new CEO takes some steps to make friends first.
1. under the current CEO Starbucks has racked up numerous labor violations for union busting
Assuming he actually works the whole shift, he still can experience what works as a barista in his company is like (workload, how to deal with customers assuming they don't recognize him) somewhat truthfully.
I believe Google’s data would reflect number of people hanging out inside more than number of customers passing through, since a customer that stays 10x as long has 10x the impact on average number of people inside the building. 11-6 sounds right for times the seating area is most full, but I’d imagine the biggest rush of in-and-out customers is just before work hours. Fortunately, there’s a Starbucks near me that I happen to know has had its lobby closed for a year or two due to a high crime rate, and Google’s data for it does indeed show a strong peak from 7 to 10.
Friendly neighborhood barista here: actual sales numbers have always shown a peak somewhere between 7-10. If might appear busier later in the day, but that's more likely a function of having less staff for afternoons.
I have never worked as a barista, but I have worked as a line cook. It's not hard to cook one thing. It takes some time and practice to cook many things at once at a speed that keeps up with a good lunch rush. You can also easily compound the situation by trying to go too fast anyway, resulting in orders being sent back.
Yeah it’s like juggling. A non juggling person can’t really just decide they’re going to juggle a few hours a month and expect some balls won’t be dropped.
Yes, working as a barista means you're running multiple independent instruction loops in your head at all times, while also having to act like a pleasant sociable human.
Yes. About the least-skilled position in retail is working the POS. Even with a touch screen, it takes practice. It makes a big difference if the operator knows where all the buttons are as opposed to having to hunt and peck. Yes, the machine tells you how much change to make, but picking up the right number of coins by touch instead of by picking up a bunch of them and counting them out into the other hand, that makes a difference. Picking up single bills out of the cash tray without fumbling takes some touch. Knowing all the sizes (short, tall, grande, venti, trenta?) and all the drinks. If you are at a store where they don't print drink labels, you have to know the order in which to announce a drink (size, modifiers, drink-type, but make sure the modifiers are in the right order) and the shorthand for the sharpie markup of the cups.
There's skills you need. None of it is that hard. But it is not easy to do it at speed without practice.
Better not be during the rush. Someone who works half a day once a month is going to be worthless in a rush, and it isn't worth the trouble to train them because they aren't coming back soon enough to remember any skills.
During the less busy times, he might learn something, though. Especially if he talks with his partners. They still call the workers at Starbucks "partners," right?
It's really obvious when you put a c-suite 40-something or 50-something exec on a blue collar team: nobody's gonna be fooled for a minute. It's like that SNL skit of Kylo Ren from Star Wars going undercover in the employee cafeteria.
As long as you spring it on them they won't have a chance to tidy up first. They'll still be on their best behavior and follow every rule to a T once the exec shows up though.
to be fair half of what made that funny/awkward is Kylo fishing for compliments. If Narasimhan is chill, it might be less super-awkward. Plus, who knows Narasimhan. This is the first I've heard his name. I wouldn't be surprised if most starbucks counter employees don't know the name of the CEO, much less what he looks like.
It's not really name or face-recognition usually. Execs slumming it in the trenches just speak and listen differently. And they have very specific priorities there that day (it's not "I'm just covering my shift" like everybody else). They stand out, clear as day.
Plus someone involved in the running of the store has to know why there's a highly educated, highly curious 50 year old who doesn't know how to make a latte or work the till added to the crew today, and that person is going to want to make sure everyone is on their best behaviour.
I saw this happen too. Lots of people doing overtime to tidy up the store for when the regional manager came by.
I had my hand in a cast at the time in a work related incident, so I only did some menial tasks. The regional manager focused on me for a time, and was extremely frustrated with how slow I was. He proceeded to show me how much quicker he could do those menial tasks with just one hand. It was weird. I feel like the disconnect he had with the realities of the stores is on an entire other level than not being there to witness it.
Was his demonstration helpful? Or do you mean that he was only able to do the tasks faster because he was rushing them, or that fast completion of these tasks was not really meaningful to the overall performance of the store?
No there was no useful tips or anything new to his demonstration, only speed. If the completion of these tasks was meaningful to the performance of the store, it was only in his opinion. The store was already in the best shape it had ever been because of our hard work between the announcement and the day of his visit.
Obviously he was only concerned about optimization.
Just want to make sure that it’s understood the point I’m making is that I had an obvious injury, still showed up for work, still did work, and was met with nothing but reprimand by this manager that I had just met. So in this particular case the benefit of a manager going down to the trenches seems only beneficial for one side.
