One of the amazing offshoots of my career is that it has allowed me the opportunity to see the world—forty countries and hundreds of cities. Even more amazing is the fact that it has allowed my family to see the world as well.
However, my first real travel adventure actually took place long before I started my professional career. Once I arrived at the University of Oregon, I was exposed to different types of financial aid. Of course, I signed up for all of it, ignorantly thinking that I would just pay it off one day, no big deal. These loans were all low interest and didn’t require repayment until six months after graduation. To me, that was a lifetime away—almost inconceivable.
Of course, I used this money to buy books and supplies, but I also realized I could use it for other purposes as well. Like, for instance, I had always wanted to visit Lebanon, the land where my father came from, but I never before had an opportunity. Until now.
In the summer of 1995, I worked with a travel agent (yes, they actually existed back then!) and used my student loan money to travel to Lebanon over the summer. At the time, there was a restriction against American citizens traveling to Lebanon due to the fifteen-year civil war that had ended in 1990, just five years prior. It was a brutal and tragic period, and the United States issued a warning through the State Department that it was unsafe for Americans to travel to the area.
In 1983, only a dozen years prior to my trip, two truck bombs struck a building in Beirut that was housing American service members. The attack killed more than 240 Americans and 50 French servicemen. Needless to say, the US State Department was right. Despite the risk involved, I still wanted to visit Lebanon and, for the first time, I had access to the funds to make it happen. I had to buy my ticket out of Canada, then have it shipped to Oregon. To get to Beirut, I went from Oregon to New York to the island of Cyprus to Beirut. I didn’t care about all of these hops because I was eighteen and this was the first time I’d ever left the US. The only significant travel I’d done up to that point was a family vacation to Hawaii when I was ten. It was an adventure!
Beirut had been ravaged by civil war in the eighties and nineties. I remember watching the bombings and destruction on television as a kid. Throughout this time, I had been talking to my family in Lebanon on the phone, getting to know them from a distance and through the couple of visits they were able to make to the US during my childhood. I distinctly remember the sound of static and the delay as my family’s voices made their way from Lebanon to the US. It made the conversation a bit awkward and everyone who talked on the phone tended to speak loudly, as if that would help the quality. It made a big impression on me when I learned that my uncle refused to sleep on the floor or in the basement with the rest of his family during the war, despite the fact that bullets had ripped through his bedroom balcony and walls during the night. He was determined to stay in his own bed. Because I grew up seeing and hearing this, even as an eighteen-year-old kid, it wasn’t lost on me that I was coming into what had recently been a war-torn country, entrenched deeply in a religious and geopolitical civil war.
Even at that, it was still jarring to land in Beirut (which was occupied by the Syrian government at the time) only to be greeted by tanks and checkpoints where Syrian military carrying AK-47s were searching cars and harassing drivers. I experienced some of this firsthand. My family and I were stopped at some random checkpoint and told to get out of the car. The military asked who I was, because I clearly stood out in my Oregon Ducks clothing and American English accent. They made my young and pretty cousins get out of the car and open the trunk, sneering at the women as they bent over to move everything around. It was bullying and despotism on full display.
Very quickly, I learned what a massive civil war does to a country and its people. Even after the war, Syrian occupation meant that there still remained deep tension in the country, even though the bullets had ceased flying. It deeply impacted me to see my family living in the midst of this, especially since I was roughly the same age as my dad had been when he left for America.
The first thing that hit me was the sheer destruction of society. Buildings were imploded, water leaked out the side of apartment complexes because the plumbing had been blown out by bombs, and there were bullet holes and destruction everywhere. I was surrounded by desperation and poverty unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Beirut seemed to be a lawless place. You could get pulled over and shot on the side of the road and no one would think twice about it. Despite the fact that the war was over, it was still a war zone. Property had been damaged beyond repair, people’s lives had been destroyed, and society had been reduced to its the most basic elements.
