Free Onward by Howard Schultz, Joanne Lesley Gordon Page A

the trepidation that came with reassuming responsibility for day-to-day operations. We rode to Michael's house, where he walked me through the chronology of what he had done at Dell one year earlier and graciously shared the very documents that had aided his own transition.
     
    One tool stood out as particularly applicable to Starbucks. Michael called it the Transformation Agenda. Neither of these words was part of my or Starbucks’ vernacular at the time. But they resonated with me. “Transformation” spoke to the scale of change that Starbucks had to undertake, but with a positive connotation. The word “Agenda” provided an actionable framework. This was key. I was intent on demonstrating, right out of the gate, a sense of immediacy and precision in decision making.
     
    Yet just as the future of Starbucks was beginning to crystallize in my mind, its present circumstances were causing me great angst.
     
    Every morning in Hawaii, I checked the company's daily sales reports.
     
    It was extremely difficult for me to fathom what I was seeing. Starbucks was reporting negative daily comps—meaning our sales were down compared to the same day a year earlier—in the
double digits
. Our comparable store sales had been negative before, but never had I seen performance this poor, and so consistently. Sales were in free fall! Every day, around the country, fewer and fewer people were coming into our stores. And those who did were spending less money than in the past. Starbucks was hardly alone. That holiday season in the United States, consumer spending reached its weakest level in four years. Still, I felt helpless. I was on the phone with our people in Seattle asking for comps from every region of the country. The numbers were so bad I felt paralyzed. I simply did not know what to do with myself. I couldn't eat breakfast. I couldn't enjoy my family. I could barely move. It was as if everything I feared was coming true.
     
    As December 2007—and our first fiscal quarter of 2008—came to a close, I knew that Starbucks would not make its projected earnings. I was not only coming back as ceo, but also coming back to hold the mantle after the company's worst three-month performance in its history as a public company.
     

     
    Immediately after the New Year, I returned to Seattle and reconvened with Jim Fingeroth and the few other people who knew of my return as ceo.
     
    There was a disciplined, almost chesslike approach to the work we did in the days leading up to the public announcement on Monday, January 7, 2008. As the cold winter rains and gray skies engulfed Seattle, we hunkered down around my dining room table, comfortably dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, and engaged in very serious discussions about what and when to communicate to a variety of audiences. These included Jim Donald; Starbucks’ most senior leaders; thousands of corporate and store partners; shareholders; the financial community; the business and consumer media; and customers who would likely come across the news online, in newspapers, or on television.
     
    Everything had to be done with an eye toward disclosure regulations and legal formalities, as well as authenticity and sensitivity to our partners. I also wanted to personally touch as many people as possible, in person or by phone. It would be a logistical whirlwind that required precise execution. First, following my private meeting with Jim Donald, the board would have to meet and officially ratify the change in Starbucks’ leadership. Before the announcement, Nasdaq, the exchange where Starbucks’ stock trades, had to be alerted. After the announcement went out, a conference call with financial analysts had to be scheduled. For the Securities and Exchange Commission, we needed to prepare and immediately file an 8-K form documenting financial details of Jim's departure.
     
    Although Starbucks’ annual report was about to go to the printer, we still had time to revise the letter to