Onward (36 page)

“How many people are you bringing?”

“Ten thousand.” Even through the phone, Craig Russell could see
people's stunned expressions. Months before we arrived in New Orleans, Craig's team had contacted several nonprofit community and nongovernmental organizations—NGOs—to let them know Starbucks’ leadership conference was coming to their city and that our people wanted to help. Although the groups were grateful, it quickly became clear that they simply had no precedent for hosting thousands of volunteers all at once. The NGOs did not have enough supervisors. There were not enough shovels! So, in addition to bodies, we bought our own shovels and hammers and other supplies, $1 million worth, enough to fill two rental trucks.

Each day of the conference, from Monday through Thursday, about 2,000 partners joined one of six organizations for five hours to do whatever needed doing in New Orleans. In City Park—a 1,300-acre public sanctuary that had suffered millions of dollars in landscaping damages from Katrina and had to reduce its 260-person staff to just more than 30—our partners planted 6,500 plugs of coastal grasses, installed 10 picnic tables, and laid four dump truck loads of mulch. At Tad Gormley Stadium, a popular venue for high school football games, partners scraped and painted 1,296 steps, 12 entrance ramps, hundreds of yards of railing, and a half-mile-long fence. In the Gentilly neighborhood, two playgrounds were constructed. In Broadmoor, 22 city blocks of street and storm drains were cleaned. In Hollygrove, partners did construction and leveled dirt for New Orleans’ first urban farm. We collaborated with the Crescent City Art Project to paint, in one day, 1,350 murals at 25 public school grounds, and with Hike for KaTREEna, we planted 1,040 trees.

The NGOs were astonished at our productivity. Most had never hosted a group of our size and were used to volunteers coming in and swinging a hammer for an hour or so. But when our teams of partners showed up—aggressive, athletic, passionate—they could finish a project in two and a half hours even when they were scheduled for four. “Give us more!” we cried, and more we got.

I spent my volunteer hours helping more than a dozen store managers whom I'd never met paint a house, one of the 86 homes our volunteers repaired that week so families could move back in after three years of displacement. While there was laughter and a sense of camaraderie as we climbed ladders, painted front stoops, and caulked and raked and planted and dug and drilled and sawed and hammered
and fixed doors and laid down floors, there was also a heartwrenching pang. Many of us spent time talking with the men and women who had lived through Katrina, and we heard stories of not only individual sacrifice and loss, but also of neighbors taking care of neighbors. The power of community was so evident in New Orleans, and when people's appreciation of our efforts was tough for them to put into words or a smile was not enough, they expressed themselves with quiet tears or a hug. Incredibly emotional.

“When you give up,” said a slim older man whose home we rebuilt, “you might as well lay down and die.” It was obvious that we weren't just giving people back their homes, but also restoring a sense of dignity. No doubt, our community contribution reinforced what it meant to work for Starbucks, and I knew that the experience would be difficult to adequately describe to people who were unable to attend.

Throughout the week, our volunteers’ presence could be seen en masse. We arrived at work sites by the busload, almost everyone clad in jeans and the same white T-shirt or navy sweatshirt. The name “Starbucks” did not appear on our clothing. Instead, “Onward” was printed across the chest. I'd been surprised to see the shirt design when I'd pulled it from my own welcome bag in my hotel room. Incorporating “Onward” had not been my idea, and as far as I could recall this was the first time my signature sign-off had been lifted from my memos. It was somewhat surreal, but I could not have imagined a more appropriate time or place to give that word more life.

All told, Starbucks’ partners volunteered approximately 50,000 hours of time in New Orleans. It was unprecedented, and I was beyond proud. Our partners were as well. Proud of the impact we were able to make during our visit to New Orleans, as well as even a little bit prouder of the company that we had come here to rebuild.

“In times of adversity and change, we really discover who we are and what we're made of,” I would later hear one partner say as he reflected on the week. “To be a part of this organization as it moves through transformation, that is really exciting.”

New Orleans was serving its purpose in helping us rediscover ours. And the week had only just begun.

Whenever I see someone carrying a cup of coffee from a Starbucks competitor, whether it's an independent coffee shop or a fast-food
chain, I take their decision not to come to Starbucks personally. I wonder what I, as Starbucks’ chairman and ceo, might have done to keep them away and what I might do to encourage them to come back or to try us for the first time. I ask myself what I can do today to win someone's business and earn his or her loyalty. If we were going to really transform the company, Starbucks’ store managers needed to take their jobs just as personally as I take mine—to act in their stores just as they were acting here in New Orleans, where every tree planted or house painted mattered. We'd come here not as bystanders, but as participants, and on Wednesday, as the conference neared its close, it was time to turn our attention inward and accept that, as a company, we were in the midst of our own crisis and could not afford to stand back and hope for the best. We each had a responsibility to help ourselves and recognize that every little act matters: A store manager's job is not to oversee millions of customer transactions a week, but one transaction millions of times a week.

