In this interview, Speaker A (a co‑founder) explains the core philosophy that Starbucks is a "people business serving coffee," rooted in the founders' modest, non‑wealthy backgrounds. He describes how Howard Schultz, Oren Smith, and himself grew up in poverty or immigrant families, which shaped a commitment to treat every employee with respect and dignity. The company instituted equitable benefits early on—universal health insurance and stock options for all staff, from baristas to executives—rejecting typical corporate perks. Their guiding principle of respect was intentionally left undefined to encourage listening and personal interpretation. Speaker A emphasizes his role as a servant leader, focusing on helping employees grow as human beings first, believing that personal growth fuels organizational success. Speaker B reflects on the contrast between merely extracting work and fostering human potential, reinforcing the servant‑leadership ethos.
Chapters
I coined this phrase that we're not in the coffee business serving people, we're in the people business serving coffee. And that phrase has lasted throughout all the years, which is amazing, because that was a driving force. And our values were a driving force. We came from different things, but basically all three of us came from not super wealthy backgrounds. Matter of fact, not at all. And Howard came from a very poor family, lived in the housing projects in Canarsie. Outside of Brooklyn. Oren Smith was— came, 5 brothers and sisters, father had left the family, and her mother had to raise the kids without hardly any money living in a farming community in southwestern Washington. And me, I came from parents that were immigrants and who were Depression-era people, you know, survived through the Depression. And so we all 3 came from that place, and Howard Oren and I said, that we were gonna all, everybody had to be in this thing together. We had to be able to walk down the hallway and look at everybody in the face and everybody know that we weren't some greedy SOB business people that were trying to take advantage. We didn't have any company boats, any company cars, any company health club memberships, any accounting fee, anything for officers. Everybody got health insurance long before it was popular, certainly in the quick service industry. And so everybody from a barista all the way up, and we had the same health insurance. Wasn't like somebody had better health insurance than the other. Everybody got stock options based on their, what they earned each year. And so it was, you know, we just wanted people to have equity and we wanted there to be equity in the company. And that's how we drove it. And our first Guiding principles, we treat each other with respect and dignity. It purposely was left undefined because everybody would define that differently. And so we had to listen to each other to understand where they were. And, but yeah, emotional, strong values orientation, very strong people orientation. You know, my— I felt my job was to help people grow as human beings and If they grew as human beings, then they would grow as people that worked in the company.
And I find that that's a very contradictory belief to just getting people to do their job, do their work, get product out of them, but not build them up as human beings to get their potential out of them.
Yeah, no, you build them up as human beings, make them better human beings first. And, you know, that's what servant leadership is about. Is primarily this: that our role as a leader is to help people accomplish what they want to accomplish in their lives, their goals, and in so doing, they'll help us accomplish what we want to accomplish in our organizations. And if you don't go there first, right, you end up on the opposite side
