Ex-Starbucks President Behar Backs Creation of New Business Alliance
By Seattle Business Magazine June 14, 2010
Howard Behar, former president of Starbucks Corp., is putting his weight behind the creation of a new business association whose goal, he said, is to “get things done.”
Behar’s involvement adds credibility to the fledgling Washington Business Alliance, an organization with the ambitious aim of mobilizing the state’s business community behind common, long-term goals in areas like health care, education and private sector growth. The organization, chaired by David Giuliani, CEO of Pacific Biosciences Laboratory, the inventor of the Sonics toothbrush and Clarisonic, an ultrasonic skin cleaner, is currently looking for an executive director.
Speaking at an organizational meeting held Monday at the Seattle offices of NBBJ, the architecture firm, Giuliani said the goal of the organization is not to displace established organizations such as the Association of Washington Businesses, but rather to play a complementary role to the many other business organizations that currently exist. The organization plans to take an entrepreneurial approach to identifying and solving problems that current institutions have been incapable of addressing. “We want to create a world where there is greater participation by businesses.”
The key, says Giuliani, is to find levers that can result in significant reforms. A good example, says Giuliani, is Obama’s Race to the Top program which, by offering access to federal money, triggered significant changes in the dynamic among educational institutions previously resistant to such ideas as merit-based pay for teachers.
When he was growing up in Seattle, says Behar, his father, a Bulgarian immigrant, ran a neighborhood grocer. if an occasional customer was in trouble, he would offer credit, or give away food. “It wasn’t about being liberal or conservative. It was about people helping people.” Today, he says, many newly-minted MBAs think that business is only about maximizing profit. “They don’t understand that businesses operate in communities.”
By the same token, Behar says, many community activists don’t understand the critical role that businesses play in supporting a community and making available the money that supports the many causes they support.
What Washington needs, says Behar, is a common language to talk about the common issues businesses and their communities face. “The ranchers in eastern Washington are interested in the same quality education for their children as the software engineers in Redmond. But we haven’t figured out how to cross those borders. We haven’t learned to get things done.”
Travelling to China, Behar says, he has seen progress that would have been unimaginable a couple decades ago. “We need to do what China does in the context of our own system. We need to learn to get things done. Our population is looking for solutions, and it’s not coming from Republicans or Democrats.”