From the Ground Up

Howard Schultz is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Starbucks Coffee Company. He grew up in Brooklyn public housing and was the first in his family to graduate college. After founding a small cafe business, he bought Starbucks, which grew from eleven stores to more than 28,000 under his leadership. In 2018, Starbucks ranked fifth on Fortune's list of "World's Most Admired Companies." Howard and his wife, Sheri, co-lead the Schultz Family Foundation. His other books include Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time; Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul; and For Love of Country: What Our Veterans Can Teach Us About Citizenship, Heroism, and Sacrifice. Howard has been recognized for his passion to strengthen communities, and is the recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Ripple of Hope Award, the Horatio Alger Award, and the Notre Dame University Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Business Ethics. He and Sheri live in Seattle and have two children.

The stairwell was where I went to escape. Most people in the apartment building used the elevator, unless it broke down. Even when it did, no one walked up the steps that led to the roof. So that's where I sat. On some days Billy, my best friend, joined me. But mostly I sat alone when things got too chaotic at home. My bedroom, which overlooked a parking lot, wasn't an option-I shared it with my younger sister and brother-and our apartment was so small and my parents' voices so loud that even under my bedsheets I couldn't escape. But sitting on those steps, I felt safe. That place was my refuge. An urban nest. The stairwell wasn't quiet. I could still hear people arguing, or heavy doors slamming shut, or the thunder of other kids pounding up or down the steps on lower floors. Noise bounced off the hollow hallways' concrete walls and echoed in my ears. But in that stairwell I found some peace. And while sometimes I cried, I mostly thought about playing basketball, or the Yankees-and the possibility of my becoming a switch hitter like Mickey Mantle. As I got older I sat on those steps and fantasized about leaving home, trying to picture life beyond the borders of childhood. Images were hard to summon but I knew what I wanted to feel. I wanted to shed the anxiety that could ripple through me when I turned the doorknob to apartment 7G. I was three years old when we moved into the cramped two-bedroom apartment in the Bayview housing projects in Canarsie, located on a swath of former swampland on the southeastern edge of Brooklyn. In 1956, my family was one of more than one thousand low-income households that qualified to live in the freshly baked brick buildings constructed by the New York City Housing Authority. It was a new alternative to the decaying city slums. Projects like Bayview were not designed to be dead ends, but to jump-start lives. I wasn't so sure what that meant for me. Over the years, my mom tried to instill in me the notion that there was something better beyond Canarsie and within my reach, but it was hard to see. What I did see, every day, was my dad, who spent so much time lying on our couch that my mother nicknamed him Mr. Horizontal. The scent of his malaise and frustration-with himself, with us, with bosses I never met, with a system I didn't understand-seeped into the fabric of our family's life. In the stairwell, I created a little distance between me and the suffocating air of home. Sitting on the cold, hard steps shrouded in dim light, I felt some peace. But I struggled to see past the concrete walls around me. Canarsie, Brooklyn, was, and still is, the last stop on the L train from New York City. As I sat in the stairwell, the idea of what might lie beyond my small world began to take shape in my imagination. -- Throughout my life I have been haunted, and fueled, by childhood memories. From my father, I saw what can happen to a life when a person's dignity is stripped away. From my mother, I was imprinted with the belief that the last stop on the train was not going to be the last stop in my life-that I could work and learn and plan and dream my way out of the place I was born into. The juxtaposing forces of a father who had less than he wanted and a mother who wanted more for her son spurred me, eventually, to imagine a different future for myself. To see my world not as it was, but as it could be. This became a lifetime habit. And in some ways, that's the story I've tried to tell in this book: how we can all reimagine a better future by learning from the past with as much clarity and wisdom as we can muster, and by summoning the will and doing the work to bring that future into being. This has been my life's journey. The stairwell was the first place where my imagination took flight, but not the last. When I began my own business in the mid-1980s, I was inspired by old, even ancient, influences: coffee,