When Starbucks Confuses Theater for Leadership

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Starbucks is retraining its baristas. The new directive? Pause for a second, make eye contact, and follow the acronym LATTE—Listen, Apologize, Take action, Thank, Ensure satisfaction.

On paper, it reads like a return to roots. Human warmth at scale. An elegant mnemonic for a company built on connection.

But behind the script is a harder truth: Starbucks has posted six straight quarters of same-store sales decline.

And no amount of eye contact will turn that slope around.

The Comfort of Theater

Here’s the pattern. When performance slips, leaders retreat into what feels safest: culture. They call for renewed engagement. They launch slogans. They script behaviors.

It’s comforting because it doesn’t demand redesign. It feels personal, immediate, and actionable.

But it’s theater. And theater doesn’t stop decline.

The irony is that culture is most powerful once systems are locked. Politeness matters when throughput is already reliable. Smiles amplify execution; they don’t replace it.

When companies reverse the order—when they try to solve system drift with sentiment—they confuse gesture for strategy. And that’s the trap Starbucks has fallen into.

The Competitor Reality

Critics point out that Dutch Bros and Luckin Coffee are small compared to Starbucks. And they’re right—in absolute terms, these brands don’t yet rival Starbucks’ global footprint.

But that misses the point. Big companies don’t collapse because their competitors start big. They collapse because their own thinking makes them small.

Business history is littered with “invincibles” that underestimated faster, leaner rivals:

• Blockbuster laughed at Netflix.

• Nokia dismissed Apple.

• Sears once outsold Walmart.

The giants didn’t lose because David was bigger. They lost because Goliath stopped adapting.

Dutch Bros and Luckin aren’t winning with friendliness. They’re winning with system design: drive-thru throughput, app-enabled speed, and ruthless cost discipline. Starbucks is fighting a systems war with a soft-skills manual.

And that’s how Goliaths become cautionary tales.

The Drift Trap

What we’re watching at Starbucks has a name: drift.

Drift happens when leaders mistake sentiment for structure. When the enterprise stops enforcing execution and starts substituting culture.

Instead of addressing wait times, Starbucks is asking baristas to smile longer. Instead of re-engineering workflows, it’s issuing mnemonics.

LATTE is not an operating model. It’s a patch. And like all patches, it shifts accountability downward: if sales are falling, it must be because the barista didn’t pause long enough, or the apology wasn’t warm enough.

It’s the same soft logic that has weakened HR for decades—frontline staff carrying the burden of systemic failures, while executives confuse slogans with fixes.

The Real Lesson for CEOs

The Starbucks story isn’t about coffee. It’s about how large companies lose their advantage.

The lesson for CEOs is simple but brutal:

• If you confuse culture with execution, drift will spread.

• If you substitute scripts for systems, decline will compound.

• If you believe size protects you, you’re already vulnerable.

Decline rarely announces itself as collapse. It shows up as substitution:

• Smiles instead of speed.

• Scripts instead of standards.

• Culture instead of enforcement.

Once that substitution hardens, decline becomes inevitable.

Why This Matters Beyond Coffee

Starbucks is bolting politeness onto a failing operating model. Dutch Bros and Luckin are proving that system design, not sentiment, is what scales.

Yes, Starbucks is still massive compared to its rivals. But history doesn’t remember size—it remembers trajectory.

The dangerous myth of corporate invincibility is that being big makes you safe. In reality, the larger the system, the more catastrophic the drift when enforcement is lost.

That’s why “David vs. Goliath” stories repeat across industries. Goliath isn’t slain because David is bigger. Goliath falls because he mistakes strength for permanence.

The CEO Question

For every CEO, the Starbucks case is a mirror:

Are you building an enterprise that depends on sentiment—or one where the system makes execution non-negotiable?

Because culture doesn’t protect margins. Politeness doesn’t stop decline. And scripts don’t scale.

Six quarters down can easily become ten.

And if Starbucks can drift this way, any enterprise can.

The New Mandate

The consultants of old will tell you to reignite culture. We tell you to enforce systems. To make execution permanent through design, not inspiration.

That’s not soft skills. That’s infrastructure control.

It’s what separates companies that drift into decline from those that endure.

The Starbucks story isn’t a coffee story. It’s a CEO story.
And it’s the warning shot that execution—not sentiment—is the only strategy that scales.

Next Step for CEOs

This isn’t about coffee—it’s about your enterprise.

We’re scheduling private Executive Briefings with CEOs who want to hardwire execution before drift takes hold. In one conversation, we’ll map where your systems are strong, where they’re vulnerable, and how to enforce execution so performance can’t slip.

Schedule Your Executive Briefing

Because decline doesn’t start with collapse. It starts with substitution. And the only protection is enforcement by design.