I’m not sure how to categorize this book as a memoir, business management case study, leadership, or a shameless promotion of the Starbucks brand. I think it has a little of each. But mostly, I consider it an entrepreneur’s self-narrated journey, a journey that Howard Schultz embarked on since buying the Starbucks stores from its original owner and merged with his own Il Giornale stores that no longer bears their name.

The following quotes spelled out Starbuck founders’ mission and philosophy for Starbucks. “My quest has never been just about winning or making money; it has also been about building a great, enduring company.” “No business can do well for its shareholders without first doing well by all the people its business touches.” “When we love something emotion often drives our actions. This is the gift and the challenge entrepreneurs face every day. The companies we dream of and build from scratch are part of us and intensely personal. They are our families. Our lives.”

A founder know when his “baby” is going astray from its core values. It was reflected in his leaked memo “The ommoditization of the Starbucks experience.” At that time, Starbucks was growing like weeds using 2:1 first-year revenue to build cost as a criteria to build a Starbucks store. This was the main reasons he returned to Starbucks as its CEO. He started out by locking up all 7100 Starbucks store on February 26, 2008, which was a powerful signal/statement for the turn around to return to passion for good tasting coffee. Then the financial tidal wave of the 2008 hit. Things got worse. Starbucks had to fight for its survival and the respect from their existing and future customers.

The plan to surprise and fire the existing CEO, Jim Donald, and return to Starbucks reads like a conspiracy story in itself. It took lots of coordination and creativity to create a turn-around strategy especially it coincided with the 2008 financial crisis. This served as a good case study for a founder who wants to re-take his company.

Innovations play a critical role in the turn around of Starbucks: the Clover machine, IT revolution with Salesforce.com, new blends of coffee like Pike Place Roast and Anniversary Roast, Mastrena, Rewards card, Lean technique, MyStarbucksIdea.com, Use of social media, and Via instant coffee. There were failures like Sorbettos, and big layoffs and 1000 store closings.

There were other business strategies like getting back to the basic, and getting in the mud, and elevating the core, planning the big moves and etc.

Since reading this book, the constant reminder of the coffee and empathy toward someone so passionate about coffee, got me back to drinking coffee after quitting the coffee for more than 10 months. I experimented with French Press and other coffee making methods. I even tried out the Clover machine with the Anniversary blend. I was stunned how good the coffee was. It goes to tell you how powerful this book is. Maybe Michael Dell and soon Bill Gates will be writing one soon.

This is a fun read for me. The author took the journey to reach the US memory championship out of the curiosity and good journalism. With some coaching from one of the ex-world champions. He was able to reach the pinnacle of memorization, leveraging ancient techniques (like memory palace). I have learned a few memorization techniques and lots of sciences and tidbits about memorization.

There were stories of the Russian journalist “S” with perceptual disorder of “synthesthesa,” chicken sexer’s use of memory to decipher the sex of a chicken within half a second or 1200 chicks an hour.

The magic number 7 puts us at the limit of memorizing 7 things +/-2, according George Miller of Harvard psychologist in 1956. This was the reason that the phone number comes in 7 digits. Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each number. This was the reason the phone numbers are broken into two parts plus an area code.

Chess masters tend to have a good memory especially of the various chess patterns. But we remember things in context, not isolated facts. “A great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.”

“Our lives are structured by our memories of events. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events. Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experience by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.” “Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one.” “Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human.”

We remember nothing these days, thanks to the “external memory/information” readily available on the net where one can easily google to find things. Now with the recent advances in cloud computer, we don’t even need to store anything in our computer, even less than in our brain. Interesting history of recording facts (Mark Twain, Loisette, Gordon Bell of Microsoft and etc.)are described in the book.

Scientists generally divide memories broadly into two types: declarative and non-declarative (explicit and implicit). Within declarative memories, a further distinction divides between semantic (memories for factors and concepts), and episodic memories (memories of the experiences of our own lives). Each time we think about a memory, we integrate it more deeply into our web of other memories, and therefore make it more stable and less likely to be dislodged. But in the process, we also transform the memory, and re-shape it – sometimes to the point that our memories of events bear only a passing resemblance to what actually happened. “Older memories are often remembered as if captured by a third person holding a camera, whereas more recent events tend to be remembered in the first person, as if through one’s own eyes. As if over time, the brain naturally turns episodes into facts. Sleep plays a critical role in the process of consolidating our memories and drawing meaning out of them.

PAO (Person-action-object) technique.

OK-plateau: 3 stages in acquiring a new skill: 1) cognitive stage (discovering new strategies), 2) associative stage (concentrating less, making few major mistakes), 3) autonomous stage: as good you need to get at the task. You lose conscious control over what you’re doing. “Deliberate practice” can break the OK-plateau by doing: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance – stay in “cognitive phase.” By practicing failing and putting yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task you’re trying to master.

