I'm Heather Ruden. I'm the EVP of global field marketing here at Salesforce. And I am thrilled to be joined by my two new best friends. Brian Niccol, the CEO of Starbucks, and Scott O'Neal, the CEO of LIV Golf. And we are here today to talk about more than just leadership. But we're talking about how we think about purpose and trust and relevance with our customers, with our employees, with our players, with our partners, and how we just have a conversation about making those transformations real for all of those groups. But before we get into all this, I thought I would let my new friends introduce themselves. So Brian, let's hear from you. Tell us a little bit about your background and
Yeah, sure. Okay. Well, great to be here with everybody. Brian Niccol, chairman and CEO of Starbucks now. Before that I had the opportunity to run Chipotle. And before that I ran Taco Bell. And you know, there was a pattern there. And then, you know, I worked at Procter and Gamble for a while, a bunch of different consumer brands. You know, and look, I'm a big fan of coffee. So it was a real exciting opportunity when the Starbucks opportunity presented itself. I think it's one of the great global iconic American brands. And you know, it's one that Scott and I were talking about this. It's one of those brands that people are truly passionate about. Maybe comes close to sports, but not exactly. But yeah, it's great to be here with everybody.
Well, thank you. And yeah, I don't know. For some people, especially on the West Coast, that have grown up with Starbucks, it may be close to sports in their passion for it. Absolutely. But Scott, why don't you take a minute and tell us a little bit about your background?
Well, thrilled to be here. I feel like if LIV Golf were a conference, it would look a lot like Dreamforce. We're going to take that as a compliment. Yes, absolutely. I may have the best job in the world, I must admit. LIV is the Roman numerals LIV for 54, which is the perfect score for golf. And I believe Starbucks is 54 years old. Is that correct?
Nicely done. That is a nice synergy there. Yeah. And a little shout out to Heather, of course, and Ariel and Mark who have a transformational company. So, that opportunity for us to have them help us grow our business is quite a treat, and it's a pleasure to be here. I've spent 30 years in sports. LIV is a global sports league with some of the biggest stars in the game. Bryson DeChambeau, Phil Mickelson, Jon Rahm, Cam Smith, Dustin Johnson, hopefully household names for those of you who play golf or have been around the game. We take the game around the world and we add a little spice. There's music, there's fashion, there's art, and so we try to create a festival-like atmosphere. We have a petting zoo, so you'll see families and parents with strollers. Our audience is a lot younger, a lot more diverse than a traditional golf event. And it's about the most inspiring thing I've been a part of. I spent time at the NBA league office working for David Stern, a longtime mentor and friend of mine. Ran Madison Square Garden, the world's most famous arena, and the sports teams there, the Knicks and Rangers. And then built the Sixers and Devils into, you know, from a little tiny little business into quite a global juggernaut and now I sit here.
Nice. Now you were telling me that you are fairly new to golf.
Yes. And very humbling. I have awful stories about it. Yeah. He also suggested I should just go out and play a pro to learn. I'm sure that all of you that know how to play golf know that that sounds crazy, but we'll save that for another time. Go. Let me Can I just say about golf? It's like golf the values you learn from golf matter, okay? And I'm literally 10 months into golf. I had when I took this job, my clubs were 20 years old. I played about once a year and then I was about to play with some of the greatest players in the world. So, I found humility, which is one of the great values you get from especially as a leader. Resilience is another thing. If especially if you play with me, you're in the woods, you're in the trap, you're in the water, you find resilience, integrity, it's the only self-scoring sport in the world. And this sense of community which I think those are the four values I think the world needs more of. And so we do lead with purpose for sure.
Yeah. Brian, do you have a favorite golf course?
You know, look, one of the I think one of the special places Cypress Point up in Northern California, right here in our backyard. Yeah, it's you know, if you get the opportunity to take that walk, it's a I think it's a special walk.
It's beautiful out there. So, you're about a year into your back to Starbucks plan to really restore the brand's roots and come back to those I think you call them your employees, your partners. Yeah. And your customers, but this is a pretty large transformation and a global brand. So, how are you approaching that and how are you how how's your perspective evolved even in this last year?
Yeah, I mean look, my experience has been especially when you're focused on an iconic consumer brand. You got to start with understanding what's happening for your customer or the consumer. And in our case, where that interaction happens is in the coffee house and with our partners or our baristas. So, you know, initially where I started was what's happening for the partner, you know, how is their job coming together so that they can give our customer the experience that they expect from Starbucks. And that's really what the whole back to Starbucks strategy is all about is setting partners up to give customers the experience that they want. And you know, we've gotten too focused, I think, on efficiency and tasks and not enough focus on customer and experience and craft. And so, you know, that's really been the thing that we've been focused on. And when you travel around the world, you would hear the same themes over and over again. It didn't matter whether I was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, London, to New York City. You would hear the same things coming back over and over again, which is how do we get back to being a great customer connection, a place where people can have a moment, a place where people can connect with friends, you know, the third place that Starbucks created and we had veered away from it. You know, we had removed chairs, we had made the restaurants hard. And so, you know, it's all about bringing it back to being a place where you want to spend time, where you want to connect with friends and family, where you want to connect with your barista. There's a lot of great like if you search people's connections with baristas, you'd be amazed how powerful that connection is. And so we need to bring that back into our business and back into our experience.
I would imagine some of them they see them every morning. They're the first person they see when they leave the house. They know their names.
They do. Well, and what's amazing is not only do they know their names, but they know what's happening in their lives. And so, you know, and it doesn't matter whether it's a 14-year-old to an 80-year-old. These connections happen over and over again. And I think we need to set this place up so that they can happen every single time.
