Howard Schultz: belief

Transcript context

…I’d love to flash forward. You were CEO through 2017. Kevin Johnson took over 2017–2022. You came back for one year as interim CEO. Now, Laxman is the CEO and has been in the seat for about a year. You came in after a tumultuous COVID era, tried to basically figure out who the successor was going to be and patch the ship in the meantime. A lot of stuff has happened in that last five years, notably with labor unions. I don’t want to make this 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 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 very [...] pattern in a history of being unbelievably……

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