Saved by Starbucks

Note: This is another of my not-a-review-but-a-collection-of-thoughts kind of note

I don’t know how I missed this book the first time around, given how addicted I am to overpriced coffee.

Published sometime in the third quarter of 2007, the book tells the story of Michael Gates Gill, a once high-flying ad executive who lost his job after more than 25 years of slog, and who – wonder of wonders – got desperate enough to accept a job in Starbucks where his new Boss, Crystal, is not only an African American female but is also half his age. A fifty plus guy working under a young lady boss of a different ethnicity is not exactly head-twisting stuff in this day and age but it’s a remarkable turn of events for a “son of privilege” like Michael Gates Gill, son of New Yorker columnist Brendan Gill, who had everything from school to grand piano to first job handed to him on a silver platter.

The author, I suppose, must be commended for being quite honest about all of his mistakes and prejudices, though his air of naivete does make you wonder whether it’s all real. I give him the benefit of the doubt and choose to believe his change of heart and newfound happiness behind the bars of a Starbucks outlet in New York.

The excerpt below is at the beginning of the tale, when Michael revisits his childhood home and finds himself longing for those comfortable times again.

How far I had fallen from those happy times. I had come a long way from my childhood, when money was never mentioned. I was now nearly broke.

Turning away from the comforts of the past, I looked for some comfort in a latte. One of my last remaining treats. A Starbucks store now occupied the corner of Lexington and Seventy-eighth, where during my childhood there had been a pastry shop. In my depressed daze, I did not notice the sign in front reading: “Hiring Open House”—not that it was the kind of sign that I would have noticed anyway. Later, I was to learn that Starbucks has hiring events at different stores every week or so in New York. Managers from other stores in the area come in to interview prospective employees. Looking back now, I realize that the good fortune that had left my life returned the moment I chose to step into the store at the corner of Seventy-eighth Street.

What does smack of commercialism is his raves about Starbucks. However much I love coffee and appreciate Starbucks for being here in Malaysia to serve up RM8.50 lattes and RM12.50 frappucinos, I can’t imagine it to be the workplace heave that Michael has made it out to be. A lot of its employee policies sound great – healthcare benefits, study loans, a conscientious effort to locate its staff closest to their homes, an entrenched culture of mutual respect and open communications - but perhaps they got the raves from Michael because his former place of work treated him so unfairly. When you’ve been mistreated, kindness, fairness and courtesy gain higher currency in your eyes.

Starbucks photo from Barneto.net

If you give in – yes, give in – to the book and its message, it is a heartwarming tale of how a fair and positive work environment can do wonders for an employee’s morale, confidence, performance and general sense of well-being. It also fosters incredible loyalty, as the Starbucks “partners” demonstrate. In the store, Michael also finds out what it feels like to be in the minority in terms of race and age (he’s white, and he’s one of the oldest employees), and it’s clear that he thinks the world of Crystal, his new Boss. What’s touching is how much he’s willing to learn from his much younger colleagues, and how much of his own past ego he’s willing to let go. Now that is unusual.

This is not a book to read for its writing but for the tale that it tells. It’s a nice story, made meaningful because it’s true but made suspect because it raves just too much about Starbucks. Take the lessons offered – that life is full of surprises, many of them nasty, but that it’s still possible to deal with change and be happy – and soak up the myriad things you would learn about Starbucks (it provides a chart for displaying pies and cakes and has a system of calling out beverages ordered for its baristas). The story is also a sobering reminder of the yawning gulf that exists between the haves and the have-to-work-for-it groups.

It’s only in America, I suppose that a high-flying ad executive could be fired, broke, divorced, humbled, renewed, and then land a rich movie deal through the whole experience. Yes, that’s right, Tom Hanks has secured the rights to this story, so it’s likely that Michael will be the richest Starbucks barista very soon. B

Well, given the recent troubles the chain is facing, Michael’s story and Tom Hanks’s visual dramatisation, could be just what it needs to heat up its business once more.

As for the author – well, all I can say is, well done. And in the spirit of Christmas and the New Year, let’s all take whatever inspiration we can find to make our lives brighter, bigger and better. Whatever time that we have left in this world, let’s make it good.

Merry Christmas, all, and Happy New Year.