It's funny because it reminds me of stories my grandparents told me about communism in Eastern Europe where the higher ups would come inspect their factories and the execs would know in advance and prep everything to look perfect.
If he and executive come in on a regular basis at the same stores, it won't be a such a big deal after a while. They'll get to know the staff at the store, they'll know the routine. Like if Tom Cruise was your neighbour, it'll just be "Hi Tom".
It's less about seeing how x store runs and more about seeing how the job for x employee is, no?
I dont think undercover bossing is helpful. But a CEO working a barista or manager shift at a store and dealing with customers and all the shit employees deal with it going to be insightful for the CEO. Hopefully that will help set policy and make work better for those workers.
I once took a cab in the middle of the night. The cabby was a elderly gentleman who did not seem to know his way around very well. It was a long ride so we got talking. Turned out he was the new boss of the company (a fairly big company, lots of cars) who wanted to get to know the circumstances under which his drivers worked. He had been working the night shift for a couple of weeks.
This is good, right? Then a team of <trolls/activists> can all arrive at the same time and order a big pile of 'secret menu' 19-ingredient monstrosities from the CEO.
Any CEO doing this for the right reasons - I.e., to help ensure the product is good - would whip the marketing department right into shape and tell them to keep a lid on it.
Part of the reason to do this is for employees to know that the CEO understands their job and their concerns. The vast majority of employees will not be working at a store the CEO visits, so it makes sense to announce it internally. It sounds like that's what they did, and CNBC got a hold of that email.
And it really should be a week or two. You can grind through hell on optimism for a day. Doing it day in and day out is the hard part and may highlight different negative aspects of the job compared to just showing up for 8 hours
It's a noble idea, but it's not enough to give someone who's already wealthy beyond imagination a sense of the precarity of people who have to work to live. That's the real problem: people with all the power making decisions that impact people in circumstances they can't imagine even if they might have experienced something that vaguely resembles it 20 or 40 years before.
No matter what he does, he knows he gets go to home to a safe place with plenty to eat at the end of the day. You can't simulate the effect of the lack of that certainty on someone's work.
The CEO is probably independently wealthy, so shutting off his pay for one month does nothing. I think this is a great opportunity to get to know what it's like to work at this level, the type of people, etc. If this person has a heart, it should enable good changes in the company based on bottom-up feedback.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadAnd it wouldn't work. I don't think a lot of people would be comfortable sharing real complaints with the CEO who parachuted in for a single shift. It will probably end up being a bit of a Potemkin village situation. The shift will probably be filled up with the highest-motivated, most ass-kissing employees, whose focus will be keeping the CEO comfortable.
It would absolutely work in a sense. Of course the CEO will not get a real experience and of course no one will bring any real grievances to him. But the CEO will still get some exposure to day to day. It is still somewhat better than not doing it at all. It’s a good precedent to set and one can only hope more CEOs would follow
The CEO will quickly spot broken processes and inefficiencies. Ass kissing can't make up for business problems. Beyond that, by working in a different store, gets a feel on how generic the approach can be, and where they need local optimizations.
The only think you are taking out of the consideration is toxic lower management and asshole colleagues, but that's not something I'd expect the CEO to fix directly himself. If anything he is just bored of the ass kissers and good news shows, and wants to regain a feel of reality
They will quickly spot what they perceive to be broken processes and inefficiencies, but they don't have real experience of the actual work at that level to be able to safely move Chesterton's fence.
I think that reasoning might have some flaws.
If you think he’s a bad CEO, you shouldn’t want him there at all. If you think he’s a good CEO you shouldn’t want him dropping his work for a month.
This, to me, doesn't qualify as work. Large company executives create no value. They only take and store value from those who actually perform real work.
a common usage definition of work being used here is in terms of creating "use value". the ceo's activities do not. they do generate profit for ownership though. which is not the same thing as "use value" and serves a different purpose in society.
this is basic analysis, not a judgment.
This is how CEOs often manage to "do so much". All kinds of charity involvement, "advisor" work on other businesses, sit on boards, et c, then blog about how they still find time for their family and/or staying fit despite being so "busy". It's not because they're super-humans working 100 hours a week with perfect time-management discipline, but because a lot of them don't really do jack-shit for any of their "jobs".
Why? Just as long as they don't fire someone on the spot, live on social media, I'm sure their PR team can handle it. E.g. make a statement "Joe Schmoe had persistent performance issues and was fired a month after the CEO visit, there's no connection to the CEO."
