Adam Markel examines the 2018 Starbucks arrests of two Black men in Philadelphia and CEO Kevin Johnson's response: a public apology, settlement, and closing 8,000 stores for bias training. Markel argues the $11 million cost was worth it to reframe perception and prove the company's values.
Chapters
I want you to imagine for a moment that you walk into a Starbucks with a business colleague. Can you imagine that? And you go to use the restroom, and when you come out, your colleague is being arrested by the police. And the next thing you know, they ask you to turn around and put your arms behind your back and they put the handcuffs on you. Can you imagine that scenario? Shocking, right? Not so shocking because it happened in April in Philadelphia. Now, I want you to imagine something different. Imagine. Imagine you're Kevin Johnson, who's the CEO, current CEO of Starbucks, and you're sitting in your office and the phone rings. And you go to pick up the phone and you hear on the other end that a manager at Starbucks in Philadelphia just arrested two African American men for using the restroom. Click. What do you do? Damage control. What does damage control look like? Cyh. Right. Remember what CYH means? Cover your hiney. Right. So throw that manager under the bus. Off with her head. Insulate the company from damage. All the conventional wisdom. And what did Kevin Johnson decide to do? Is that what he did? Anybody know? Remember? What'd he do? Yeah. The next morning, he gets on national tv. The next morning he goes on Good Morning America and he owns it. This is our bad. This is ours to own. Figure it out. I don't know what happened, but this is not what our company represents. This is not who we are. And we're going to figure it out, and then we're going to get to the root of it, and then we're going to do something about it once we figure that out, whether it's training or something, but this is not who we are as a company. So he took responsibility. He owned it for the company. He did something the lawyers probably told him. No way in the world you're going to do this. We're getting threatened with a lawsuit. We're a public company. But he did it anyway. He took the risk. What he did was he saw a creative opportunity. So when it comes to resilience, one of the things we have to do when the winds blow, when the storms happen and the fires raise as they are right now, is that we have to gather ourselves and we have to frame what's happening so that other people can follow us. So he changed the perception of what was going on. And only a few weeks later, what happened? They resolved the dispute. And two months later, he closed down 8,000 stores for four hours for unconscious bodies training. Now, does that solve the problem? Does that make it go away? Hello? No. But what did he tell the market? What did he tell the world by his actions that it mattered to them? That their purpose, their why, their reason for being was in conflict with what had happened? 8,000 stores cost him 11 million bucks to stand for something. We've got to reframe perception because perception. Say these words with me, please. Perception is reality. We've got to reframe perception to become more resilient.
