Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time - Howard Schultz - ★★★.¼

AUTHOR: Howard Schultz

GENRE: Business, Memoir

PUBLICATION DATE: January 1, 1997

RATING: 3.25 stars.

Howard D. Schultz served as the chairman and CEO of the Starbucks Corporation from 1986 to 2000, and then again from 2008 to 2017. USA TODAY has called him “the Bill Gates of Coffee.” This book was written in 1997, just a few years before he first stepped down from the active role of CEO of Starbucks and became its Chairman.

Schultz comes from humble origins and is a self-made billionaire courtesy his stint with Starbucks. He wasn't the creator of the coffee megabrand but took it over and expanded it to the worldwide scale it runs on today. The book does make you wonder where Starbucks would have been if he hadn't envisaged bigger dreams for a company he wasn't even part of.

Schultz is a marketer at his core, and hence he speaks like a marketer. He has a little bit of pomposity and comes off as very self-congratulatory. Nevertheless, the book makes for interesting reading, though it isn't the best in its genre. The level of thinking and effort that has gone into building the Starbucks brand is commendable. "Pour Your Heart Into It" reflects his beliefs about keeping the product and consumers first in mind rather than focusing on the bottomline alone.

Of course, the fact that this was written in 1997 makes the book quite incomplete. It doesn't have the information about Schultz's second term as Starbucks CEO after it lost a great deal of its brand name and stock value around the 2008 financial crisis. His second term was marked by some very controversial decisions, which may be covered in his second book, "Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul", published in 2011. I've no plans to read this sequel because it will probably be even more self-aggrandizing.