I really didn’t want to read this book.
Yet another deathly dry, turgid, tedious book about lean is not what I need right now. My bookshelves are filled with lean books that provide all the enlightenment of a one-watt bulb.
So Steady Work sat on my shelf for a few weeks while I looked for pretty much anything else to do—shopping for toilet paper, learning to make sourdough starter, watching Zoom videos on proper handwashing. You know, the usual activities in these shelter-in-place days.
I finally sat down to read it yesterday morning. And didn’t get up till I finished it. (That’s not quite true. I did get up to make a cup of coffee, which seemed like an appropriate break in a book about Starbucks.)
The short story: the book is great. Read it now. It’ll take you less than an hour, and it’s a far more rewarding use of your time than real-time tracking of COVID infections. That’s both a testament to Gaudet’s storytelling, and her decision to make it a concise 97 pages—a welcome change from typically bloated business books.
Gaudet traces Starbucks’ budding lean journey with its “A Better Way” program in 2009, to its full flower with “Playbook” in 2011, and (sadly) to its eventual abandonment around 2015. She tells the story with a simple grace that actually choked me up at the emotional climax of the book (I know—a lean book with an emotional climax???), when the lean operating system she helped install enabled the staff at the Starbucks stores around Newtown, CT manage the chaos and trauma around the Newtown massacre.
Like most companies, Starbucks began its lean journey looking to reduce waste, increase margins, and improve service. And they succeeded at that. But eventually this led to what Gaudet calls the “Blizzard of Best Practices,” and what I found to be the most valuable part of the book.
John Shook of the Lean Enterprise Institute has often talked about the problem of unregulated “employee empowerment.” It sounds great in theory—give workers the autonomy to do what they want to make the work easier and better for themselves, and then share those ideas so that everyone benefits. But in reality it leads to lower quality, inconsistency, and confusion. The Blizzard of Best Practices shows how that occurs:
“The good ideas kept coming at us. There were too many to fully digest, much less implement. And some of those good ideas bore no relation to the problems of 100 stores. Store managers naturally chose some best practices and ignored others. So, an initiative that was intended to create a consistent experience for the customer was actually creating slightly different operations in every store. That might be all right if the end result was the same. But for our partners [i.e., employees], who often filled in a nearby stores when needed, those best practices created new operations to relearn in each occasion.”
Starbucks resolved the tension between top-down, command and control leadership and bottom-up employee empowerment by developing its “Playbook.” Playbook was an approach whereby each store would use lean thinking to understand each specific process (how long it takes to make a latté; how to ring up an order; how to heat up a breakfast sandwich; how to clean the bathroom; etc.) and then design standardized staffing and roles to meet varying levels of customer demand. Although the work content was standardized, employees changed the way they divided the work based on that demand:
“…we used this information [about how each task was done] to make staffing decisions—including how many people on each shift and everyone’s roles in 30-minute increments throughout the day. The lean team referred to these decisions as “calling the play.” Think of a coach on the sidelines with a binder full of tactical plays. Based on the circumstances on the field (the strengths of the players, the weather, the opposing team, etc.) coaches will choose specific plays that they think the team will execute well. The idea was to make store managers and shift supervisors into those coaches by teaching them how to asses the field and create their own plays.”
Critically, the Playbook was made by each manager at their specific store. Allowing each store to design the plays for itself was essential, because the stores could be radically different from each other. A primarily drive-through location off a highway had a different physical footprint, a different customer base, and a different demand pattern from a store in the center of a college town. The plays for one store would never work for the other.
Lean books typically address scenarios of relatively constant demand—whether you’re talking about Toyota making cars or a bank processing mortgage applications, demand typically doesn’t quintuple in the space of thirty minutes. Understanding how Starbucks was able to use lean to deal with that kind of variation without building up excessive buffers, or disrespecting employees with last minute scheduling, was riveting.
In the past few years, my favorite book on lean has been The Lean Farm. I’m adding Steady Work to that list. Both stories have stretched my understanding of how lean can be applied in what at first glance appears to be impossible, or at least inhospitable, environments. I’ll bet you learn something new as well.