Dumped ad guy finds his true calling at coffee house

books:


	• How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else Michael Gates Gill Gotham, 2007 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 97 reviews view larger image
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Dumped ad guy finds his true calling at coffee house

Golly and gee whiz! At times this book seemed so much like a long and breathless flack piece for Starbucks that I wanted to put it down. I wanted so much for Gill to write something, anything, negative about the company so that it would seem like an authentic business memoir. As I reached the book's end, though, I realized why he was so gung-ho: he still works as a Starbucks barista.

Gill is an unabashed name-dropper, and some of his celebrity tales strain credibility. I particularly had a hard time buying the one about Ernest Hemingway and bull-running.

The book's strength is in its redemptive story of an arrogant ad man who shed his Yale-educated pride to serve coffee and a smile to others -- and to clean many a toilet with a graceful humility.

It also inspires as an example of landing on one's feet after being dumped by the corporate world late in one's career. Career paths do not have to be linear to be fulfilling.

Starbucks treats its employees, called Partners, with Respect and Dignity, Gill writes. That's something he rarely received or gave at the advertising agency where he spent 25 years.

The Seattle-based company "saved me from my pursuit of empty symbols, but also my anxiety about a fear-filled superficial life that hadn't been, in the end, helpful or even enjoyable for me."

Amidst all the false euphoria, this part of the book rings true. That, and its portrayal of Gill's fellow Partners, make this one worth reading.

And Mike is funny. Glorioso!

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Pass Me a Tissue

I was going to jump off a bridge this morning, but then i read this book and decided to wait until tomorrow. Very sappy. Starbucks is wonderful, the people are wonderful, the coffee is wonderful, the benefits they offer are wonderfully...someone needs to tell this guy he needs to wipe the chocolate Starbucks brownie off his nose. All that aside there were some enjoyable moments.

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Great humbling story

This book was fantastic. Michael Gates Gill (Mike) loses his job as a big wig advertising executive to someone half his age. He is sitting in his local Starbucks drinking a latte trying to figure out what to do next and a woman working for Starbucks asks him if he wants a job. His entire life changes after that moment. He takes the job, struggles with his "stumbling down the ladder" mind-set, overcomes his insecurities, humbles himself, becomes happy, develops friendships, and life ultimately is re-born for this guy.

The way Michael Gates Gill wrote the story is very interesting. He has met many famous people in his life (and he's not afraid to share that in the book) that don't seem to mean as much to him as his usual guests that he serves everyday and his partners. Great story, I highly recommend this book!

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

In his fifties, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a big house in the suburbs, a loving family, and a top job at an ad agency with a six-figure salary. By the time he turned sixty, he had lost everything except his Ivy League education and his sense of entitlement. First, he was downsized at work. Next, an affair ended his twenty-year marriage. Then, he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, prognosis undetermined. Around the same time, his girlfriend gave birth to a son. Gill had no money, no health insurance, and no prospects.

One day as Gill sat in a Manhattan Starbucks with his last affordable luxury?a latté?brooding about his misfortune and quickly dwindling list of options, a 28-year-old Starbucks manager named Crystal Thompson approached him, half joking, to offer him a job. With nothing to lose, he took it, and went from drinking coffee in a Brooks Brothers suit to serving it in a green uniform. For the first time in his life, Gill was a minority--the only older white guy working with a team of young African-Americans. He was forced to acknowledge his ingrained prejudices and admit to himself that, far from being beneath him, his new job was hard. And his younger coworkers, despite having half the education and twice the personal difficulties he?d ever faced, were running circles around him.

The other baristas treated Gill with respect and kindness despite his differences, and he began to feel a new emotion: gratitude. Crossing over the Starbucks bar was the beginning of a dramatic transformation that cracked his world wide open. When all of his defenses and the armor of entitlement had been stripped away, a humbler, happier and gentler man remained. One that everyone, especially Michael?s kids, liked a lot better.

The backdrop to Gill's story is a nearly universal cultural phenomenon: the Starbucks experience. In How Starbucks Saved My Life, we step behind the counter of one of the world's best-known companies and discover how it all really works, who the baristas are and what they love (and hate) about their jobs. Inside Starbucks, as Crystal and Mike?s friendship grows, we see what wonders can happen when we reach out across race, class, and age divisions to help a fellow human being.

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