Buzan’s quote: “The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.”

Savants’ stories like Daniel Tammet’s story and Kim Peek were detailed in the book.

In the last chapter, Joshua Foer described play-by-play how he won the US Memory championship. It appears that his memory was at its best when he won.

After being an engineering manager for more than 15 years, I finally realize through this book that majority of what I do daily is about creating and shaping people’s habits. This book taught me several management techniques. I wish I had read this book 15 years ago. But it’s never too late to learn and apply the key principles of habits.

Specifically, I’ve learned quite a few things about the power of habit: 1.) Main components of habit loop: Cue, routine and reward. 2) Must have the craving for the habit to continue looping. 3). If the routines are bad for you like smoking, substitute the routine but keep the same cue and reward. 4) Addiction is a form of habit, like gambling and even sleep walking. 5) Changing an organization habit may be the key to the success of an organization, e.g. Paul O’neal at Alcoa. 6) Believing that you can change the habit is the “spiritual” element of habit changing. 7) Will power is a limited-resource habit. Kids’ learning piano is training them for more will power and the ability to regulate emotions. 8) Acquiring a good habit takes willpower. 9) Getting employees to adopt a good habit will take role-play for all possible circumstances. They need to feel in control. 9) Getting someone to adopt a new habit may take inserting new between familiar/old habits. 10) Social movements are a form of social habits.

Key outlines:

Part 1: The habits of individuals
1. The habit loop consists of cue, routine and reward.

2. The craving brain: how to create new habit. Craving is what makes the cues and rewards work; it’s what powers the habit loop. E.g. feeling the film on your teeth or craving for tingling sensation for Pepsodent and P&G’s Fabreeze lacks the craving for people who needs it because they hardly smell any odor. Reading emails habit is created by craving for distraction. Jogging routine is fueled by craving for endorphin.

3. The golden rule of habit changing: why transformation occurs. You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it and you must believe you can change. Use the same cue and provide the same reward. For examples, Dungy’s coaching career at Colts and Bill Wilson’s starting AA and creating the social routines of AA meeting instead of drinking, feeling the tension of finger tips leads to nail biting.

Part II: The habits of successful organizations
4. Keystone habits, or the ballad of Paul O’Neill – which habits matter most. Paul O’Neill of Alcoa latched onto one keystone habit – zero injury, safety habit. Michael Phelp’s winning warm up habit and the playing of the winning “video.” They are “small wins.”

5. Starbucks and the habit of success: when will power becomes automatic. Travel Leach’s adopting the Starbucks’ will-power habit turned him into a successful “partner” for Starbucks. “When you learn to force yourself to practice for an hour or run fifteen laps, you start building self-regulatory strength. Starbuck’s secret: turning self-discipline into an organizational habit. Use the LATTE habit loop (Listen, Acknowledge, Take Actions, Thank them, then Explain why the problem happened.) Howard Schultz was trained from his childhood to set goals. Empowered employees with some amount of autonomy or given a sense of “agency” tend to perform better.

6. The power of crisis: How leaders create habits through accident and design. In the heat of crisis, the right habits emerge like Rhode Island Hospital. Benefits of organizational habits/routines is that they create truce between potentially warring groups and individuals within an organization. Leader must cultivate habits that both create a real and balanced peace and, paradoxically, make it absolutely clear who’s in charge, e.g. King’s Cross fire incident. “Never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

7. How Target knows what you want before you do: When companies predict and manipulate habits. Target uses “guest portraits” to guide purchases or take advantage of major life events (especially baby’s birth) that are known to be habit changing. Turning a song like “Hey Ya” or persuading the American to eat organ meats may take the technique of “sandwiching” between familiar tunes or “by dressing something new in old clothes, and making the unfamiliar seem familiar.”

Part III: The Habits of Societies
8. Sadlleback Church and Montgomery Bus Boycott: How movements happens. It’s because of Rosa Parks “weak ties” that made it difficult for avoid joining the boycott because of “peer pressure.” Weak ties, at times more important than strong ties, give us access to social networks where we don’t otherwise belong. Religion takes advantage of the habits (recipes) of faith – joining small community prayer groups, signal a “maturity covenant card” promising to adhere to 3 habits: daily quiet time for reflection and prayer, tithing 10%, and membership in a small group. MLK’s peace movement gives people a new habit to react to violent racism.

9. The neurology of free will: Are we responsible for our habits?
Gambling habits are something one is aware of (free will) and yet sleep walker is not aware of the action (not free will.) If you believe you can change – if you make it a habit – the change becomes real. The metaphors of the water to fish are like habits to us; we may not be conscious of them. “Water ‘hollows out for itself a channel, which grows broader and deeper; and after having ceased to flow, it resumes, when it flows again, the path traced by itself before.'”