Schultz on Lucky Misses

 

“Life is a series of near misses. But a lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future.”

– Howard Schultz (1953 – )

American entrepreneur, chairman of Starbucks

One thing that’s helpful to me when I catch myself shying away from taking a risk…

I remember that I’m not so important that a mistake or failure will likely have any lengthy impact or be that difficult to overcome with a little extra effort and time. (If you happen to be a head of state, a Supreme Court Justice, or a military general, maybe you need to be a little more careful.)

Google Places Updates

There have been two updates to the Places Quality Guidelines over the past two weeks. On July 21st, with the rollout of the new Places Page look, Google added this paragraph (bold added by me):

You cannot create Places listings for stores which you do not own, but which stock your products. Instead, consider asking the store owner to update their own Places listing with a custom attribute specifying brands or products they stock, including yours. While this data may not appear on the Place page, this information continues to help our system understand more about your business and ensure your organic listings appears and ranks appropriately on Google and Google Maps when potential customers perform searches related to your business.

This is a clear indication that while not displaying the information in the Additional details area of the Places listing they are in fact using the information for relevance and rank in retrieval of the listings and you want to still fill in the extra information.

Google added a paragraph to the Quality Guidelines allowing stores within other stores to explicitly note their relationship with the mall or container store:

Some businesses may be located within a mall or a container store, which is a store that contains another business. If your business is within a container store or mall, and you’d like to include this information in your listing, specify the container store in parentheses in the business name field. For example, Starbucks (inside Safeway).

Schultz on Impact

 

“If you want to achieve widespread impact and lasting value, be bold.”

–Howard Schultz (1953 – )

American entrepreneur, chairman of Starbucks

Starbucks opened its first store in Seattle, WA in 1971. Schultz joined the company 11 years later as its director of retail operations and marketing.

It was a trip to Italy in 1983 that inspired the coffeehouse culture that Starbucks now has. Schultz convinced the founders to try the concept in 1984 and it did well.

In 1985, he founded his own company, Il Giornale, and used Starbucks coffee beans for his espresso beverages. Two years later he purchased the assets of Starbucks and changed the name of Il Giornale to Starbucks Corporation.

Today the company does more than $10 billion dollars in sales and has more than 15,000 stores around the world.

“Look around, leaves are brown

And the sky is a hazy shade of winter.”

– Paul Simon

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