By now you’ve heard that Chipotle’s CEO, Brian Niccol, was recruited to helm Starbucks.

There’s been a lot of attention paid to his comp package and private jet.

And debate over the worth of a CEO as AI continues to come to the fore.

But what I was curious about was what Niccol did at Chipotle that made him so valuable to Starbucks.

In many ways, it’s a story of what he didn’t do.

Niccol went out into the field and listened; he observed in the Chipotle stores.

He asked questions.

He dined as an anonymous customer.

And after digging in to things, he said, “We just needed to get even better at doing what people already loved us for.”

No big menu overhaul.  (They made their queso dip better.)

No chasing grand ideas.

There were consistency issues, and there had been food safety incidents.

Their marketing needed some tuning.

And the frustration that both online and in-house customers felt with ordering inefficiency needed to be solved.

I’m left wondering: Do you know what your organization is truly loved for?

Do you have the correct mechanisms to find out?

And how often is “innovation” used to course correct when simply identifying and resolving some of the fundamentals would make the critical difference?

 

If you want to be in a room of peers with fresh ideas and incisive thinking, we just opened 3 more seats at the Magnificent Leadership® Live Annual Event on October 17+18 in Raleigh after selling out.  Go here to grab your seat.  Attendees say there is no other event like it: behind-closed-door conversations, outstanding guest speakers, small group working sessions.  And time with yours truly.

We are at capacity for the cost-free webinar, “How to Build a Self-Correcting Team” on September 10th and registration has closed.