HOWARD SCHULTZ

Howard Schultz was born and raised in Brooklyn, where his family lived in public housing. He went to Northern Michigan University on an athletic scholarship and in 1975 became the first person in his family to earn a college degree. In 1982, he got a job working for a small coffee company called Starbucks. He soon left and started his own coffee company, then bought Starbucks, and in 1992 took it public. In 2011, he was named Fortune magazine’s Businessperson of the Year.

He has been much honored for the social activism he has spurred both through his efforts as CEO of Starbucks and through the Schultz Family Foundation, which supports two national initiatives: Onward Youth, which promotes employment for young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four who are not in school, and Onward Veterans, which helps post-9/11 servicemen and women make the adjustment to civilian life.

Howard received the RFK Ripple of Hope Award in 2016 for leadership on social activism as a CEO. We met in his office in Seattle, where he started our conversation by showing me a photograph he keeps of Bobby Kennedy.

Kerry Kennedy: You’ve said that Robert Kennedy was someone you identify with and you’ve quoted from his speech in South Africa as an inspiration.

I’m interested in what you think about the process of turning those ripples of hope into action.

Howard Schultz: Robert Kennedy spoke for the oppressed and those in need, and he did that at times when it took a lot of courage to do. He believed in equality, and he had compassion for people, and was never afraid to communicate that. He showed us that each person can lead in his or her own life, whether it’s in business or through volunteering or in whatever way someone gets involved.

Robert Kennedy’s example inspires us to do what he was trying to do, and that’s why it’s so important to remind younger people about what he said and what he did. Those of us who are older haven’t made it easy for the next generation, but if we can point to leaders who’ve made a huge contribution and a huge difference, young people will see the possibilities for change. Robert Kennedy was one of those leaders who showed a way that can be done.

As you know, I grew up in public housing; we moved there in 1956, when I was three. It was a diverse community, and in a sense we were all captives there, a condition that gets imprinted on people for life, especially if you’re very young. We were all different colors, we had very different life experiences, and you had to get along with everyone there, despite all the differences. Like so many other people, I watched and will always remember the famous speech your dad gave from the back of that flatbed truck in Indianapolis on the evening Martin Luther King was assassinated. That was an example of leadership I’ve never forgotten. So when I watched and thought about what’s been going on in recent years, with young African American men being murdered, and the lack of empathy and compassion among different communities, I felt compelled to see if Starbucks could do something to elevate the national conversation. I started having town hall meetings with our people, and there were two very powerful moments. An African American young man in Ferguson said, “I’m eighteen years old and I don’t know if I’ll make it to nineteen living in Ferguson.” And someone in Seattle said, “Racism is like humidity. You can feel it, but you can’t see it.” I don’t know if you knew this, Kerry, but I played the Ripple of Hope speech at a companywide meeting, from beginning to end, because I wanted to show the people who worked at Starbucks that those words from fifty years ago are just as relevant today as they were then. We have an individual and collective responsibility to embrace one another. We must reject the hatred and bigotry, and it will help us all to remember the courage, the leadership, and the power Robert Kennedy showed when he spoke out with a force and conviction we seldom hear today. When the recording of your father’s speech ended, there was such a deep silence; people were incredibly moved by what they had just heard. I think this showed how people are longing for truth, longing for authenticity, and longing for the kind of leadership that your father displayed.

KK: As CEO of Starbucks, you have made an effort to advance the national dialogue on race, an issue which has plagued our country since our founding. The fallout fom your Race Together initiative is indicative of why people consider race the third rail.

HS: People have a longing for human connection. I see this because Starbucks is a place where millions of people gather—almost a hundred million people a week come into our stores all over the world, and they’re not coming just for the coffee. They’re coming in for the community, to be with other people. When we decided to get people thinking together about racism in America by writing “Race Together” on our cups, we did take a lot of criticism in the media, mostly social media, which kind of hijacked the narrative very quickly. In spite of that, it was one of my proudest moments at Starbucks. We had decided as a company to do it, and our doing it arose from our core purpose and reason for being, which was to try to lift up the lives of our own people and our customers and to try from time to time to use our widespread resources for good. And that was a defining moment of saying, “This could be misinterpreted, we could have people very angry and upset,” and we did, but we decided it was the right thing to do to address the issue in the most respectful way we knew how and see if we could elevate the national conversation around empathy and love for one another. I think we will continue to challenge the status quo in ways that we think are appropriate and necessary.

KK: Howard, in a recent speech you talked about how a company can have aspirations that are not exactly the same as making money. You talked about achieving the balance between making a profit and having social impact. And you describe Starbucks as a “performance-driven organization through the lens of humanity.”

That’s the way I was raised—a combination of drive and impact blended with compassion. As a society, we don’t usually think of these qualities—competitiveness and compassion—together, and I think that might be because we associate empathy with vulnerability, while winning means beating the opposition without mercy. So I’m very interested in how you, as a CEO, can combine those qualities that don’t seem naturally to operate together. How do you make a company competitive and humane?