Filed under: Books, Personal Note, Reads, Work & Productivity , authors, Books, coffee, how starbucks saved my life, michael gates gill, movie rights, not-a-review, reading, starbucks, tom hanks

Office Humour

When there’s nothing much to smile about, at work, I turn to:

Dilbert.

 

A creation of Scott Adams, the history of Dilbert could serve as a sort of inspiration to cubicle inhabitants everywhere. Essentially, Dilbert was created by Scott when he himself was a cubicle-ite, and was an amalgamation of his co-workers. He used Dilbert for his work presentations then was encouraged by the response to try Dilbert for syndication. United Media signed him up and in 1989, Dilbert was launched. Scott still held his day job until 1995, and his work experience (he worked from 1979 to 1995), I believe, is what makes Dilbert and his experiences immediately recognisable to office workers all around the world. So who says all that nastiness you endure at work can’t translate to money, huh?

Dilbert now appears in 2,000 newspapers in 70 countries, and the Dilbert web site, which is fantastic by the way, was the first syndicated comic strip to go online in 1995.

Our Star carries Dilbert in its tech section on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but in black and white. A pity.

At any rate, while you laugh at Dilbert and co (and many times thank the Lord that you do not have a Boss like his), some of his characters and stories will eerily remind you of real life. There is truth in art. And actually, this Dilbert comic strip below is based on a true story:

This guy got fired for posting a Dilbert strip that described managers as “drunken lemurs”; Scott Adams knew about it and created a series of strips around the incident (as above). Not only that, Scott also posted the guy’s resume on his blog, and voila – the guy has now found a new position with one of Adams’s fans. The article quotes Adams as giving this advice though:

“Stick with ‘Garfield.’ No one ever got fired for loving lasagna.”

Heh. I shall continue loving my Daily Dilbert.

Filed under: Collectibles, Playing Favourites, Reads, Work & Productivity , humour, office humour, work

Women Leaders: Not Hot

So who says the world is not biased against female leaders?

In this Washington Post article, “The label slapped on top women“, the writer contends that female leaders get unfairly labelled as “ruthless”, “conniving” and “mannish”, not because they have to be to elbow their way to the top in a man’s world, but because of ingrained beliefs of the nature of men, women and leadership.

“The roots are in stereotypes about women, men and leaders,” says Alice Eagly, a social psychologist at Northwestern University. “Culturally, women are the nicer sex, and men are more aggressive go-getters. Leaders are generically in our culture more like men than women in the way people think about leaders.“

Experiments show that women vying for leadership roles are automatically assigned two labels. The first is to be seen as nice and warm, but incompetent; the second is to be seen as competent but unpleasant. Women stuck with label A cannot be leaders, because the stereotype of leadership is incompatible with incompetence. Women who become leaders get stuck with label B, because if leadership is unconsciously associated with manliness, cognitive consistency requires female leaders be stripped of the caring qualities normally associated with women.

Judging from the tales of my female-manager friends, I would agree. As a female, women are often expected to be “nice” and “soft”, and when they exercise authority and act in the way male bosses do, they are automatically assigned descriptors such as “over-ambitious” and “ruthless”. Both males and females react with the same prejudice against females in authority positions, the article finds.

In a recent experiment, (New York University organisational psychologist Madeline) Heilman asked a group of volunteers to evaluate two leaders, a man and a woman. She devised two descriptions of executives with roughly similar qualifications.

Without the volunteers’ knowledge, Heilman regularly interchanged the names of the leaders in the descriptions. For each description, half the volunteers thought they were hearing about an executive named James, while the other half heard exactly the same description applied to an executive called Andrea. The volunteers were asked which leader seemed less likeable, and whether they would prefer James or Andrea as a boss. Nearly three-quarters said they thought Andrea was less likeable than James. More than four-fifths chose James as a boss. Women showed the same bias as men: Andrea seemed less likeable merely because she was a female leader.

Heilman’s finding replicates the conclusions of other studies: that the reason people see a highly competent woman as less likeble than a man with precisely the same qualifications is that such women are automatically perceived to have lost their feminine, caring side.

