Importance of Coffee
Strategic Coffee
I truly enjoy taking my Slovene colleagues on business trips to the US and UK. Inevitably, a local business partner will invite us for a coffee and then proceed to lead us as we walk, talk, and drink our coffee. Walking and drinking coffee is a most ordinary activity in the US, but in much of Continental Europe, this borders on being an acrobatic exercise. The resulting business consequences are quite revealing. For many years I worked in a Slovenian office with two cafes in the building. We would refer to the lower cafe as the “Decision Center” as a partial joke when we walked new clients around the building on a tour. American customers would envy this “luxury” and soon we also began to see this as a luxury. As we expanded, our new buildings were made more efficient by replacing the cafes with machine equipped coffee areas. The theory was that employees should not have to waste company time getting coffee. Now, based on my observations on coffee in the corporate culture, I am prepared to make some bold conclusions on “optimal coffee behavior” in the workplace. Read more…