HS: Well, Starbucks is a public company, and we have a duty to stockholders to perform as well as we can financially. But I believe we have another responsibility, which is a higher one. We have to ask ourselves, “What is the right way to conduct our business?” You can’t do business alone. Like almost everything we do in life, business requires other people; it’s a team sport. So within the company there has to be a sense of purpose that unites everyone; we have to be confident that we’re all in it together, that we are sharing a common endeavor. At Starbucks we have 350,000 employees worldwide. We have to be a community. Every business decision can’t be an economic one. In fact, our success is due to many decisions that were not economically in our interest. We provided comprehensive health care to all of our employees almost thirty years before the Affordable Care Act; we provide free college tuition to every employee—no other company does that, we’re the only one. We don’t do these things because we’re a charity or because we’re trying to be benevolent. We do these things because we believe that, even though we don’t win financially because of these decisions, ultimately our success is because of the way we treat the people who work at Starbucks.

So, viewing our performance through the lens of humanity means that we have to define our core purpose, our reason for being, in terms of human beings and pursue our financial success with that purpose lighting our way. We are very competitive, we want to win, but we want to win in such a way that when we leave the field, we’ll be proud of how we conducted ourselves. Most people want to join with others in pursuit of something more important than their individual desires, and that’s not because of something that you tell them or something that’s written in the handbook but because they believe what they’re doing has value for themselves and for other people.

I’ve thought about and spoken about the role and the responsibility of a public company today, and I believe strongly that the rules of engagement have changed, in large part because the government has become so polarized and dysfunctional that businesses and business leaders need to do more for their people and the communities they serve. I also think companies have a moral obligation today, not necessarily to be political but to be determined to stand up for important human values. So when we announced that we were going to hire ten thousand refugees globally after the president announced his ban, we did that because we believed it was dictated by our principles. I do think of Robert Kennedy in this context. He stood up many times for what he thought was right and just, and it was not always politically convenient. That is leadership, and it’s a lot easier to lead when you have the wind at your back than it is when you’re confronting powerful opposition.

I never saw your father when the cameras were not on him, the way he was when you saw him, in private, but I know that he didn’t play for the crowd, he didn’t play for the cameras. He was doing what he had to do to elevate people whose lives were hopeless, people who were in despair, who were powerless. I think he understood that this was his calling, to help those people, and I know it wasn’t politically convenient.

KK: Well, you’re right; my father was very much the same off camera. Probably a little more laughter and fun… My question is: How do you put that humanity into the culture of your coffee shops?

HS: Let me give you another example: I mentioned the fractured politics, the lack of trust, the polarization in Washington. Over the last year and a half, we’ve been talking inside Starbucks about the responsibilities of a public company today. They’ve changed. And to respond to that change, we have a responsibility to use our platform, raise our voice, and harness the worldwide extent of our potential influence for good.

We talked not about profit and loss, not about growth and development, not about the stock price or shareholder value. We talked about our conscience: our collective conscience as a company. We said to ourselves, “Eighty, ninety million people a week are going through our stores. Let’s do everything we can to try to elevate the national conversation about how people treat one another.” We asked ourselves, “How many more times are we going to allow ourselves to look at the news and the television and see one injustice after another, just because someone has black skin?”

So we took it on. And Robert Kennedy, despite the fact that he has not been with us since 1968, was the catalyst for me. I remembered his courage the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, when he spoke from his heart and calmed angry people and comforted an entire nation. I always remember what he did that night, and it frequently helps me figure out what I need to do. I try to inspire my company to follow his example too.

What we did was we opened a store in Ferguson, Missouri. We opened a store in Queens, New York. We opened a store in Englewood, Illinois. People said, “Englewood, Illinois? Starbucks is going into the charity business?” No, it’s not charity. It’s not charity. It’s our values. It’s our guiding principles. Just about a year ago, in the same week we were opening in Ferguson, we were opening a store in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I had never been to South Africa, and I didn’t realize when we were in Johannesburg that there were preparations taking place in Cape Town for the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of Robert Kennedy’s speech there in which he talked about ripples of hope.

What I did realize, when we were opening a store in Johannesburg, was that a terrible thread of misfortune connected Ferguson, Missouri, and Johannesburg so far away. That thread was a lack of hope, a lack of opportunity, and prejudice. I sat down with these kids, about fifty of them, who were getting ready to open our two stores in Johannesburg. And I learned that none of them had ever had a job in their entire lives. And I went to visit them in the townships where they live. And I saw poverty like I’d never seen before.

But I also saw joy: when they put on their green aprons, you could see the swelling of pride, self-esteem, hope, self-respect. It was exactly the same as what we saw in Ferguson. The kids we hired in Ferguson had never had a job. The people who were supplying us with food didn’t have any resources. As I sat down with these kids in South Africa and heard their personal stories and walked the townships with them, I kept hearing over and over again a word I had never heard before. “Ubuntu. Ubuntu.” Finally I got up my courage and asked, “What is that word you keep saying? What does it mean?”

It was like they had been bursting to tell me. It means, “I am because of you.” I almost began to cry when they were explaining it to me: a sense of shared humanity that comes from recognizing other people and acting with compassion, solidarity, and regard for community. They were telling me that we were together in the knowledge that we don’t exist as individuals but as interdependent parts of the world. We achieve our humanity through mutual recognition and compassion for one another.