Filed under: Malaysiana, Newsprint, Women, Work & Productivity

Mind Mapping

I get very excited when I come across a new software tool. At a class I recently attended, the tutor was advocating this software: MIND MANAGER by MINDJET as a nifty tool for computerised mind mapping. I have downloaded the 21-day trial version and am playing around with the software. Just to let you know, I have played around with NovaMind’s mind-mapping software and still have the free Freemind installed. Novamind’s was very colourful – it really is like creating Tony Buzan’s mind map on the computer, with wavy lines, lots of hues, and graphics you can include for yourself. Freemind was a lot more structured – more like an engineering diagram than a mind map, but still operates on the same principles of mind-mapping, that of root subjects and their sub-roots. What I did not like about it is its presentation – there was very little flexibility in terms of adding colour and graphics, and exporting could only be to HTML or JPEG format. Still, I have a Freemind-based chart of our Library’s operations on the bulletin board behind my desk. And – oh yes – Freemind is free.

I’m still tinkering with Mind Manager, but the features that stood out for me with this software are: the ability to add lots of colour, flags, notes, and graphics, and the ability to export to Powerpoint, MS Project, and MS Word. This latter feature alone made me download the tool – I mean, I’ve created mind maps before on computer only to find that I have to translate it to linear, conventional form manually. The tutor showed how a mind map gets translated to a presentation or text document, and it’s almost magical to see the sub-roots transplanted to bullet form.

The price is off-putting though – it’s US$349 for the full version (with export features) though non profits and educational establishments qualify for a discount of almost 50%. Exchanged into Ringgit, that’s still a hefty price to pay for a piece of software, though if you use it often enough (daily), I gather it’s more of an investment than an expenditure.

I’ll keep tinkering with this tool – I understand a novelist used it to flesh out his novel :

For the past decade, Richard Powers has turned to a program rather ominously called Mindjet MindManager, which creates vast, sprawling outlines resembling family trees….For “The Echo Maker,” which won the National Book Award last year and is about a man who emerges from a coma without an emotional connection to his intimates, Powers created a visual outline for each character. It included material on his or her “life history, personality traits, physical characteristics, verbal tics, professional and educational background, choices and actions, attitudes and relations to the other characters,” he said. “As the material grew, I created topical sub-branches and sub-sub-branches. … After many months, at the very tips of these increasingly articulated branches, I sometimes ended up with sketches that plugged right into the draft.”

Wow. Of course, he supplemented MindManager with Microsoft’s OneNote, where he “mapped out possible changing interactions between characters, and claims “The combination of software programs (each of which links seamlessly into the other) allowed for simultaneous top-down and bottom-up composition.””

I personally feel software cannot replace desire and inspiration, but as a planning and personal productivity tool, mind mapping can be useful, whether done on computer or done the old-fashioned way: using your hand, colour pens, and paper.

Filed under: Playing Favourites, Tech, Work & Productivity, Writing

Advert: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE “MUSLIM WOMEN IN THE MIDST OF CHANGE”

When there is a dearth of blog topics, advertise.

This is a good ad, though. The Muslim Professionals Forum, which lists as one of their objectives the provision of an “Islamic response to the intellectual and cultural challenges of the modern world and various school of thoughts, religion and ideology”, is organising a very timely Forum on Muslim Women on 1-2 September 2007 (Sat-Sun) at the KL Convention Centre.

Separated into talks and workshops over the two days, the topics to be covered in the Forum include Muslim Women in History, and the very interestingly titled, “Muslim Women as a Battlefield”. Main speakers are WALEED ALY, a lecturer in politics at Monash University, and a board member of the Islamic Council of Victoria; Dr. M. HAYTHAM AL-KHAYAT, a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, and DR. HEBA RAOUF, a lecturer of political theory at the Department of Political Science, Cairo University. There is also a Dinner Talk by SUSAN CARLAND, the 2004 “Australian Muslim of the Year” and a lecturer in the school of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University where she is currently completing her PhD, researching leadership challenges facing Western Muslim women. 

The second day of the programme is mostly workshop and Forum, and the leaders of the sessions include Kamar Ainiyah, whose name seems to crop up whenever there are family law cases in Syariah courts.

It is an intriguing line-up; I have to confess, as a Hijab-clad Muslim woman, with a family and career to juggle, the topics of Hijab, gender conflicts in relation to the Quran, and family vs work can get a little weary, in the sense that the talks and discussions seem intellectually stimulating, but you step out of the discourse venue and away from your spirited and noble-minded brothers and sisters, and the real world smacks you in the face once more. Still, the objectives of the Forum are worthy:

1. To understand the history and evolution of feminist “traditions” within Islam.
2. To discuss Muslim gender roles from the Quran and Sunnah.
3. To examine the injustices against women in Muslim societies and recommend solutions.

