Starbucks Note #6: How Does Starbucks Inspire Their People?

My reading section today is getting to the part that Starbucks was organizing their Starbucks Global Conference in New Orleans in 2008. It was a amazing project that how they organized a huge crowd from everywhere in the world

"....house, feed, teach and inspire almost 10,000 people - in a manner that was both safe for our partners and respectful to our hosting city - was staggering. We would fill 38 hotels. Serve 33,000 meals each day, make dinner reservations at 32 restaurants and banquet halls, and usher everyone through breakfasts and lunches at the city's massive convention center, where the staff was not big enough to serve all our needs. We wound up recruiting folks from local homeless shelters to help us out.

We had to prepare about 10,000 welcome bags and almost 10,000 different agendas since every partner followed a unique schedule for the week."

The conference was spread into many sections: Informational sessions, interactive galleries, volunteer events, closing session, and a street fair. The way Starbucks and Howard Schultz touched 10,000 people was simply amazing and amazingly simple, but it was not easy to do.

"When people can see things, feel things, interact with things, that is when their minds actually begin to shift. I believe that our store managers would, as we had intended, walk away from the conference with new skills for managing their teams, treating customers, and running their stores - even for the way they understood and talked about coffee. I simply could not wait for them to experience each gallery."

"The partner and storage galleries - also 100,000 square feet each and divided into thematic sections - were equally as grand and powerful. Almost every item used in the galleries as a prop was recyclable, reusable, or something we could take back home with us to avoid leaving a big footprint at the convention center. I was amazed by the resourcefulness, the creativity, and the nonverbal cues of the entire experience. Each gallery was interactive. It was emotional. It was multi sensory. It was storytelling!"

End for tonight!