I was also struck by the lack of security and accountability. In the Western world, we don’t think twice about the fact that we can call 911 or its equivalent with the expectation that help will arrive quickly. If you’re sick, an ambulance will come; if you’re in danger, a police officer will. Without this sort of basic societal expectation, a Mad Max zone arises, in which crime, murder, and extortion can run unchecked. It’s just you and whatever network you happen to have built around you, doing what you can to survive. To survive, people use their connections, pay bribes, or just try to leave the country in desperation.
As an American, I didn’t respond well to any of this. I was told many times in my first days in Lebanon to just be quiet and avoid causing any issues. No one would care if I got shot. “This is just the way it is,” I was told. My experience and expectations as an American did not apply to Beirut in 1995.
Another striking element about Beirut was the strength of the human spirit. Beirut is five thousand years old, and one of the longest inhabited cities in the world. I saw how adaptable and resilient the people were. I saw that, no matter what hand they had been dealt—strife, poverty, destruction, or violence—there remained a palpable warmth and desire to build a better life. That spirit survived all of the bombs, bullets, and battery. These people were determined to rebuild and recover the best place they could from the rubble. No matter what they were dealt, this was an optimistic and determined people.
Even as I was there looking at the destruction, it was almost impossible to wrap my head around what these people had been through and how they were forced to live. For example, one day, my cousin’s friend and next-door neighbor had to choose between taking one of two routes to work, one of which took twenty minutes and another, which took two hours with traffic. The twenty-minute route required my cousin’s friend to dodge a sniper who shot at cars. He had to play chicken with a sniper, trying to change the driving pattern of his Volkswagen Jetta so he wouldn’t be hit. He had the bullet holes in his car to prove it. Still, he took the twenty-minute route to work because he didn’t want to have to drive two hours each way to and from work to avoid the sniper. I remember hearing stories about how Christians and Muslims would have coffee together in the morning, then be fighting against one another in the afternoon. This was such a foreign and disturbing notion, and it showed me the extent to which geopolitical and religious sects can pull the people themselves into conflict.
Looking at my cousins, who were all close to my age, it was impossible not to think about what my life could have been like had my dad not left Lebanon. I would have been just a year old when the war started, and fourteen when it formally ended. I heard one story about a thirteen-year-old answering his door one day only to be handed a machine gun. He was told that a gang was on their way down the street to rape his mother and sister and kill his dad, so he’d better fight. Just a few different decisions and that could have been me. My life could easily have been unrecognizable from what it is today.
Since that initial visit to Beirut in 1995, I have been back many times, in large part due to the work I did for Starbucks in their Middle East locations. For the last twenty years, I had always wanted to figure out a way to honor my family and heritage in Lebanon. In 2018, I finally had the chance. I was invited to do the keynote speech for the Lebanese American University in Beirut and I accepted. In June 2018, we left for Lebanon. The plan was that I would do the keynote, and we would have a tour guide and host to help us make the trip a memorable one. I brought my four oldest children, Leyla, Aidan, Spencer, and Audrey, as well as Aisha, my brother, Jason, and my mother and father. It was all the more special because, after all these years, it was my mother’s first visit to Lebanon.
Since I first visited in 1995, Beirut has drastically improved. I would go so far as to say it’s almost unrecognizable from what it once was. Today, it is reminiscent of a modern European capital, blending together East and West. It has a modern, clean downtown that is just as good as anything I’ve ever seen in Europe or parts of the US. On the other end of the spectrum, it has Byblos, which, at seven thousand years old, is the oldest continually inhabited city in the world.
In fact, it’s so beautiful that my whole family wanted to figure out how we could buy a home there. It’s astounding what a difference less than twenty-five years can make. It’s also interesting to see the relationship my children are developing with Lebanon as a second-generation American family. They did not know the war or its immediate impact. They speak French (like many Lebanese) and use social media to connect with the friends they’ve made there. They have a modern connection to our family’s ancestral homeland, but they also have their family, who is there to remind them of their past and what came before.
