We can't wait for Washington. Business leaders are going to have to galvanize their own constituencies and do everything they can to demonstrate confidence in the economy, and I think that can be contagious.

I think if you're an entrepreneur, you've got to dream big - and then dream bigger.

China traditionally has been a tea-drinking country but we turned them into coffee drinkers.

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.

One of the fundamental aspects of leadership, I realized more and more, is the ability to instill confidence in others when you yourself are feeling insecure

If you look at coffee, tea, food and juice, we think there are inherent opportunities. If you look at health bars or grab-and-go products that are in our stores, we think we can significantly enhance them and make them more widely available.

When I first discovered in the early 1980s the Italian espresso bars in my trip to Italy, the vision was to re-create that for America - a third place that had not existed before. Starbucks re-created that in America in our own image; a place to go other than home or work. We also created an industry that did not exist: specialty coffee.