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MORE ARTICLES ON SPECIALTY COFFEE: Ideas and Consequences© 2004 by Stuart Daw In 1991, at the beginning of the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA, Ted Lingle, its newly appointed Executive Director, had some kind things to say about me in the SCAA’s very first edition of its newsletter, which I, “in all immodesty,” reprint here word for word. As background: a few years earlier Ted had conceived a complex, brilliant program which he named “A Search for Value.” In it he simulated the green coffee market, the process of buying green coffee, with blending and pricing as actually experienced by coffee roasters. I had just completed my role in the training of the new “Coffee Ambassadors” of the Coffee Development Group, a program funded by the International Coffee Organization (ICO). These were young University graduates from various major cities in the US, hired to preach the gospel of good coffee throughout the country. Ted and I each took a group of cities served by the Ambassadors, and throughout one full year did the Search For Value with each ambassador, as a seminar for local coffee purveyors, starting in San Francisco and winding up in Washington. In the following years I have done, and indeed still do, an expanded version of The Search for Value on behalf of my company and its various customers. Here is the transcript of Ted’s piece. ============== TOUCHSTONES OF EXCELLENCECoffee gurus are hard to find these days, and ones with a philosophic bent are even rarer. One needs to normally climb up above the altitudes suitable even for coffee to find these unlike minded creatures communicating with their lesser gods and an occasional mortal. SCAA was fortunate enough to have one such guru quietly working the exhibition floor in Orlando last May. Known as Stuart Daw in his human form, he was representing Southern Heritage Coffee. A veteran coffeeman and disciple of Ayn Rand, Stuart brought with him a very important message for SCAA. “If ever there was a coffee industry segment that needed to learn the difference between the socially objective value or its product and the philosophically objective value of that product, it is the SCAA.” Stuart explains that the socially objective value of a product is decided by the consumer who “votes” with dollars for the product of choice. On the other hand, the philosophically objective value inherent in the coffee beverage is that value which, under ideal conditions and judged by the most expert and knowledgeable people in the field, is found to be superior to all others. The socially accepted value will gradually approach the philosophical value, if some industry education can be applied. While some would argue that meeting consumer demand is the responsibility of the coffee industry, our coffee guru suggests that a greater responsibility for SCAA is the creation of the philosophically perfect cup of coffee. At least then coffee consumers would know what they’re missing. In a single masterful stroke, he laid out the challenge now before the SCAA, “in the short run you must set out your ‘touchstones of excellence’ as benchmarks to guide your consumers, or in the long run you will lose them to those beverages that do ==============. The Cocktail Party When in a group setting, maybe a cocktail party or a coffee convention, you might become embroiled in a conversation with one or more people, and wind up by asking yourself, “Wherever did (he, she, they, I) get that ridiculous idea?” How often on such occasions have you asked that question of yourself or wondered the same about others? The truth is that people enter the adult world with minds filled with all kinds of ideas, good and bad, right and wrong, often without the faintest thought given to how those ideas got there, and without any intention of examining them in light of reality. And most people deal strictly in concretes, not general principles under which those concretes are subsumed, principles which would lend coherence and consistency to their opinions. As mentioned above, Ted Lingle noted that I was “a disciple of Ayn Rand.” And it is true that her philosophy of Objectivism has had a profound effect on my own ideas and method of thinking and, I might add, on countless other people. It’s not a case of what one thinks, but how one thinks and forms the crucial concepts that guide one’s life that is important. We come into this world not with innate knowledge, but with our brains tabula rasa (blank slates), in essence a little computer “C” Drive with an ability to be programmed with endless data and ideas. And in the early stages that programming takes place automatically, outside our conscious control. The result is our growing up holding mixed premises, a hash of conflicting ideas. Unfortunately, when we are very young we have not yet developed a value system by which to make selective judgments as to the truth of our ideas, so what enters our heads may simply get stuck there, perhaps for life. We may not even realize who or where they came from. Sometimes uprooting a bad idea, examining it by the light of day and tucking it back all corrected into our minds can be like pulling an abscessed tooth. But it may be well worthwhile, and it can only be done by a process of introspection, digging back into