Of course, you can still see the remnants of poverty and war. The difference is that, now, those elements are more isolated and less frequent. You can also still see the hope and resilience of the people. They have stronger communities and are modernizing their city, opening grand new malls and restaurants. Everything feels full of life and hope, and it’s beautiful to behold.
For my speech at the Lebanese American University, I was introduced with a lead-in by the president of the university that also included mention of my father and grandfather and their journey to America. It brought tears to everyone’s eyes. It was a life moment for all of us, and especially, for my dad, who was in the land he once called home again, surrounded by multiple generations of his family.
I hope and expect that Lebanon will continue to be a part of my family’s lives as our kids grow and Aisha and I become grandparents. There is something grounding about being connected to the land that your immediate ancestors came from.
I’ve come a long way from that kid who had only been as far as Hawaii, and most of my extensive travels have been facilitated through work. It was during my time at Corbis that I began to travel to more remote locations. Corbis had a global market and international locations that included China, Japan, Germany, France, and the UK. My time at Corbis served as my entrée into what would become extensive international travels to dozens of countries and hundreds of cities across the globe.
It was at Corbis that I learned how powerful the languages of technology and gaming are, no matter what other types of barriers might exist. Before I departed for trips to our offices in Asia, Corbis would provide my bio and information about me to the team I was going to visit. I distinctly remember landing in Tokyo for the first time in 2006 and being greeted by a crowd of employees. When other executives came to visit, employees were generally shy but, because I was a gamer and technologist, they felt comfortable with me even though most of them didn’t speak English. They had created a binder that contained a sheet for each person in the office, each of which included a picture, their favorite video game, and the team member’s signature in Kanji. Gaming and technology turned out to be a huge ice breaker and a major advantage for me in terms of building relationships that most other executives didn’t even understand. I would talk to employees and other business contacts around the world about apps, games, and e-tournaments. No matter where we lived, we were all playing the same games and shared the same vernacular and subculture. Five years later, in 2011, I returned to Tokyo and visited all the big gaming companies and traveled to several parts of the country. I celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday in a skyscraper in Tokyo. It was a very special trip. Later that same year, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami hit Japan and destroyed or devastated many of the areas I’d seen just a few months before.
To this day, I still speak that gaming language as I travel around the world, and it still breaks the ice and creates connection and trust. This has been great for me, too. It can be intimidating to go to a place where people don’t speak your language or abide by the same customs. I have found that tech and gaming level out this big, diverse world. They create shared passions and hobbies and, with that, a sense of trust and solidarity. They tend to take the bigger differences of language and culture and shrink them, while simultaneously building a bridge of similarity and interest.
At Starbucks, travel looked a little bit different. I still went to Asia, but also to the Middle East, many of the European countries, Mexico, Canada, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. I went all over the place. In some cases, such as Central America, I would visit remote coffee-growing regions where many of the locals don’t speak Spanish but a local tribal language. I would be two translators deep in conversations with these communities that were growing the coffee. Even there, in the mountains of Central America, we could often still connect over the games they played on their phone or comic books they read.
We connected in other ways, too, but often the gaming and tech laid the groundwork. One time in Guatemala, I went to visit a coffee farm located at the base of an active volcano that still had ash coming out of the top of it. The farm’s location at the base of the volcano provides the coffee with a very specific earthy, ashen flavor. Two young farmers had received my biography before I came, which said that I was a gamer and that I drove a Jeep. They really connected to that, especially the Jeep part, which is a popular vehicle in those parts.
They offered me to drive their Jeep up to the volcano and visit the farm. I agreed to go with a couple of my colleagues, and we expected to see the farmers arrive in a 1980s or 90s Jeep. Instead, they appeared in a World War II-era Jeep. It had four speeds and, of course, no power steering or brakes. Between the translators, I was able to get the gist that the Jeep always has to remain on, otherwise it has to be jumped. The Jeep couldn’t start on its own.
So, off we went, with the general counsel and chief marketing officer from Starbucks in the back seat. I drove all of us and our translator up the dirt road that led to the top of the volcano. If I veered over the left by even an extra foot, we would tumble off the volcano. It was stressful, and we all let out a deep breath when we reached the end of the road. “No, no,” one of the translators said. “We’re still not there yet. Now we have to hike one thousand feet up to the top of the mountain.”
