Currently reading
Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul
Started February 2026
I write software for a living and I run a café, epifin Coffee, in Dhaka. This book keeps talking to both of those people at once. I’m a bit over halfway through.
“What if we cared all of the time the way we care some of the time?”
That line is the whole book for me so far. Every café has good days. The hard part is the boring Tuesday afternoon.
What I’m taking from it so far
On the coffee side
- The experience is in the small moments. It’s not the menu or the interior. It’s a barista taking a minute to walk a first-timer through their first espresso.
- Efficiency can kill the romance. Starbucks put in taller espresso machines and customers stopped seeing their drink being made. It saved time and lost the connection. I think about this every time I want to speed something up behind our counter.
- A merchant tells the story. Take something ordinary, give it meaning, and keep telling that story so people don’t forget it.
- Take every lost customer personally. When someone picks the place down the street, ask what you can do today to win them back.
On the building side
“we were running a race but no longer knew what we were running”
That one stung a little. A company can stay busy and still lose track of what it’s for. Teams do this too.
- Love the work enough to make the sacrifice worth it. If you don’t, the cost of building something will eventually feel too high.
- Leaders drift to their strengths. Schultz went back to brand, experience and people. Worth knowing where I drift.
- Boards don’t run companies. Their job is to make sure the company is run well, not to run it themselves.