“Success is empty if you arrive at the finish line alone.”

To be an enduring, great company, you have to build a mechanism for preventing or solving problems that will long outlast any one individual leader.

We woke up one day, and all the sudden Starbucks was in the middle of this political crossfire between the people who want to bring a gun into Starbucks and the people who want to prevent it. It is a very difficult, fragile situation.

Cutting prices or putting things on sale is not sustainable business strategy.

A great business has to have a conscience. You have to know who you are and who you are not.

At an early age, my mother gave me this feeling that anything is possible, and I believe that.

People want guidance, not rhetoric. They need to know what the plan of action is, and how it will be implemented. They want to be given responsibility to help solve the problem and authority to act on it.

Sometimes you have to create the thing you want to be part of.

But when you really believe-in yourself, in your dream-you just have to do everything you possibly can to take control and make your vision a reality. No great achievement happens by luck.

My parents really wanted me to get out of New York, be exposed to other people, other ways of life.

Europe has always represented a major strategic opportunity to achieve our goal of creating and building an enduring global brand.

We have no patent on anything we do and anything we do can be copied by anyone else. But you can’t copy the heart and the soul and the conscience of the company.

In life, you can blame a lot of people and you can wallow in self-pity or you can pick yourself up and say listen, I have to be responsible for myself.

The hardest thing about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability. And that has a lot to do with trust.

When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.

This may sound a bit naive, but I got here by believing in big dreams.

Always challenge the old ways.