Joseph Michelli

Strip this book of its eye-catching, texturized(!) cover and its subject of Starbucks, and you get a lukewarm read (get it?) It's really a shame, because a book about as big of a success story as Starbucks Coffee should be packed with wittiness and quality rather than excessively enthusiastic adjectives, redundant sentences and self-evident knowledge that is not repackaged in a fresh, clear way. There were simply far too many instances when an entire paragraph could have been revised to be a single sentence. I realize that the book's main aim is to be as accessible to as many as possible, yet it comes at the expense of substance. Furthermore, the best of this book cannot really be credited to the author--the heartwarming stories of the Starbucks employees ("partners") transformed my understanding of the company culture, though I still am not a customer of the brand.

I will give credit to the fact that Michelli's five principles are explicitly stated, and the examples he provides have been picked carefully. Nevertheless, (at the expense of sounding too critical,) there are many other authors who write these sorts of business-success books and achieve what Michelli has failed to do. The book's tips can be summarized as "be a good person, show you're a good person, don't compromise your good character and apply these values to your business". In short, I will be keeping my copy because I did learn some things, but it is certainly not because of its literature.

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