Coffee at the Center

Starbucks was navigating a meaningful period of business and leadership transition. As the company looked to reconnect with its roots, leaders were being asked to put coffee back at the center of the brand, culture, and business.

The question was being raised at the CEO level, but the path forward was not yet fully clear.

Across a large, complex enterprise, a phrase like “coffee-first” can mean different things to different leaders. Before it could shape decisions, culture, or strategy, it needed to become shared, specific, and actionable.

The challenge was not simply to talk about coffee. It was to help senior leaders create a shared understanding of what coffee-first leadership meant, and why it mattered.

The work sat at the intersection of brand, culture, strategy, and leadership alignment. It required care, clarity, and trust.

Key tensions included:

• As the company expanded across channels, formats, and priorities, coffee needed to be re-centered as a shared decision-making anchor.
• Leaders were using the idea of coffee-first in different ways.
• The organization needed more than messaging. It needed shared conviction that could travel.

Andrew was brought in by C-suite and senior leaders across brand and coffee to help translate an open-ended leadership ambition into a structured, high-stakes engagement, working in close partnership with the Discover + Design team and cross-functional collaborators.

The brief was not fully pre-defined. The work required shaping the engagement itself: clarifying the purpose, aligning senior stakeholders, designing the leadership experience, and creating the conditions for honest reflection, shared meaning, and visible commitment.

The role was to help turn a directional ambition into a designed experience that could move leaders from language to belief, and from belief to action.

We designed the engagement as a leadership experience, not a traditional workshop.

That distinction mattered. A workshop often extracts input. This experience needed to create conviction.

The work was built around a few essential moves:

• Reconnect leaders to the meaning of coffee. The experience reintroduced coffee not simply as a product category, but as the emotional, cultural, and strategic center of the Starbucks brand.
• Create space for individual reflection. Leaders were invited to examine their own relationship to the brand, the role coffee played in their leadership, and where the organization had drifted from its core.
• Surface and resolve competing interpretations. Through structured dialogue, the group moved from varied interpretations of coffee-first toward a more unified leadership position.
• Turn alignment into something durable. The work produced Coffee at the Center, a leadership artifact that captured the shared definition, and a scalable leadership experience that could travel beyond the original room.
• Scale the experience with integrity. What began with a senior executive group was adapted across additional leadership tiers, preserving the core intent while making the experience relevant to broader audiences.

The work helped turn a broad leadership aspiration into a shared organizational anchor.

Senior leaders left with a clearer, more unified understanding of what coffee-first leadership meant. The organization gained a durable reference point that could support future leadership conversations, planning, and cultural alignment.

What began as a CEO-level strategic question became a structured leadership experience that helped 1,500+ leaders reconnect to the core identity of the brand.