Howard Schultz: commitment

Transcript context

…Did you go in with essentially the Starbucks concept? It was exactly what you see right now. There’s no different. But the Chinese people hardly knew what coffee was, there was no morning traffic, and the early days of our partner we didn’t see eye to eye, so we got them out. When Belinda came along, we had a world-class operator who had succeeded in Singapore and Hong Kong. She’s a strong person who believed that Seattle, the way we were organized, was not a formula for success. You can’t have people in Starbucks in Seattle designing the breakfast menu, who have never been to China, who think they’re going to eat blueberry muffins. When she said to me, I will do it if I’m in control of everything, I want to decentralize China. I report to you. It’s you, me, and John Culver who runs international. Take Seattle out of the equation. We were failing. What choice did I have? She turned it. She single-handedly built the China business. Today 18% of Starbucks’s revenue is China.…

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