Starbucks Identified as a Giving Company By Leadership Expert Will Marre

Dec. 20, 2010 - PRLog -- Starbucks’ mission “to inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one, and one neighborhood at a time” hasn’t gone unnoticed.  Will Marre, CEO of Realeadership Alliance and renowned leadership speaker is shining a light on Starbucks this week for their ongoing dedication to social responsibility and sustainability.

Starbucks’ spotlight is part of an ongoing blog series Marre is launching called Giving is Winning.  Marre hopes that by bringing attention to companies who are including giving in their core business strategy he can inspire other companies to follow these examples and inspire consumers to support companies who have the common good at heart.  The blog is in conjunction with his extensive research entitled 21 Companies for the 21st Century with Clemson University and the University of California San Diego on what successful companies are doing in today’s challenging environment that average companies are not.
Some of Starbucks achievements include buying seventy-seven percent—295 million pounds—of their coffee from responsibly grown and ethically traded sources.  By 2015, their goal is to buy 100 percent of their coffee this way.  Starbucks also participates in alternative loan programs that provide farmers with access to loans that the commercial or traditional lending sector is unable to serve.
Where Starbucks is especially winning from their social responsibility, contends Marre, is through their employee policies. Both full and part time “partners”, as Starbucks refers to their employees, receive paid vacation and sick leave, subsidized health benefits, stock options and a 401(k) plan.  

Marre states, “Starbucks asks, how much can we give and can we gain from our giving? In creating these virtuous cycles from coffee farmers to employees that are happy to work at Starbucks, here is a company that is trying to do as much as they can to serve their employees and the wider world.  Starbucks is a company that we can generally be proud of” (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKMET55dCls).  



For more information on Marre’s Giving is Winning blog, visit http://www.willmarre.com/blog.  You can also download a free series based on his research findings, “Apple to Zappos: What Today’s Successful Leaders Are Doing That the Rest of Us Aren’t,” at http://www.willmarre.com/wm/21-companies-leadership-resea....

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About Will Marre:

Will Marre is CEO of Realeadership Alliance and founder of Thought Rocket, a new online leadership development platform providing up-to-the-minute leadership research on what successful organizations are doing to thrive in the 21st century. Will Marre is also the cofounder of the Covey Leadership Center where he brought the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to millions of executives and managers worldwide. He also heads the advisory board of the Human Performance Institute (a Johnson & Johnson company) and is an Emmy award-winning writer of a public television learning documentary. For more information please visit http://www.willmare.com.