Howard Behar
speaker
126 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Howard Behar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I got to Starbucks and I was there about four months and I said to Howard, we need to raise wages. We're paying minimum wage. This is not going to work. We can't get the kind of people we want at minimum wage. I said, I want to raise it. I want to start everybody at least a dollar to two dollars over minimum wage. And he said, well, how are you going to pay for it? I said, I'll figure it out.
And so I got the finance team together. We did all the work. I poured over the numbers day and night trying to figure out what we needed to do to make it work. So we did it and we gave everybody a raise and everybody was excited. And everybody was happy. And so I go on vacation the month of the first P&Ls that were going to reflect the new wage structure were going to come out.
So I'm on my vacation and I get this call from Schultz. And he said, Howard, you told me that we were going to be able to afford this. Well, it's costing us double what you said it was going to cost us. Oh, shit. That's all I could think to myself. I said to Lynn, I said, I'm out of here. And I left the vacation. I can't remember where we were. I think we were at Sun River in Oregon with the kids.
And so I went back to Seattle and I got to work again. And sure enough, we'd made a mistake somewhere and we figured it out. But you couldn't go back. Now, I thought I was going to get fired over that because it was a significant hit to the bottom line. And fortunately, Howard didn't fire me. And we figured out how to fix it. And we stayed with it. We weren't going to go back on it.
We made a commitment. And so we stayed with it and we moved forward and we fixed it. But, you know, I made one mistake after another. Most of the worst mistakes I always made were with people where I picked the wrong person, kept them too long, or a person that I let go that I shouldn't let go. I mean, it's the hardest, most difficult thing.
You recover from it and you move forward and you hold yourself accountable and you live with it. You know, if you make a mistake, you make a mistake. And hopefully in a kind of organization that is OK with mistakes. And Howard was and he dealt with it. But I fixed it. You know, I went ahead and fixed it. And the rest is history.
I agree with you. What happens, companies start to get big and they lose their innovativeness. And they lose it because they start to, they say, well, we don't need this anymore. We're going. But the truth is, you've got to innovate all the time. Look at HP, look at Intel. They get rid of their engineers.
You know, they start to squeeze it down because they aren't doing so well and they lose their creativity and they lose that passion and the energy. That's what happens. And they start to raise prices because they're a public company and they want their earnings to... Look, the biggest BS in all business and particularly in the public markets, earnings just go up like this. They don't, right?
That leadership and management is always messing with it. So what do they do? They're not going to make their earnings. So what do they do? They have a little layoff to get their costs down, right? And then they take a one-time charge. They say our APS was really this without the one-time charge. It's so stupid. It's so wrong. It's one of the problems with capitalism, our kind of capitalism.
The public markets seem to think and expect that it's a constant road up. It's not. There's going to be these ups and downs. And then what happens is the public markets force these companies into making dumb decisions. Then leaders listen and they make the dumb decisions. My favorite leader in all the world is a guy named Jim Senegal. He was one of the co-founders of Costco.
And he's a gruff guy, the absolute merchant prince. but a great guy. And his shareholders used to say, why do you pay so much? They paid a lot of money for their hourly. And why do you give them all these benefits? And he used to say, no, if you don't like the stock, sell it. And I think we need more leaders that say, if you don't like the stock, sell it. We're here for the long term.
If you're not here for the long term, do something else with your time. But it's hard to do because you've got to perform over the long term. But it's what kills organizations.
I've always been a believer in affirmations, and I've used affirmations to correct myself, to hold myself accountable, to live my life. And so two of my most important affirmations is I love myself unconditionally, and I have that sitting in my bathroom in front of the toilet. I figure if I can love myself there, I can love myself anywhere.
And it's hard to love yourself unconditionally, and I don't all the time. And then the other one is I am enough, I have enough, I do enough. Because that's always been a struggle of mine. Am I really doing enough? Am I getting it done? Am I achieving all that I want to achieve? But I think a lot of it's family of origin stuff. I was the baby of the family. I could do no wrong, so to speak.
And so I had that unconditional love. I think that helped a lot. You know, I had the opposite side of that. My mother was always trying to protect me. I'd come home and say, I'm not very good at athletics. And she said, Howard, not everybody can be a good athlete. And no matter what I said I wasn't good at, she said, not everybody can be. And I kind of internalized it that I wasn't good enough.
And it used to make me mad. Finally, it wasn't until my mid-20s that I just pushed back against it. And I said, I can. And I had probably the single most important mentor in my life was in my mid-20s, a guy named Jim Jensen. And he was a guy with an incredibly bright side, but equally his dark side. He was a guy that introduced me to affirmations.
He introduced me to Robert Greenlee's work on servant leadership. He introduced me to the belief that I could do anything. If I set my mind to it, I didn't have all that. He gave me the skills and pushed me to believe in myself and held me up when I was struggling. And it was an important part of my life. He changed my life. I look back at those times and he did really change my life.
So I give the credit to others. I've always been a kind of a people guy. They call me Happy Howie. I've had a smile on my face my whole life. And people related to that. So I was good at that. I didn't understand what I was doing. I was not a conscious competent. I was just being Howard.
But over time, as I learned about servant leadership and Robert Greenlee's work, I attached to it and I became a conscious competent at servant leadership. Not only could I do it, but I knew how to teach it. And so that's what I did.
Get clear about who you are, what your core values are, what you stand for in this life. So I have, I'll show it to you. I carry this around. I've had this for almost 50 years. You can't read it all, but this is Howard in 50 words or less. So on this document, it has my mission statement. It has my eight core values and my six P's, how I do everything. And I live by this. This drives me.
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