“And the handles on the carafes! You see this injection molding seam? You see where it is when I pick up the carafe for tbe 500th time today? You see these callouses? You’re not going to have callouses, you’re going to have blisters! Like everyone in the first week! And the packaging on these cups! You see this…”
But seriously, unless the whole shop is staffed by management, to get a taste of the job on some rotation, they will mostly just get in the way of front line people. In high school I hated, hated it when a boss would come in and do work. It just stunk the atmosphere.
And I know personally that my experience working in a small-business warehouse back when I was young was absolutely garbage. Smaller businesses rarely get any news coverage, but I worked in a warehouse with zero ventilation, no safety training, no safety equipment, nobody trained in logistics, broken and improper lifting equipment, etc. This is par for the course at a workplace with zero outside scrutiny.
Amazon warehouses are at least run by professionals in logistics, have proper safety procedures, equipment, training, etc. As I understand, the 'bad' part is the volume. But at the end of the day, even a well-run warehouse job is a warehouse job. It is physical work.
Similar situation where they would send everyone in the company to work in the store, so you would actually use the system you've developed in the real world and understand why everyone always hates the software.
In the case of offices, the receptionist is the most important and powerful person there. They are the ones who have the ear of everybody else, have control of access to everyone else, know how things really work (as opposed to how everyone says they work), etc.
A good or bad word from the receptionist can literally make or break business deals.
Bezos would do one day a year operating the customer service lines.
My first McJob was at an owner-operated McDonalds where the owner would roll in at lunch on a Saturday in his BMW Z4, see the lunch rush, wash his hands, throw on some gloves, and call out to turn on the other side of the grill for assembly and start packing orders himself on that side to help out the workload.
Gained a lot of respect as an impressionable young adult on what a good leader looks like at that job because his efforts trickled down to his store manager and the managers underneath them.
The worst thing was that Ray Kroc's wife live in the next town over and routinely came through our drive thru. Once the lot was being re-surfaced and she was royally pissed that the drive thru was closed and she had to come inside and mingle with the hoi polloi.
This won't happen among most companies, but I'd love to see that become a common practice with at least some high-level developers.
There's so many pain points in many customer service organizations that are easily solvable if a developer understood the frustration and waste with many customer service tasks. Nothing motivates more than having to do some annoying manual billing process that's error prone or looking up customer information by logging into 5 different systems.
Alas, Google has no customer service, so their developers shall be placed in the void until morale improves.
It was very eye opening.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the UX people were wrong though. Even if their changes made the experienced people slightly slower, it could be worth it if it significantly sped up onboarding.
Why optimize for the one-time thing at the expense of the everyday use?
Also, everybody goes through onboarding, and initial impressions have a lot of power. It's pretty easy to create a system that everyone hates just because it's a little difficult during onboarding. Social reinforcement can be stronger than reality.
(Personally, I still lean towards optimizing for experienced use, if you can do it without sacrificing the onboarding experience too much. Hotkeys that the new employee never needs to see or know about are a typical example, though I prefer a smoother ramp by mentioning the key on applicable menu items. The newbie can ignore it, the intermediate user can learn from it, the experienced user can ignore the menu.)
I'm not necessarily endorsing this perspective, and it depends on the specifics, but there are cases where this makes business sense. If you take a task that requires an expensive expert and make it something that an unskilled worker can do then you you can lower overall labor costs even if each user is less efficient in the new system.
https://breakingpoint.substack.com/p/your-three-kinds-of-cus...
Just curious. Many applications have some kind of "Settings" or "Preferences" section with some kind of App UI customization being possible. Often it's just a set of fairly simple features like picking a favorite background color for your App or being able to upload your own avatar or something.
But are there Apps out there where you can pick between say "Beginner and Expert" modes and have a radically different UI and UX depending on how experienced and comfortable you are? (Gmail sort of has a touch of that concept with the ability to either have a dense or comfortable email layout, but that's barely scratching the surface of what's possible)
PS: I realize that trying to develop, maintain, and support mobile and desktop versions of different versions of the same App would morph into a significant and unpleasant challenge, but being able to pick the type of UI might be a possible solution that pleases more types of users.
Yes, plenty. They've never been particularly popular, because they tend to impose an "all or nothing" switch to the user: by going Expert, you're suddenly overwhelmed by loads of options you don't know and don't understand. People mostly prefer a gentler path, where you become familiar with one feature at a time when you need it particularly badly.
This, in theory, would suggest that the best approach is to morph the interface over time, making those advanced-but-useful features easier to access once discovered. But most people also hate interfaces that change, so in practice that approach doesn't work well. Maybe it will all be solved by a ML engine that looks at what you do every day and automatically serves you the features it thinks you'll want; but Microsoft kinda tried that in a bunch of places and I don't think it was particularly successful.
