Parsing Starbucks

Jack Flack (congratulations, btw) today decodes the jargon-filled press release which accompanied the news that Howard Schultz was returning as CEO of Starbucks.

The release certainly needs decoding. The headline, ferchrissakes, is "Starbucks Announces Strategic Initiatives to Increase Shareholder Value": something which, pace Paul Kedrosky, has no meaning whatsoever.

My favorite part of the release is where Schultz feels compelled to translate his own jargon into English, before, in seeming exhaustion from such an effort, retreating to pablum about global achievement:

"I am enthusiastic about returning to the role of chief executive officer for the long term and excited to lead Starbucks and its dedicated partners (employees) to even greater heights of achievement on a global basis," Schultz said.

I do thank Jack for his translation, but I'd also like to stop for a second and ask why the press release was written in gobbledegook rather than English. Given that the number of people impressed by talk of "reallocating resources to key value drivers" is precisely zero, why would anybody do that?

The first possibility is that Howard Schultz is a zombie, whose heart has been ripped out and replaced with that of a management consultant. (Think Jerry Yang.) But I don't buy it: Schultz was capable of communicating in English less than a year ago.

The second possibility, which is more likely, is that Starbucks didn't actually want to say anything at all - certainly nothing which could be used against them in the present or future. In that case, Jack's translation - or any translation - misses the point, which is that Schultz actually has much less of an idea what he plans to do than Jack and the press release would have you believe.

As for me, I'd ask of Schultz just one thing: that every Starbucks coffee shop, with bathrooms and tables and chairs and all that, should be willing and able to serve its coffee in china, rather than only in paper cups. The best way to undercut a brand which claims to take coffee seriously is to serve that coffee only in paper.

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