Discover Your True North

Bill George

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119082958
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

"One of the 25 Best Leadership Books of All-Time." – Soundview

The Leadership Classic, Discover Your True North, expanded for today's leaders

Discover Your True North is the best-selling leadership classic that enables you to become an authentic leader by discovering your True North. Originally based on first-person interviews with 125 leaders, this book instantly became a must-read business classic when it was introduced in 2007. Now expanded and updated to introduce 48 new leaders and new learning about authentic global leaders, this revisited classic includes more diverse, global, and contemporary leaders of all ages. New case studies include Warren Buffett, Indra Nooyi, Arianna Huffington, Jack Ma, Paul Polman, Mike Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others. Alongside these studies, former Medtronic CEO Bill George continues to share his personal stories and his wisdom by describing how you can become the leader you want to be, with helpful exercises included throughout the book.

Being a leader is about much more than title and management skills—it's fundamentally a question of who we are as human beings. Discover Your True North offers a concrete and comprehensive program for becoming an authentic leader, and shows how to chart your path to leadership success.

Once you discover the purpose of your leadership, you'll find the true leader inside you. This book shows you how to use your natural leadership abilities to inspire and empower others to excellence in today's complex global world. Discover Your True North enables you to become the leader you were born to be, and stay on track of your True North.

Part One
Your Journey to Leadership

In our interviews with leaders about their development, the most striking commonality was the way their life stories influenced their leadership. Your life story is your foundation. It shapes how you, as a human being, see the world. And in leadership, the most human of all endeavors, it can propel you forward or hold you back.

In Part I we examine three topics:

1. How you frame your life story. Your journey through life will take you through many peaks and valleys as you face the world's trials, rewards, and seductions. Reflection and introspection will help you understand your life experiences, and in some cases reframe them.
2. The risk of losing your way. Everyone experiences pressures and difficulties in life, and all of us have to deal with fears and uncertainties. In your life journey, you will be confronted with seductions that threaten to pull you off course from your True North. We will examine five archetypes that can cause you to lose your way.
3. The role crucibles play in shaping your leadership. The way you deal with your greatest adversities will shape your character far more than the adversities themselves. Much like iron is forged by heat, your most significant challenges and your most painful experiences present the greatest opportunities for your personal growth.

As you gain greater clarity and insight about your life's journey, you will discover the focus of your True North.

1
Your Life Story

The reservoir of all my life experiences shaped me as a person and a leader.

—Howard Schultz, CEO, Starbucks

The journey to authentic leadership begins with understanding yourself: your life stories, crucibles, and setbacks. This knowledge gives you the self-awareness to discover your True North.

Howard Schultz's Leadership Journey

In the winter of 1961, 7-year-old Howard Schultz was throwing snowballs with friends outside his family's apartment building in the federally subsidized Bayview Housing Projects in Brooklyn, New York. His mother yelled down from their seventh-floor apartment, “Howard, come inside. Dad had an accident.” What followed has shaped Schultz throughout his life.

He found his father in a full-leg cast, sprawled on the living room couch. While working as a delivery driver, Schultz's father had fallen on a sheet of ice and broken his ankle. As a result, he lost his job—and the family's health care benefits. Schultz's mother could not go to work because she was seven months pregnant. His family had nothing to fall back on. Many evenings, Schultz listened as his parents argued at the dinner table about how much money they needed to borrow. If the telephone rang, his mother asked him to tell the bill collectors his parents were not at home.

Schultz vowed he would do things differently. He dreamed of building “a company my father would be proud to work at” that treated its employees well and provided health care benefits. Little did he realize that one day he would be responsible for 191,000 employees working in 21,000 stores worldwide. Schultz's life experiences provided the motivation to build Starbucks into the world's leading coffeehouse.

“My inspiration comes from seeing my father broken from the 30 terrible blue-collar jobs he had over his life, where an uneducated person just did not have a shot,” Schultz said. These memories led Schultz to provide Starbucks employees access to health coverage, even for part-time workers.

That event is directly linked to the culture and the values of Starbucks. I wanted to build the kind of company my father never had a chance to work for, where you would be valued and respected, no matter where you came from, the color of your skin, or your level of education. Offering health care was a transforming event in the equity of the Starbucks brand that created unbelievable trust with our people. We wanted to build a company that linked shareholder value to the cultural values we create with our people.

Unlike some who rise from humble beginnings, Schultz is proud of his roots. He credits his life story with giving him the motivation to create one of the great business successes of the last 25 years. But understanding the meaning of his story took deep thought because, like nearly everyone, he had to confront fears and ghosts from his past.

Brooklyn is burned into Schultz. When he took his daughter to the housing projects where he grew up, she surveyed the blight and said with amazement, “I don't know how you are normal.” Yet his experience growing up in Brooklyn is what enables Schultz to connect with practically anyone. He speaks with a slight Brooklyn accent, relishes an Italian meal, dresses comfortably in jeans, and respects all types of people. He has not forgotten where he came from or let his wealth go to his head: “I was surrounded by people who were working hand-to-mouth trying to pay the bills, felt there was no hope, and just couldn't get a break. That's something that never leaves you—never.