the past, looking for its origin. One good way to approach the problem is by asking ones self, “Did I get that ‘knowledge’ by induction or deduction? And does it pass the acid test, that of corresponding to reality?” At a recent Toastmasters meeting, where a “Table Topics Master” threw questions at members for extemporaneous two to three minute answers, one such question struck me as symbolic of learning by induction as opposed to deduction. It came to a member; let’s call her June who, along with her husband runs a small business operating three golf driving ranges. She was asked what she thought of the government proposal to increase the minimum wage by 13%. Until that moment, I could hardly tell her politics or economics, for in her last Toastmasters speech she was asking for help in how to vote in the national elections.But in this case she shot back with an impassioned speech against raising the minimum wage. In effect she said, “I can’t hire anyone at the minimum wage. I have to pay what our competition is paying, so the whole issue is academic. Why bother? Get the government out of my face.” What struck me was that her answer was firm, specific, and clearly coming from hands on experience and empirical evidence about the business. Thus her opinion came from a process of induction, inducing a general principle about government involvement in business, based on her own experience. Her answer brought me back to another era, a time when a friend of mine in Mississauga loved to throw cocktail parties to which he invited various people with the explicit purpose of getting as many arguments going as possible. I can see him now with that malicious, delicious grin on his face as he rubbed his hands together in anticipation of the heat he was going to generate at the party. His name was Pete. He was a high school teacher with lots of friends. His motive at the parties was simply to introduce people who usually hadn’t met before, drop a question and then leave them to have at it. And so, driving home from the Toastmasters meeting, I wondered how two of Pete’s party guests would have handled the issue posed at that meeting. Let’s pretend Pete introduces our June of Toastmasters to a college professor in the Humanities named John. Pete casts the question about raising the minimum wage, and June gives her Toastmasters opinion that it shouldn’t happen. The professor says, “I rest my case. By your own argument the present minimums are obviously too low. You said yourself that you can’t get anyone to work at that wage.” June says, “But if companies that do pay this minimum are faced with higher wages that they can’t afford, some workers will be laid off, causing more unemployment.” The professor assures her that government sponsored unemployment insurance will neatly take care of that. June tries again. “But if companies have to pay some workers 13% more, will they not have to pay other workers, now above the minimum, higher wages too, causing inflation in the economy?” The professor with his sickeningly sweet, condescending smile advises her, “My dear girl. We all know that corporations are making obscene profits, ripping off the public. We and the government know they can well afford to absorb higher wages with no price increases.” “But won’t some people, the stay-at-home moms or pops who are happy to make a few dollars part time or maybe contracting to do work at home be happy at the current or maybe even below the current minimum wage?” The professor loses his cool a little, “We all have to sacrifice for the common good of society. Any people working below the legal minimum should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” Hopefully at this point Pete would show up carrying a couple of martinis, checking on the progress of the argument. But note how each of June’s arguments, induced from her own experience, are pinned on the principle that all government interference in the economy is bad. The professor’s arguments on the other hand are at least consistent, even though incorrect, but what Ayn Rand called “Floating Abstractions,” ideas disconnected from reality, ideas gained by deduction from some principle picked up early in his own education, and with which he has had no direct experience. While minimum wages were used in this example, one could take countless similar issues and encounter the same kind of dialogue. What might all this have to do with Vending and Coffee Service? How one approaches and analyzes issues such as the current hot button, single cup service, can lead to success or catastrophe. Will it be such a big deal after all? How does it fit into the quality-service-price equation? Can I afford it? Will I get stuck with a lot of obsolete equipment? Which application of all the alternatives will win the day? These and other questions can only be solved by inducing from past experience a general principle telling us how to approach the answers, and then deducing from that solid principle, based on reality, what we can afford, what the trends are, and what action to now take. Mankind moves the world. Ideas move mankind. May the right ideas take your business to a higher plateau. And may your coffee be the “philosophically as well as the socially perfect cup.”Read more of Stuart Daw's articles
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