By the end of the hike, we were all exhausted and covered in ash, but it was worth it. Lush coffee farms were laid out before us for as far as we could see. It was one of the most beautiful moments I’ve ever experienced. In all of this, I forgot to keep the Jeep running, but it did start when we arrived back!
There were a lot of other touching moments, too. I loved meeting people, seeing harvests, and visiting the hospitals Starbucks had helped to build, where we were able to serve families that otherwise had no access to healthcare. I went to farming celebrations and visited agronomy units where Starbucks helped farmers improve their yield and create sustainable farming.
When I visited stores in different parts of the world, I got to see and understand how to open retail operations in various places. More importantly, I learned how regional governments enforced rules and regulations for store operations and issuing permits. It was fascinating and, at times, very challenging to learn how these regional operations varied and to have to figure out what a business needs to operate and thrive within that scenario. All of this taught me to check my American expectations at the door, especially from a business standpoint. Each place has its own proprietary experience of laws, customs, business practices, and consumer behaviors. It is your job to adapt to their context rather than to expect them to adapt to yours.
In my experience, one of the biggest failings of Western executives is that they bring their baggage of expectations with them when they go to other parts of the world. Much more effective is to spend your time on the ground coming to truly understand the customers, employees, and business climate in the part of the world you are operating in. You keep your values and legality, but adapt and remain flexible to the needs of the areas you hope to do business in.
Although I traveled largely for work, I took the opportunity to integrate my family into it, too, which made all of the difference for me. It was right around the Starbucks years when this started to happen, because, first of all, I was able to afford it and, second, the kids were old enough to appreciate traveling.
If I had an event to attend in Portugal or Italy, for example, I brought Aisha and a couple of the kids. If I hosted an executive from New Zealand, in return, I would later visit them and then tack on a week to visit Australia as a family. While I worked in New Zealand, we were hosted by Sir Richard Taylor and the famed Weta workshop. Richard made the visit very special. We spent our days with him and his family touring Weta and recreating the various movie scenes with props for Leyla and Aidan. We learned and saw how the special effects and props for some of the most successful movies in the last twenty years were made. We even took a small plane ride to visit the Lord of the Rings hobbit village set. Later, in the Weta workshop, they made a white plaster cast of my face. I always looked for ways to blend work trips with family adventures so we could experience the world together.
Earlier in my career, I spent more time away from my family. Then, during my years in Seattle, I ran across a special piece in an online magazine that consolidated one hundred years of research completed by a hospice provider. This provider asked people who were near death a few questions, mostly about what they appreciated about life and what they regretted or wished they had done differently. The online article included a compilation of people’s answers to those questions over the last many decades. One thing was clear in the answers: in the end, status and money did not really matter. What people regretted in their final moments on earth was the time they had missed with their family, not having another child, disconnecting from their faith, failing to make amends in long-standing disputes, not traveling, and generally getting caught up in the pursuit of less important things. This human condition had gone unchanged in the course of the last hundred years—and likely more.
To me, this study illustrated and crystallized everything I already believed and held to be true. Since then, I have said no to a majority of unnecessary work travel. Speakers’ fees and exotic locations are just not worth the time it costs my family. When I do travel, I make sure to incorporate Aisha and my kids to the greatest extent possible and we make memories out of it. If there is anything timeless that money can buy, it is not things, but experiences. Through travel, when we can create some of the best experiences of all as a family.
Although my kids are still young, I can already see the impact of this exposure to the world and other cultures. They are willing to do things like foreign exchange programs in France and China. They are confident enough to engage in adventure and discovery; to go to parts of the world they’ve never before experienced and figure things out. These lessons are invaluable, and I’m so grateful they’ve had access to this sort of global exposure at a young age.