“From my earliest memories, I remember my mother saying that I could do anything I wanted in America. It was her mantra.” His father had the opposite effect. As a truck driver, cab driver, and factory worker, he never earned more than $20,000 a year. Schultz watched his father break down while complaining bitterly about not having opportunities or respect from others.

As a teenager, Schultz clashed often with his father, as he felt the stigma of his father's failures. “I was bitter about his underachievement and lack of responsibility,” he recalled. “I thought he could have accomplished so much more if he had tried.” Schultz was determined to escape that fate. “Part of what has always driven me is fear of failure. I know all too well the face of self-defeat.”

Feeling like an underdog, Schultz developed a deep determination to succeed. Sports became his early calling, because “I wasn't labeled a poor kid on the playing field.” As star quarterback of his high school football team, he received a scholarship to Northern Michigan University, becoming the first in his family to earn a college degree. His fierce competitiveness never faded; it just shifted from football to business.

Working in sales at Xerox, Schultz felt stifled by the bureaucratic environment. While others thrived in Xerox's culture, Schultz yearned to go his own way. “I had to find a place where I could be myself,” he said.

I could not settle for anything less. You must have the courage to follow an unconventional path. You can't value or measure your life experience in the moment, because you never know when you're going to find the true path that enables you to find your voice. The reservoir of all my life experiences shaped me as a person and a leader.

Schultz encountered Starbucks Coffee during a sales call at Pike Place Market in Seattle. “I felt I had discovered a whole new continent,” he said. He actively campaigned to join the company, becoming its director of operations and marketing. On a buying trip to Italy, Schultz noticed the Milanese espresso bars that created unique communities in their customers' daily lives. He dreamed of creating similar communities in America, focusing on creating coffee breaks, not just selling coffee.

When he learned he could acquire Starbucks from its founders, Schultz rounded up financing from private investors. As he was finalizing the purchase, he faced his greatest challenge when his largest investor proposed to buy the company himself. “I feared all my influential backers would defect to this investor,” he recalled, “so I asked Bill Gates Sr., father of Microsoft's founder, to help me stand up to one of the titans of Seattle because I needed his stature and confidence.”

Schultz had a searing meeting with the investor, who told him, “If you don't go along with my deal, you'll never work in this town again. You'll never raise another dollar. You'll be dog meat.” Leaving the meeting, Schultz broke into tears. For two frenzied weeks, he prepared an alternative plan that met his $3.8 million financing goal and staved off the investor.

If I had agreed to the terms the investor demanded, he would have taken away my dream. He could have fired me at whim and dictated the atmosphere and values of Starbucks. The passion, commitment, and dedication would have all disappeared.

The saddest day of Schultz's life came when his father died. Schultz shared with a friend the conflicts he has had with his father, and his friend remarked, “If he had been successful, you wouldn't have the drive you have now.” After his father's death, Schultz reframed his image of his father, recognizing strengths such as honesty and commitment to family. Instead of seeing him as a failure, he realized his father had been crushed by the system. “After he died, I realized I had judged him unfairly. He never had the opportunity to find fulfillment and dignity from meaningful work.”

Schultz channeled his drive into building a company where his father would have been proud to work. By paying more than minimum wage, offering substantial benefits, and granting stock options to all its workers, Starbucks offered employees what Schultz's father had never received and used these incentives to attract people whose values are consistent with the company's values. As a result, the employee turnover at Starbucks is less than half that at other retailers.

Among Schultz's greatest talents is his ability to connect with people from diverse backgrounds. He tells his story and the Starbucks story at special events and visits two dozen Starbucks stores per week. Each day he gets up at 5:30 AM to call Starbucks employees around the world. He said, “Starbucks gave me the canvas to paint on.”

Starbucks is the quintessential people-based business, where everything we do is about humanity. The culture and values of the company are its signature and its competitive difference. We have created worldwide appeal for our customers because people are hungry for human connection and authenticity. Whether you're Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, or Greek, coffee is just the catalyst for that connection. I don't know if I was drawn to this business because of my background, or whether it gave me the opportunity to connect the dots, but it has come full circle for me.

In 2000, Schultz turned the reins over to a new CEO, Jim Donald, but remained as board chair. In 2007, a controversial e-mail he wrote to Donald and Starbucks' executive committee expressing his concerns that the Starbucks experience was becoming commoditized was leaked to the press. This created a firestorm in the media and among Starbucks' customers and employees. In January 2008, Schultz returned to Starbucks as CEO. One of his first moves was to shut down all U.S. stores for a half day of employee training to emphasize Starbucks' need to restore its original culture. Starbucks' spectacular results since then have validated the effectiveness of Schultz's leadership.

Howard Schultz is one of dozens ...