2) I can't help but think that many UI problems would be solved by Apps replacing meaningless icons with actual text labels. I can't remember what half the random symbols on software I use daily for hours means. If something is a sharing icon or a saving icon, I have no clue half the time. But simply having text labels on buttons and links everywhere would make all software a lot more explorable and understandable.
Completely different audiences and incentives. Gamers game because they want to; most people use apps because they have to, to get shit done and pay the rent. Gamers are motivated to inspect capabilities in order to get an advantage, to solve the gameplay puzzle, even just to kill time; people are motivated to get the hell out of apps as quickly as possible and go shopping.
I don't care about the capabilities of MS Word, I just want to type some stuff out. I don't care that Outlook can read RSS feeds, I just want to send an email. I skip every single onboarding wizard I can skip, because I honestly don't give a shit about 90% of "features" out there. If people cared about advanced features, we'd all be using Emacs.
> many UI problems would be solved by Apps replacing meaningless icons with actual text labels
I don't disagree in principle, but the reality is that text takes a lot of screen real estate, scales badly, and most people think text-heavy UIs just look ugly. We could definitely have better and more meaningful icons though; the "material" anti-skeuomorphing bullshit has inflicted a lot of damage on the credibility of UX practitioners, over the last decade. The 90s in comparison were a dream.
1) I understand that the motivation for playing games is far different from the motivation for work. My main point is just to indicate that there's some games that basically simulate entire economies (on a planetary or even galaxy-wide scale) and a large amount of intricate detail. Using some approaches from games to display UI might help in the business world too. (and might have other benefits)
2) Text taking up more real estate than an icon can in a sense sometimes be considered a big feature rather than a bug. A big part of good UI design is picking and choosing what UI items belong on a particular screen. Icons IMO can lend themselves to bad overall practices because you can fit more junk into every single screen. If you need to fit every single possible command into one screen, the command line is the best method for that.
I never really understood why they focus on these two things. They're good for rank beginners, I suppose, but once you've even approached competency, those "easier" workflows inevitably end up being a huge pain in the ass, and lower information density is actively a terrible thing.
It's because you're aiming for a system where you don't need to reward the competency of long term employees and can instead just pluck random people off the street, pay them next to nothing and replace them when they quit.
Where I work it's not uncommon for people to come into engineering through support > support engineering > software engineering. At one point our top AE decided he didn't want the stress of selling and went from AE > PM > UI Engineer. These have always been some of my favorite engineers to work with.
AND if a developer actually has the opportunity to do something about it. Many companies overbook their developers time such that deadlines are constantly missed, where in that prioritization is their room for significant improvements to other services?
If the Engineering Manager is judged by their project throughput how does the EM feel about their reports working outside of that scope?
If there's value in Customer Service there should be a distinct team working on it and it shouldn't become a second job existing employees have to work.
We had customer support for Google Fiber, and engineers could pair with a CSR to listen to calls whenever they wanted to. We were widely regarded as having excellent customer support, and of course, customers were calling us about our highest priority but most difficult to fix bugs.
> “You’re doing what Bob Iger does at Disney!” Jack tells Gavin. “He makes every manager wear the Goofy suit one day out of the year.”
The difference will be if you think that you're going to come up with better prescriptions for success than they are (and this is where the level of executive cleverness comes into play). One day per month in a Starbucks shop and then giving technical directives wouldn't make any sense, but one day per month in a Starbucks shop and then redirecting budgeting at a corporate level might.
The new Starbucks CEO is Laxman Narasimhan. Google says he's worth about $20m.
The previous Starbucks CEO was Howard Schultz. He's worth about $3.7b
Can somebody who is worth between $20m and $3.7b really just... hang out broad daylight behind a counter at a Starbucks from a security perspective?
Obviously I get the gap between $20m (he's just starting out, I'm sure his net worth will grow to at least $50m shortly if he does well at Starbucks) and $3.7b is huge. But at what point is going outside (without security? where people know you will be?) kind of a risk?
If I was worth $3b (like the previous Starbucks CEO), I'd be worried about being held up at gunpoint/abducted/held hostage for ransom.
I am lead to believe Tim Cook doesn't just walk around like you and I?
Maybe then both parties will come to realize whether or not the 3 orders of magnitude difference in pay is warranted.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/starbucks-ceo-salary-laxman-...
Do you really think that baristas should be paid $115k daily? Or that CEOs should be paid minimum wage?
When it's just the CEO for one day a month...it's like when you see a frontpage news article declaring that your governor recently undertook a choreographed ride on the local subway to better understand their constituents' public transit concerns. Instead of making them seem relatable and trustworthy, it highlights how grossly out of touch they are.
