My interview for the job of CEO at Jamba, Inc., couldn’t have come at a more troubled time in the company’s history. It was November 2008, and the Great Recession had begun to hit hard—but even before the financial crisis blew up the US economy in September of that year, Jamba had started bleeding cash. Its net losses for the previous year had been $113 million, against revenue of $400 million. The weather was turning chilly in Emeryville, California, where the company was headquartered, and that served to remind me that in most of Jamba’s locations this was precisely the time of year when people would be least likely to stop at a smoothie stand for a cold, refreshing beverage.

I wasn’t the board’s first choice for the job, either. I arrived at 6:00 p.m., their last interview on the schedule. And after having spent much of the day interviewing a slate of candidates, they had already decided on a top choice.

I sat down with only one board member, Ramon Martin-Busutil, an operating partner from New River Capital, the firm that had led the IPO of Jamba Juice in 2006. This was apparently just a courtesy interview. But we talked for a while. I’d done my research and told him the plan I had for transforming the brand and the company. I told him that a cultural transformation was central to what I believed needed to happen—a cultural change consistent with the way I always led, seeking a staff with diverse lived experiences and a wide variety of perspectives. I told him that with more-diverse voices you can unlock more potential from the organization. After that, Martin-Busutil said he thought Steven Berrard, the chairman and interim CEO, should meet me, so he went up to Berrard’s office and brought him in. That evening I ended up talking with the two of them as well as with Tom Byrne—all partners in New River Capital. They asked me to come back and meet with other board members, including Brian Swette, the former CMO of eBay and PepsiCo, and Bob Kagle, from Benchmark Capital, who had been the company’s first large investor.

So in my follow-up interview, I faced a highly accomplished group of men (they were all white males), and I asked a question that, as I mentioned in chapter 1, I’ve heard more recently in a different context: “How could you guys have let this happen?”

I should point out that not so long before, Jamba had taken off from a simple concept to become one of the restaurant-chain industry’s hottest brands. It had appeared on Inc. magazine’s 2008 “Inc. 500” list of the five hundred fastest-growing private companies in the United States, based on Jamba’s growth between 2004 and 2007.

Kirk Perron, an avid cyclist who liked to drink fresh-squeezed juice to replenish himself after cycling, had founded the company as a single juice stand called Juice Club, in San Luis Obispo, California, in 1990, with the idea of selling juices to bicyclists and others with an interest in healthy living. Perron expanded modestly, opening two more stores in the next couple of years. It was Bob Kagle, at Benchmark, who first saw serious growth potential. Kagle was on his way to a meeting at a restaurant one day when he spotted a Juice Club and a long line to get in. There was still a long line when he left his meeting. He contacted Perron, and it took months to convince the entrepreneur that he could build the company into something big. But Kagle finally won him over.

With capital from Benchmark and others, followed by the 2006 acquisition by Services Acquisition Corp., a special-purpose acquisition company led by Steve Berrard, the company went public and grew quickly, with more than seven hundred stores around the United States by 2007. But by mid-2007 the stock had begun to decline, and a year later it was down below $1, losing about 95 percent of its value at its height.

While the most immediate problem appeared to be a revenue decline in the midst of the economic downturn, there were also flaws in the business concept. The company was experiencing rising costs from overbuilding and was now borrowing at steep interest rates to meet its expenses. Sales were down partly because of the recession, but I also saw that the menu wasn’t broad enough to sustain the restaurant chain year-round, especially with the expansion into the Midwest and the East Coast, where winters were long. Something else I observed was that there was a lack of clear direction. Board members and senior executives had plenty of big ideas, but there was no clear strategic plan. After one of my early analyst conferences, one analyst showed me the quarterly reports she’d been publishing for several years, and in each it was clear that Jamba’s strategy changed almost every quarter.

At the same time, what I was thinking that day in 2008, as I looked at these distinguished directors, was that this was still a company with a purpose and tremendous potential. The brand was substantially larger than the business, which meant the company was just scratching the surface of all it was capable of doing. What it needed, in my estimation, was someone to approach it with a serious plan, not just for rapid growth but for making Jamba Juice a brand that would connect to its health-conscious customers in a deeper way, so that it would be an indispensable part of their lives. My plan included making DEI an essential part of the company’s DNA. The board wanted to know how I would restore profitability and get the company on a sustainable growth trajectory that would boost the value for shareholders rather than create a culture of DEI, but my approach has always been that an intentionally inclusive organization is essential to solving problems and creating innovations in the real world.

I said that I’ve never been offered a job or a promotion based on my potential to rise to the occasion, but I had proven that I could build and run a much bigger consumer-products brand in the job I held at Safeway—the job I left to become CEO at Jamba. At Safeway I was running the $8 billion consumer-brands private-label portfolio, overseeing thirty factories across multiple brands and thirty-five different categories of products. I had upgraded Safeway’s private-label brands into premium-price categories and expanded the organic brands, including the largest organic brand in the industry, O Organics.