Back State-side, I’ve had the opportunity to visit both the Obama and Trump White House. There, I’ve met and worked with senior officials to talk about everything from IT to modernization to technology innovation to cybersecurity. All of this is politically agnostic work. It’s about helping our leaders and their teams figure out how to think about technology and how it can help achieve their administrative goals as well as interact to support all Americans. These efforts help bring in the best technologies, which could last for the next fifteen or twenty years. I’ve always considered advocacy and loyalty to America to be far more important than advocacy or loyalty to a political party.
In the beginning, it was surreal to find myself in the White House meeting with President Obama’s administration, specifically around IT and cybersecurity issues. At the time, in 2013 and 2014, the Obama administration was bringing in many business leaders to help shape the tenets around what would ultimately form the NIST framework, a cybersecurity network that is the standard today. I had the chance to meet with officials and share my thoughts about and experiences with how this framework could be used by private organizations. The optional standards were compiled and completed, then signed in an executive order by President Barack Obama in 2014.
When Trump won the presidency in 2016, I was invited to the White House again for the inauguration, and a couple times after as well, in 2017 and 2018. I helped with the same items I had in the Obama administration, focused primarily around IT modernization and helping federal agency CIOs. Essentially, I served the same role I did at Starbucks in helping them think about how technology could serve as a tool to help with their change initiatives.
In the course of these White House visits under both the Obama and Trump administrations, I met some of the most passionate people I’ve ever encountered, many of whom, in my experience, were just trying to do their best and advance what they believed was good policy for the American people. When you can remove yourself from the political ideology any single presidential administration is undertaking, you will find that the average person working in the White House in many ways transcends political dogma. They’re just like the rest of us in America: working hard, trying to do what’s right, and doing everything in their power to make our country as safe, efficient, and good as it can possibly be. For me, it’s not about supporting the politics of Obama or Trump as individuals or endorsing every policy they have. It’s about the thousands of people who are giving their all to making things work for our country on a day-to-day basis.
In the course of my work, I’ve shared stages and brushed elbows with a lot of well-known people, including Bono, Aerosmith, Lady Gaga, One Republic, and Felix Baumgartner, who is best known for jumping from the stratosphere to Earth with a helium balloon. For as fun as some of these experiences have been, I’m always more enthralled by being in the presence of figures like Bill Gates and Howard Schultz. But one of these encounters with a public figure does stand out.
I attended the 2009 Sundance Festival as a guest of Hewlett-Packard because Starbucks had been a big technology partner with them at the time. I had the chance to talk about technology and digital leadership with other event attendees and understand more about what HP was doing to help companies like ours advance our capabilities in IT and digital. I got to see a lot of movies, too!
HP paired their attendees with one another and I was paired with, of all people, Olympic gold-medalist swimmer Michael Phelps. Here I am, a thirty-three-year-old dad matched up with Phelps, who was ten years my junior and the highest-achieving athlete in the history of the Olympics. The two of us really hit it off at dinner, despite our differences in lifestyle. I tried to be a worthy partner to Phelps and advise him where I could on the various things we talked about at dinner. It was a great weekend.
After Sundance, I got a call from Michael’s agent. “Hey,” he said, “can you do me a favor?” The agent told me that he and his wife had been trying to adopt a baby from Ethiopia. They were having trouble navigating the government to get the process approved. At this point, the couple was in love with a baby and desperate to bring that child home. He knew Starbucks did a lot of work with Ethiopia and was wondering if I knew anyone in the region who could help.
I connected Michael’s agent to the people I knew in Ethiopia. Two months later, I received a note and pictures of the couple with their baby, safe and sound and all together. It was a moment of such humanity and love, and I was moved and grateful to get to play a role in that situation.
Over the years, I have mingled with some of the most privileged people in the world and some of the most impoverished. What I’ve taken away from it all is that the world is much smaller than we think. In some way, we are all connected, and we are all impacted by one another. We are also more alike than we are different. In my experience, one of the great commonalities between humans is that we all want to do better. We want to learn more, provide more for our families, and wake up every day to have access to those basic things in life.