Approximately two decades ago, the three of us crossed paths in a co-learning and coaching experience at Starbucks that pioneered new lean territory. As part of The Management Brief’s series on coaching across the lean community and the benefits of mutual learning, we are going to walk down memory lane in the coming weeks and share our experiences that, we believe, are still relevant to leaders and coaches today attempting a lean transformation.
Many of you who are familiar with Starbucks may be asking, “What does lean have to do with Starbucks?” It’s a fair question, the answer to which also carries some learning — certainly for the three of us and those who wish to follow along. But before we get to that, it helps to understand our roles related to Starbucks after the turn of the century and our roles today:
- Scott was at Starbucks from 2002 to 2011, first as VP of Strategy and then VP of Lean Thinking. Prior to his work at Starbucks he was a management consultant with McKinsey & Co., and today he is Managing Partner with advisory-services firm KILN LLC and a board member of the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI).
- John Shook is a Toyota veteran working with the company in Japan and the United States from 1983 to 1994. John joined LEI as CEO in 2010 is still a Senior Advisor. John met Scott when Scott began to consider the application of lean at Starbucks and when John was exploring ways to take lean beyond the automotive industry and factories.
- Josh was a Starbucks barista and later store manager in Portland, OR, from 2004 to 2008. He joined Scott’s lean team and began to learn about lean from John and Scott. Josh left Starbucks in 2013 to work for LEI and became President of LEI in 2019.
From the start of the co-learning experience, Scott and John were “learning like crazy.” Scott was learning both about lean but also how Starbucks stores actually worked, going to coffee shops and observing the work that took place and the challenges faced.
John was learning how lean could be applied in an environment that was dramatically different from typical manufacturing companies — 7,000 unique retail stores manned by “kids” — yet similar in many ways.
The pair began to explore ways to help Starbucks achieve its ambitious and challenging goals of growing rapidly while maintaining the neighborhood coffee shop experience. Initial experiments to improve business processes eventually led to applying lean to a model line of stores in Portland, during which Josh entered the picture, being coached while witnessing the co-learning experience first-hand.
While experimenting with process changes at an operational level, Scott also developed an approach to bring a core lean principle to all 7,000 stores: at a Starbucks leadership conference he introduced problem-solving skills to all store managers, letting each one go through their own discovery while solving a real problem specific to their locations. These efforts proved to Scott — to all of us — the profound difference lean could make at Starbucks.
They also demonstrated the enormous challenges entailed in bringing lasting lean change to large complex organizations.
In the coming weeks we’ll detail many facets of this co-learning relationship. Some of it good, some not so good, but all of it enlightening for the three of us and, ideally, you as well.
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