straightlinelogic | Offices and 8,000 stores were closed for an afternoon so that
employees could discuss how to make Starbucks a more welcoming place.
Judging by its success, Starbucks has already made millions of customers
of all races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual persuasions feel
welcome. You have to wonder what the employees responsible for doing so,
probably 99 percent of Starbucks’ workforce, feel about this pointless
waste of time, which could have been, in a company-wide email, condensed
down to: Treat everyone who walks into Starbucks like you’d like to be treated.
Why did Schultz make a mountain out of this molehill? Nobody has
questioned his or his company’s commitment to treating everyone walking
into a Starbucks equally. This was simply an instance when employees may
have failed to live up to the commitment. Schultz is a member in good
standing of the establishment, and professes to believe all the things
members are supposed to believe in. Why couldn’t he have handled the
matter in the same way Robert Iger, CEO and Chairman of the Walt Disney
Company, and another member in good standing, handled the Roseanne Barr
matter?
He could have. That he didn’t speaks to an insidious issue and its
even more insidious corollary. There is less and less in the realm of
private behavior, action, and thoughts that remains private, that is not
subject to public scrutiny and demands, demands which are implicitly or
explicitly backed by recourse to the government. For the government
itself, on the other hand, more and more of what it does is shielded
from publicity and disclosure.
For CEOs of large companies, virtually everything they and their
companies do is fair game for public comment, media attention, lawsuits,
and regulatory, legislative, and judicial redress. Schultz probably
thought his over-the-top public atonement would preempt the kind of
media—including social media—and government crucification that’s meted
out to the defiant and the insufficiently contrite.
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