Yeah. And Scott, you're with a little bit more of a newer brand, you know, really defining kind of a new category or maybe a new approach to a fairly traditional or longstanding tradition of golf. So, how are you building that brand while kind of considering tradition and consistency and the fan base is still forming or the opportunities are still forming? How do you think about that?
Yeah. Well, having spent so much time in sports, I can tell you that baseball, for example, has a runner on second for extra innings and a pitch clock. You'd have thought that unthinkable 20 years ago. In hockey, we took away the rule against a two-line pass and made overtime three-on-three. Crazy. In basketball, we used to be able to hand check, literally put your hand on the player so they couldn't move. Instead, we loosened up the rules and brought the beauty back into the game. And I think if those three sports can do it, it's time for golf. And so, one thing is I think we have a bit of the moral high ground, like it's time to evolve this sport. It's been like a country club elite sport and we want to bring it to the masses. And to do that, we know we need to change. And the other interesting fact is the best golf is 42 events inside the continental US and we're trying to take the game to the world where all the growth is quite frankly. And so but in terms of how we think about transformation or how we think about change that's more of a leadership question and I think it's quite a challenge. It's something Brian and I were talking about in the back. And for me, people will hear me talk about transparency. They hear me talk about pace and talk about accountability. And that's internally. So, there's a lot of messages internally to our players. I talk a lot about like the special opportunity they have to connect. I often times ask them when did you fall in love with the sport? When's the first time you met a pro golfer? What's the interaction that made you just go? Yeah. And because I want to create some of those. We have Bryson DeChambeau, one of the great stars in all of sports here with us this week and he's got gifts beyond what you can imagine. This is a guy that wasn't liked very much six, seven years ago and now he's this beloved figure because he engages at a different level and on the level of others. And so it's really beautiful to see him mid round, okay, mid round Sunday. There's a lot of money on the line. There's a lot of pressure on the line and he will go over to a kid and give him a hug and take a selfie and it's like nothing I've ever seen before in sports. And I want 54 guys doing that because we have the chance to drive impact. Yep. And with our board, that's always the hardest thing when you're dealing with your sponsor or board. I don't have the gift of being a chairman and CEO. So, I have a chairman and a board and with a company that I walked into, an early stage company, the board was very active and engaged. And so, trying to establish what those rules are, like what do you do and what do I do and how do we get that set? And then with our fans, which is probably the most fun, it's what gives me the most joy is what can we learn from our fans? I don't have 54 years of customer data. I have 54 minutes of customer data. And so we have to learn and engage at such a high level and start to react and respond. And so that's where we went from music. So you can come to one of our events if you haven't been and Imagine Dragons would play on a Friday night after the round. So can you imagine going to a golf event and then Imagine Dragons plays or Riley Green or the Backstreet Boys. It's almost like surreal. And so how do we take art and how do we take food and how do we take fashion and start to create this environment where everybody's welcomed?
Yeah, I love that. But it can't be easy to get it all right, especially in the first year. So, Brian, what did you get wrong in this first year?
Well, you know, look, I think it's kind of what Scott was saying. One of the things that I think is really important for these businesses is you have to be in culture and you also have to be leading culture. And you know, obviously the world has changed dramatically on how people experience culture. It used to come through music, sport, maybe movies. Now, you know, you're dealing with technology. You still have the music, the sport, the fashion, but technology and social media have really changed just how quickly trends take and how stories either go in one direction or another. And I think you know initially we had taken the tact of like hey we just got to get this business turned around and then we'll start talking about what's going on. And the reality is we needed to get into the conversation from day one and so people understood transparently what are we trying to do with Starbucks because in the US we had veered away from a lot of things that made Starbucks Starbucks right. And so we needed to have the conversation so that people understood like what are we getting back to doing and I think it's important to do it in a way that's culturally relevant. Yeah. And you know, so I would say, you know, early on we needed to figure out how to tell our story again and do it in the right channels and in a culturally relevant way. And I think, you know, luckily, we're now getting back to being on our front foot as it talks in talking about our business.
Yeah. Did somebody tell you that or did like do you have a trusted group of leaders that brought that to you or was that something that you observed just kind of being out there?
Well, it was it's twofold. One, you know, we've I've changed over our leadership team quite a bit. Yeah. And you know I think it's always you got to get the right people around the table with you and you know these people are transparently saying this is what I think we're doing well. This is what we're not doing well. We need to change this. We need to do more of that. And you know in this case Tressie Lieberman who is our head of brand and marketing. You know she was right on the front end of like we got to get back into the social conversation and doing it in a way that's culturally rich. And you know I think we've gotten a little tired you know and it's not all that dissimilar to what he's describing right in sports. Look I stopped going to baseball games because the games took too long and I love baseball. I grew up playing baseball but it was like to bring my 16-year-old son. There was no way he was hanging in for three and a half four hours. They put in that pitch clock and all of a sudden you're going to a game, you're out there in two and a half hours and the game's moving and it just became much more culturally relevant. And you know I personally like the changes that they've made. In all these businesses that's what you have to take a look at is like do you have the right people working with you that are going to make the organization stronger, make the culture stronger. You know we've added some very simple principles at Starbucks. We want everybody to act like an owner. Yep. We want everybody to keep it simple. We want everybody to take accountability. And then we need to do it in a way where we win together. Yeah. And so it's a shared agenda. You know, I think sometimes collaboration gets confused to mean consensus. We're not looking for consensus. We're looking for collaboration and the best thinking with the best decision that then gets executed and people own the decision.
Absolutely. The accountability that comes the accountability is big and you know some people view that as like well that's threatening I would say it's an opportunity because now you get to act like an owner in your piece of the business and that's where you see the biggest changes happen. Yeah the accountability in there it's a responsibility and the accountability there those go hand in hand but it's also an opportunity to see who can step up as a leader and see where that next group of leaders comes from.
