My Review (of Pour Your Heart into It)

So I recieved a few books and some Barnes & Noble gift certificates for Christmas and one of the books I just finished has been on my want list for a while, Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time. I'll start by saying that I love Starbucks. No matter where I'm at, if I want a good cup of coffee, I can go into a Starbucks and order a cup that tastes the same as the Starbucks back at home. One of my biggest problems when I'm out of town at a class or conference is not being able to find a good cup of coffee. I love the Starbucks experience as a whole; the feel of the stores, the friendliness of the baristas, and that taste of the coffee. All of my Starbucks beliefs have been reaffirmed.

Pour Your Heart into It is written by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and he tells the story of how Starbucks as we know it today was created. The book is a mix of Starbucks history, personal biography, business phylosophy, and management self-help. Schultz does a wonderful job of conveying his love of coffee and his company, his drive to build an employee and customer centered company, and his personal ideas about the kind of business he wants to run. Every chapter of the book balances parts of the Starbucks story with Schultz's business philosophies and management advice. Overall, the highest points of the book are when Schultz is passionatley describing how he was struggling to build Starbucks into a national company. The low points of the book would be when his advice segments would run a little long.

I picked up the book because I wanted to learn about the history of Starbucks and I came out the other end educated and enraptured in the Starbucks experience. This is in no way a book about how to run a successful company, the notes are paragraphs that Schultz includes are more about highlighting or illustrating a point in the story than acting as a teaching point on their own. You have to have a little patience when reading the book as some of it reads like an essay (a little reminiscent of my time reading A Perfect Thing), but I worked through the slow points because of how much I love Starbucks. If you're a Starbucks fan, this is such a great story that teaches you so much about the cup of coffee in your hand.