The general session would give me one shot to help our partners fall back in love with Starbucks and ensure that they understood their roles.

Inside the New Orleans Arena, the home of the NBA's Hornets basketball team, my intent was to share with the audience of almost 10,000 my thoughts on what had gone wrong at Starbucks and how we needed to self-correct, an endeavor that was as much about attitude as it was about business tools, tactics, and resources. I had no script, but knew I wanted to strike a balance between harsh realism and belief in our future. The massive arena was dark except for the lit stage. Every seat was filled. When I walked in front of a huge lime green screen that read “Onward,” the arena settled down into serious quiet.

We are here for a reason. We are here to celebrate our heritage and traditions and also to have an honest and direct conversation about what we are responsible to do as leaders. . . . We are not a perfect company. We make mistakes every single day. We put our heart and our conscience first, but we have lots of issues that we are trying to balance. Expectations are high from every constituent and we are trying our best, especially during this downturn and in this economy, to do the right thing. . . .

Now, we can point to many things that perhaps are causing the issues that we have faced this year. Like many other companies, we are
facing perhaps the most difficult economic situation since the Great Depression. It's real. It is serious. People do not have as much money as they once did, and Starbucks more often than not is a discretionary purchase. So we have the economy. And we also have something else. Something new. We have competitors small and large who think we are vulnerable and not as good as we used to be. Not as passionate. And they are trying to take our customers away. Which is why one of the themes of this conference has been to make it personal.

But what does that mean?

What does it mean when approximately 50 customers a day are not coming into our stores versus last year? What does it mean when at eight o'clock in the morning the line is out the door and a customer peels off and leaves? What does it mean when you see a customer you recognize with a cup of coffee that is not ours? What does it mean when you know for a fact that the beverage you just handed over to the customer was not made to the standard of Espresso Excellence? These are serious questions, and what they mean, I have always believed strongly, is that we have to take accountability and responsibility for the things that we observe. The things that we experience. And the things that we learn.

I spoke for more than half an hour, and it was actually difficult for me to wrap up; I had the attention of the people with the power to turn Starbucks around. I did not want to let them go, and I took every last second of my time to reach them. “I will do everything humanly possible to represent you the way that I ask you to represent the company. Passionately. Honestly. With great sincerity and humility and doing everything I can to exceed your expectations to make sure our future is as great as our past.”

The next few hours of the general session took a page from our annual meeting, using that platform as an opportunity to blend substance with inspiration, to inform as well as rally. Gospel choirs sang. Other leaders spoke. And backstage we had two surprises that I knew would electrify our partners. I just wasn't sure which would get the bigger response.

“I was going to jump out of a cranberry scone, but maybe not.”

Bono, lead singer for U2, global activist, and someone I consider a friend, had joined me onstage to everyone's shock, and now he leaned
into a speaker's podium and, in a black shirt and his signature red-tinted sunglasses, spoke candidly. I had come to know Bono through our mutual interest in and support of African countries, and I was grateful that he had been able to make it to New Orleans, not to wow us with celebrity, but to educate and motivate store managers about a new multiyear partnership between Starbucks and his organization.

My conversations about partnering with (RED) had begun a year before with Tom Freston, the cofounder and former CEO of MTV Networks, back when we both were sitting on the DreamWorks board. Thanks to Michelle's diligence, my initial dialogue with Tom had finally come to fruition, and during the 2008 holiday season Starbucks would designate its three holiday drinks (RED) and give a nickel for each one sold in the United States and Canada to the Global Fund, which finances programs to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. Like all monies collected through purchases of (RED) products at Gap, Apple, Converse, and Dell, our contributions would go directly to the Global Fund for AIDS programs in Africa. The announcement thrilled many of our partners who had been disappointed that Starbucks had not “gone (RED)” sooner, given the natural synergy of our organizations’ values.

“These are interesting times,” Bono began.

Howard has brought me to talk to you in interesting, strange, unsettling times. For Starbucks. For America generally. Times of crisis. Times of chaos. Times of opportunity. . . . The sight of your stores closing—well, a sign of the times. Historically, though, it is times like these, times of disruption, where America seems to discover its greatness.

Bono spoke not just about Starbucks and the United States but also, more importantly, about his travels to Africa, a continent where 4,000 lives were being lost every day to preventable, treatable diseases, and where 12 million children had been orphaned because of HIV. It had sparked in Bono a rage that ultimately drove him to create (PRODUCT) RED. He moved us by speaking in our own language about the absolute necessity of companies to do well by doing good.