Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. Because it’s the culture of our company. We want to do everything we can to benefit our people. Humanity, and it’s universal. But it’s so (I think) important to just create some guardrails. One day in the early stages of Starbucks, Howard Behar comes in my office one day—remember, we’re small at this stage—and he says, we got a terrible situation. He said, the manager of the Seattle Trust store on Second and Madison, Seattle, Tom Carrigan, has AIDS. Now, AIDS at that time was like leprosy. Tom comes in and he says, I need to resign from Starbucks. He’s crying. Do you have any health insurance? No. We covered Tom Carrigan from that point on, but it was those imprinting moments and there were many like that. I think it’s funny. I have heard that story probably five times because I’ve consumed an incredible amount of Starbucks content over the last couple of months. I’ve heard a story about Starbucks employees wanting to buy a cow for a farmer in Africa, stories about Flint, Michigan, and stories about the initiative to bring the company together to try to bring the country together when the government was shut down in 2013, whenever that was. I was getting frustrated watching all these stories because I kept thinking, this is not the answer to why Starbucks worked. These are one-off anecdotes that are sure they’re emblematic of some broader theme, but at the end of the day, the answer to why Starbucks works has to be something about the business model. Every time you walk into the store, XYZ happens and here’s the economics. But it turns out there are thousands of these stories, and it’s the humanity seeping through. It’s hard for the company to tell the story because everyone just feels like a random one-off example. But they’re happening in every community and every part of the country. I think for me as a business historian, that’s been the thing that jumps out is there’s no other company that we’ve studied that has this obsession with people in humanity the way that Starbucks does. And we’re not perfect. We do make mistakes. When the brand is being shined so brightly—…

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