Do I take criticism of Starbucks personally? Of course I do.

When it comes to Starbucks, I take every threat very personally.

You must find something that you deeply love and are passionate about and are willing to sacrifice a lot to achieve.

There's an energy and excitement when you're building a company. You have so much tail wind. You're planting new seeds. But it's also scary, because there's no safety net.

If you put on a lousy production with white actors, it's lousy. There is a problem, or can be, at this stage of our social evolution, with mixing the casts. It may not be a question of race so much as class. You would rarely find a black man in a high executive position where he was swinging his weight around.

When we began Starbucks, what I wanted to try to do was to create a set of values, guiding principles, and culture.

The issue of managing through a crisis is you have to be decisive even if you don't have perfect information.