I hope he rotates through a few different stores, though. Otherwise, he may become myopic to the quirks of one particular location.
CEO fielded 4 calls before he figured out what happened. No idea if he solved the problems or not.
I kinda dreamt since that day that any product managers would work some time taking support calls for their products and it'd be a better world because they'd realise all the issues we've been raising about their product are real.... But instead we were just lowly support folks who didn't know about product development and they continued to be "agile"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_Boss_(British_TV_se...
If he's serious about this, he should go in, in disguise, without anyone at the store knowing who he is (including top management).
I'm not exactly sure how this will go down for Starbucks per se, maybe it is PR-ish -- but to pull the camera back a bit, I think it would be tremendously helpful to normalize this idea everywhere, even if it may not always work out perfectly.
I also don't see it as some veiled attempt to act like he's trying to empathize with every aspect of the workers' lives. Not that a lot of people are suggesting this, but some are, and it seems like an incorrect impulse to assume that. As the new CEO, he wants to see the operating conditions of their stores, where they make most of their money. Seems like a decent idea to me, and is presumably different from what the previous CEO was doing.
One of the higher ups had worked his way up from the bottom of the totem pole. He would come and work the frontline and the employees were generally appreciative.
One of his subordinates followed his lead - except he had no idea what he was doing. He was slow, got in people’s way, and did things no frontline employee would ever be allowed to do - just give stuff away constantly.
At the end of the day, the CEO isn’t ever going to be under the same pressure or constraints as a normal employee. This is extremely likely to just end up being a vanity project.
It's all dependent upon the intent of the CEO or person coming in and doing the work. Just as an anecdote, I have seen too many times where a superior comes in with the intent of doing the work to prove it can be done better, rather than to understand the realities of what employees are dealing with, and the results are negative. I frequently had a COO who would come to my warehouse, get on the front line with processing equipment (just as an aside, this was an ITAD company processing end-of-life IT equipment for data sanitization and remarketing, so it's tech-related), and take a cavalier, "SEE! I could go through ALL of that in X amount of minutes! I don't understand why people can't move fast enough blah, blah, blah."
What he never realized is that he didn't do all the work. He'd capture only what he looked at in the system, never put anything away, and left a massive pile of work, and garbage, behind him that my team always had to clean up. He wouldn't take the time to do the rest of the work that the team has to do themselves day in and day out. He half-assed it and berated us at the end, and I could never get him to understand this. It's not that it "didn't always work out perfectly", it's that it made morale plummet every single time it happened.
So yeah, I share your sentiment, but to a point - it's reliant upon the person diving in to keep an open mind and actually give a shit about it instead of just using it as a, "Look at me, I'm a man of the people!" opportunity.
1. under the current CEO Starbucks has racked up numerous labor violations for union busting
Otherwise store management spends a huge amount of time trying to tidy up before “corporate” comes by.
At least that was my experience when things like this happened at the fruit stand.
I think it's worth something.
Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan told employees Thursday that he’ll work a half day every month at one of the coffee giant’s locations.
Something tells me it'll be something like 1-5pm; not the 7am rush.
11am-6pm seem to be peak hours for cafes near me - and google data confirms this. Why would 7am be peak time there?
At rush time, you don't have time to think. You must have muscle memory to carry you.
There's skills you need. None of it is that hard. But it is not easy to do it at speed without practice.
During the less busy times, he might learn something, though. Especially if he talks with his partners. They still call the workers at Starbucks "partners," right?
As long as you spring it on them they won't have a chance to tidy up first. They'll still be on their best behavior and follow every rule to a T once the exec shows up though.
I had my hand in a cast at the time in a work related incident, so I only did some menial tasks. The regional manager focused on me for a time, and was extremely frustrated with how slow I was. He proceeded to show me how much quicker he could do those menial tasks with just one hand. It was weird. I feel like the disconnect he had with the realities of the stores is on an entire other level than not being there to witness it.
Just want to make sure that it’s understood the point I’m making is that I had an obvious injury, still showed up for work, still did work, and was met with nothing but reprimand by this manager that I had just met. So in this particular case the benefit of a manager going down to the trenches seems only beneficial for one side.
I dont think undercover bossing is helpful. But a CEO working a barista or manager shift at a store and dealing with customers and all the shit employees deal with it going to be insightful for the CEO. Hopefully that will help set policy and make work better for those workers.
https://www.cbs.com/shows/undercover_boss/
No matter what he does, he knows he gets go to home to a safe place with plenty to eat at the end of the day. You can't simulate the effect of the lack of that certainty on someone's work.