We Had To Own The Mistakes Summary

In terms of managing change and crisis, Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz navigates challenging situations with grace and ease. He even states that those he turned to in times of need and questioning seemed to only want his input rather than share their own strategies. Based on the way he is portrayed in the Harvard Business Review article, Starbucks Crisis: “We Had to Own the Mistakes” by Adi Ignatius, regardless of whether Schultz did so deliberately, he demonstrated very textbook change/crisis management strategies and he did them well. He started by taking personal ownership of the hardship and removing culpability from other top executives. He used inclusive language like, I, we, us, and our. Characteristically, this strategy allows other executives and employees to come forward with their mistakes and opinions enlightening the issues that lead to the crisis at hand. Schultz furthermore, while taking the blame, continued to create a burning platform by explaining to different levels of management and employees within Starbucks what exactly the issues were and why the company needed to make the changes he intended to make in order to not only survive as a company, but to succeed. An example of this is when he took the 10,000 managers to New Orleans for a leadership conference. He is quoted saying, “The conference was about… being vulnerable and transparent with our employees about how desperate

In the article he spoke about the flack the organization was getting for being a product of luxury and unreasonably overpriced, even becoming the posterchild for excess with McDonald’s advertising campaign painting their prices as ridiculous. Schultz did nothing on this matter, but say that it happened and in any other case, brand perception, especially one of excess, in times of economic distress would have been of the utmost priority for a CEO attempting to ‘save an organization from