Howard Schultz
speaker
633 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Howard Schultz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And we're not perfect. And so we do make mistakes. And when the brand is being shined so brightly, we live in an environment where if you do make a mistake, and we are human and we're going to make mistakes, unfortunately, that becomes the thing. And it's tough to fight that.
Are you open? I'd love to kind of flash forward. You were CEO through 2017. Kevin Johnson took over 2017 to 2022. You came back for one year as interim CEO, and now Laxman is the CEO and has been in the seat for about a year. You came in after a tumultuous COVID era and tried to basically figure out who the successor was going to be and patch the ship in the meantime. A lot of stuff happened.
has happened in that last five years, notably with labor unions. I don't want to make this a podcast about labor unions, but I do want to ask you, what have you learned from the experience of having to do a deep dive into how we got here?
That's a very tough, complex question. I think my... personal relationship with the company and how personal it is to me and the things that we not i but we have tried to do to build a different kind of company
when the country started moving in a post-COVID era to a direction that I didn't recognize, very, very hard to understand why Starbucks would be under assault or just being challenged this way.
Particularly when you had built a reputation on a fact pattern and a history of being unbelievably, you know. Kind to your people. Yes. Yeah.
I entered Starbucks as the interim CEO when this was already going on. And I think the company made some early mistakes. some of which were COVID-related. Again, no textbook had a deal with COVID issues, health issues, safety issues. And then I think underestimated the groundswell of public sentiment for this movement in America. And...
then became vilified for trying to defend the company in a way that I thought was appropriate. I think what's lost in all this is the percentage of stores that have been petitioned and the number of people is very small in relationship to the whole. And then all of the people in Starbucks who were depending on me to defend the company,
And trying to do that in a world of disinformation is very difficult. At the time when I was trying to restore the company back to health. Clearly, mistakes were made. This story is still unfolding. And my heart's with the company. But the thing that I think was lost in the story is the shareholder is not the primary person.
It's the Starbucks partner in the green apron, which is the cloth of the company. And if we exceed the expectations of the cloth of the company and our people, shareholders and customers are gonna win. That's been my whole life story.
And that's basically worked for decades and decades. It also seems like when you, Starbucks has become such an institution in our society that leading a small disruptive organization Everyone gives you the credit for all the positives and all the exciting things you're doing. And you sort of get a pass on anything that didn't work. Move fast and break things.
When you're at this scale, everyone expects you to be wildly successful all the time because you always have been. But anything that's misaligned, that is where 100% of the focus is.
Well, I think if you take a step back, not from Starbucks, but if you say to yourself, what company has gotten big in the food business and stayed true to its core purpose and reason for being and then stayed positively inclined to its customers? What are you going to name? And so the odds on getting this big and still being revered for who you once were is very, very difficult.
And I would argue in so many ways we are better today than we were when we were smaller. That is expected of us, but I don't think we get much credit. Maybe we shouldn't. Maybe this is our responsibility. The elements, the characteristics that built the Starbucks business, the culture, is compassion, empathy, and love. Those are not just words.
It's like real things that are not being taught in business schools, and people on the outside view it as not true. Well, I'm telling you, The reason we've succeeded is because the underpinning of the company's purpose has been just that. And it's much harder today to execute that because you're dealing with cynicism as the first order of defense that you have to overcome.
But the responsibility as leaders is to do just that.
All right, I'm going to take us to Starbucks today. I'll kind of map that out and give you the stats. And then we're going to go into playbook where we basically try to take all the lessons we just learned over the last few hours and figure out why did Starbucks work. And at such a grand scale that it did.
So to catch listeners up on the business today, Starbucks does $36 billion in revenue, $4.1 billion in net income. There are 380,000 employees. You gave me a stat. I think over 450,000. 450,000 now. Globally. I must be using an old number. And over the lifetime, the company has employed over 5 million employees.
Five million alum. That is scale right there. 39,000 stores globally in 86 countries, almost half of which are in North America, 18% in China. And about half of those are licensed franchise and half are company operated. And so while we're not... You mentioned we don't franchise in the traditional McDonald's sense.
You do these joint ventures, and you do this way of entering countries where you don't need to own and operate the entire store yourself. They're not franchises in the typical sense. Yeah, so tell us about that.
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