I feel that because I challenge myself so often, sometimes I will fail. This is, to me, the essence of competition — that there will be both winners and losers. But I have great faith in myself that I will turn this loss into something positive.

But in 2007, the music stopped. We had lost sight of our shared purpose and our guiding principles, in which growth and success began to cover up mistakes and a disease set into Starbucks. That disease, hubris. We lost our way and believe it or not, we almost lost the entire company.

I never thought that we would fail or that I would fail. I knew from time to time we may make some blunders. We may make some mistakes, but we were not going to fail.

We have failed seven times up at bat, and we strike out, and I think, "How can I learn from that failure? What went wrong? What could I have done differently?" You have to take it apart to understand your failures. Failures teach you much more than your successes. Sometimes it is better just to pause on a setback, on a failure, on a screw-up, and say, "What did I learn from this?" You learn how to do it better and you recommit yourself.

There were lots of times, especially in the early days, that were very, very difficult. I think the most difficult experience I had was in 1990 when Oracle had its only loss quarter in history. We’d been in business for 20 years, and after 20 years we lost money one quarter. We had a very difficult time. We had virtually doubled our sales every year for ten years. Nine out of ten years, ten out of eleven years. It was really quite an amazing run. We were the fastest growing company in history