And I am sure the relationships and bonds that can be forged with Muslims from other countries would be invaluable. I am equally interested to follow the action, post-Forum.

The Forum is formally supported by the Ministry of Women and Family Development (Datuk Shahrizat is giving the opening keynote, I believe). If you are interested, contact:

Conference Secretariat, Muslim Professionals Forum, 54 Jalan Telawi 9, 59100 Bangsar Baru, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Tel : +6013-331 7430 (Azra); +6012-371 8518 (Siti Jamilah)

Fax : +603-2093 2450

Emails : azrabanu@gmail.com; musa@mpf.org.my

Filed under: Islam, Women, Work & Productivity

An Aside: Trust

Trust is a precious commodity – difficult to gain but easily destroyed.

In a world where backstabbing, information theft, rumour-mongering, lying, cheating, breaches of confidentiality are becoming increasingly accepted as necessities for survival, the sacrifice of ethics, professionalism and character are no longer mourned.

Trust is precious – if you are someone who has been given it, take care to protect it. It takes only a split second, an instant decision, an unguarded whisper, a press of the keyboard, to find that trust has evaporated. Once it’s lost, it’s almost impossible to regain.

It’s not hard to be liked.

It’s not difficult to be popular.

It’s not rare to be trusted,

but it takes real character to build and retain trust.

One can only hope, and pray, as one goes through life, that we trust the right people, and that we become the right people worthy of others’ trust.

Filed under: Personal Note, Speculations, Work & Productivity

Bringing Office Management Skills Home – Better Not

If you’ve ever wished your home was as organised, orderly and as disciplined as the workplace, and if you have ever wished that your kids would respond the same way to performance measures and deadlines as you and your colleagues do, then you may have been tempted to transfer some of your executive skills to the home. Think twice before you do, as this article advises:

It’s one of those mistakes easily made as the line between work and family vanishes: thinking that the very expertise and practices that work well to get results and build influence at work will work just as well at home. You don’t need to have much pull in the office to recognize that you have even less at home.

“I not only don’t have any authority,” says Leonard Clapp, a retired lab technician with a penchant for sciences, “but my wife, who is something of an insomniac, immediately falls asleep as soon as I begin speaking on the subjects which are dear to my heart.”

“It’s not just the authority that declines,” adds Bob Hoffman, a chief operating officer. “The whole economic system shifts, from capitalism at work to communism at home.” If metrics existed for the family as they do for business, “you’re measuring gross family happiness and yours doesn’t count more than anyone else’s — and probably less,” he says.

(Why We Can Manage Staff but Not Our Own Families, WSJ Career Journal, 30 March 2007)

The article goes on to say that the reason work and family life are so different in modern times is because industrialisation has effectively separated the home, from the office. Prior to industrialisation, the article pointed out, agricultural economies revolved around farms that are usually family-owned and operated. On a point related to this, would people in family businesses then find that their authority in the workplace, working styles and management approaches work equally well in the home?

I do like what the article says about how family life influences, and shapes, attitudes at work:

Family life informs work more than the other way around. It goes beyond boasts that a company is one big, happy family. The home hones skills, such as fostering development, and virtues, such as patience. It’s easy to delegate once you’ve learned to let a toddler spend 23 minutes buttering toast without an overwhelming urge to intervene. One study shows employees rate their bosses with dependents more highly than they rate their bosses with none.

And as a Career Mom with two feisty boys, I can definitely attest to the truth of this:

Families don’t have to buy what someone who can’t fire them sells. “You can be a great boss at work but you can’t get your two-year-old into the bathtub,” says Ellen Galinsky, co-founder of the Families and Work Institute. 

But the part I especially love is the article’s parting shot on performance reviews (in the home):

Bringing proven office solutions home seems like a good idea. Analyst Chris Moule attended a conference last year in which an executive explained how she used “operational analysis” and color-coded spreadsheets to show progress with family goals. Mr. Moule tried to brandish his “project decomposition” skills by breaking down planning for a camping trip into small tasks. The reaction was unwelcome.“You don’t have performance reviews at home, except my wife gives me looks,” says Mr. Moule . “Usually her look says an awful lot.”

In essence, work and home are separate, and we should keep them that way.

Filed under: Newsprint, Personal Note, Women, Work & Productivity