The Starbucks Experience

This is the next book that I would like to review. It is with regard to the company Starbucks.

It looks at our it managed to change people conception about coffee from a 40 cent to a dollar plus drink to become something that people would be willing to pay 5 dollars for a product which in essence is still coffee. When it first started off as a single shop, no one would have expected it to grow till today size.

The author of the book is Joseph A. Mchelli.

The book starts of with the introduction where it looks briefly into the history of Starbucks. It's first outlet was located in Seattle. The founder who was Howard Schulz had an idea. He wondered how would people react if instead of paying the usual 50 cent take away coffee, if he was to provide premium coffee in an European-style coffee shop, would the consumer be willing to pay a premium. On hind sight, it was a brilliant idea as there was a demand for such type of places and with the high level of quality service provided by Starbucks staff, the business continued to grow continuously.

In summary, the Starbucks experience can be experience at 2 distinct levels. The first level is that it has a unique corporate culture where the leaders create a unique culture for the employees to take up responsibility for their action, to give them the room to be entrepreneurship and most important to stress that quality and service is of the utmost importance. This is especially true for anyone in the customer service related industry.
The second level is that these values are been passed down to all the partners as they are the direct contact with the customer in the shops.

In the opinion of the writer, there are 5 main key concepts which are been ever present and could explain for their phenomenon success. the 5 concepts are:

1. Make it your own
2. Everything matters
3. Surprise and delight
4. Embrace resistance
5. Leave your mark

They look very simple but not simplistic. They are also very result orientated goals and can be very powerful when applied. A good example will be Starbucks.

In the book, each chapter will be specifying one of the 5 key concepts. The book is written in a very easy to read style and there are a lot of anecdotes in each chapter which relates to real life situation. It also tries to explain each concept in a very non-technical way and try to bring about the point by sing examples.

Overall, it is a well written book and will be suitable for anyone who wants to find out more about Starbucks or for anyone who is interested in finding out ways to improve their business through better customer service relation.

Empire of Debt

This is the first my book reviews which I had planned to write sometimes back but due to various reasons have not gotten to writing it till now.


The first book I will be reviewing is titled the Empire of Debt ( The rise of an Epic Financial Crisis) It is a book which is co-written by William Bonner and Addison Wiggin. William Bonner is the president and CEO of Agora Inc which is a financial newsletter company and Addison is the Editorial Director and publisher of the Daily Reckoning.

The below is the screenshot of the cover of the book.

Anyway, I do not know who is these two persons to be honest. I picked up this book to read was due to the interesting title and also the first chapter was able to capture my attention.


This book is primarily about the US economy in the past 100 years and a look into the future based on the policy and decisions that had been made over the last 20 years. It is quite an insightful book. It starts from talking about the present US economy. It looks at the decisions made in the early years which lead to the current US economy. In the opinion of the writers, the current US economy is run like an empire.

The main reason for their viewpoint is listed below

Before the world war started in the first half of the 20th century, US was more inward looking and more focus on building new things and producing new stuffs. However after World War 2, US took more interest in foreign policy and this interest got more intensified during the Cold war. After the fall of the Soviet Union, US became the only super power left and started to impose themselves on a number of other countries affair. Something similar to how the Roman grow their empire in the past. Except the Roman conquered the other countries whereas US is trying to control the other countries through policy, money and diplomacy.

In the book, they talked about how the present US economy is running close to a collapse.

1. They talk about the lack of productive things coming out of the US. Almost everything that is consumed in the US are made in Asia.
2. About the high mortgage of property in US to generate more cash for current consumption but it place a burden on the next generation. The key assumption is that property price will not fall. However if you think from an economics point of view, the concept of ever raising property price is never true. This is because a property is only as valuable as what the market demand is. It will reach a point when the prices are too high till there is much less demand which will cause the prices of property to fall. Then it will cause those people that has placed a mortgage to be unable to afford the property and their gamble fail. This will cause bad debt and people to go bankrupt which will affect consumption. This will be the start of a vicious cycle.
3. There is also a low rate of saving in the US which means there is very little for people to fallback when the economy go pear-shaped.
4. The US is borrowing a lot of money to fund its current consumption and the lenders are the Asian country. A good example would be Japan and China. They sell so much things to the US and then they accept US treasury bonds which is like the US owing money to these countries.

In my opinion, this is quite an interesting read as some of the points raised in the book will make you think about the current situation and evaluate the point raised in the book. Overall, it is quite a well-written book which managed to capture a lot of the key points and in a way it is like an X-ray on the current US economy.

The only drawback is that the wordings are a bit small and can be quite tiring to the eyes when you read too many pages.