I saw Jamba Juice as a company that could get back to its true north, and be far more resilient this time around, as long as those at the top developed a culture of innovation while also keeping a close watch on what was working and what wasn’t. Which was why I asked that question: “How could you guys have let this happen?” I think the board decided to hire me partly because I made it clear I wouldn’t have let the company slide into the state it was in.

Then I said one other thing that I think clinched the deal in my favor. “If you give me ten people,” I told the board, “I’ll get more out of them than nine out of ten leaders anywhere else on the planet—because I’ll look to their strengths and capabilities and play to their passions.”

So they hired me, and I started within a few weeks, on December 1. Now I had to live up to my words and turn the company’s fortunes around. In a situation like this, you have to have a vision yet at the same time stay flexible. I started the job with a sketch of what I thought the turnaround plan should be and used the first sixty to ninety days to refine that. There was a critical plan to unlock the potential and strengths of the culture. I had a thesis about where the opportunities might be. I just didn’t know what exact form the plan would take.

I did, however, know where I wanted to take the corporate culture; you can’t stage a transformation without a CEO who knows what the endgame should be. And you can’t separate culture from a company’s financial fundamentals. Revenues, valuation, and all other numbers stem from the company’s values, expectations, and mission. All operations are built around the people in the company and the way they work together and align around the mission.

So my first task was to audit the corporate culture and see what changes I’d need to make. I wanted to hear from all of the key stakeholder groups. Their feedback was critical in shaping the turnaround strategy; I knew that board members, executives, staff, franchisees, suppliers, customers, and all other key stakeholders were in a position to tell me what was needed. At the same time, I knew that having a cacophony of opinions without true leadership would only make things worse. You need big ideas—you need to bring all the ideas to the table. But ultimately, it’s your job as the leader to make the final call, determining the direction you’ll take and then staying true to the plan.

On my first day I began holding meetings, including a town hall with about a hundred people at the support center in Emeryville, seeking feedback from everyone. In the meetings, we passed out cards and I asked everyone to complete three sentences:

• I hope James White will change: _______.
• Here are two things I love about the current culture: _______
• Here is one thing I’d like to preserve in the current culture: _______.

A number of people expressed a need for a greater sense of urgency, more focus on performance, and more attention to the voice of the customer when it came to product development. One almost unanimous response was that people wanted to keep the casual dress code. At Safeway, we’d all worn jackets and ties—so I adapted to a different culture, coming to work in jeans or other casual attire to match the fun and vibrant brand.

Then it was time to address culture, values, and diversity. To initiate meaningful, purposeful change, I knew I’d need the best talent out there. I’d need teams of professionals who, among them, had knowledge of the whole global range of potential consumers and how fresh-squeezed juice and smoothies and other healthy food choices could enhance their lives. I’d need people who had big ideas about innovation, but also people with expertise in spotting risks, analyzing customer preferences, and recognizing when something needed to be tweaked.

To start initiating change, I put together cross-functional action-learning teams (ALTs), striving for diversity not just in ethnic and gender balance but also across functional disciplines. This orientation is something I learned from Noel Tichy’s The Leadership Engine. Tichy led the GE Leadership Center at its fabled corporate university, Crotonville, in the 1980s, where he oversaw GE’s transformation to action learning. He has famously said that “winning organizations are teaching organizations.” My interpretation of the book led me to create action-learning teams to foster continuous teaching and learning. The people on the ground are the ones who best know what’s working well, and how to fix what’s not, and when I brought together people who’d been on the ground in different roles, they all learned from one another about such aspects of the business as customer habits, conflicts that needed to be resolved, new food and lifestyle trends, and what competitors were doing. Powerful things happen when you bring together diverse talents to learn from one another. And when you’re a leader, one of your most important roles is to develop other leaders who can make decisions and initiate the required changes in their area.

ALTs can make a big difference when it comes to innovation and problem-solving, but to actually make them a part of the cultural transformation, I purposely chose previously overlooked employees to be part of the teams. As a result, the teams were far more diverse than the company’s workforce as a whole. My colleague Joan Williams, a professor and the founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, called the ALTs “glamour work” in an article we coauthored for Harvard Business Review.¹ These are glamour assignments in the sense that they’re line roles that get attention, generate revenue, and prepare people for greater responsibilities within the company—and these are just the kind of assignments that in conventional corporate environments would most often go to young white males based on management’s view of their potential.

Typically, middle-level managers are the ones who decide who gets these high-profile assignments, and if most of the middle-level managers are white men, they will often pick the junior staffers they most relate to. It’s the informal systems of who gets invited to certain meetings, who gets invited to work on critical projects. Even if there is a chief diversity officer to encourage diversity hires, that person has little control over who gets these coveted assignments—unless the CDO is also the CEO or is working closely with the CEO in an organization in which C-level executives handpick people who can eventually become part of a diverse pipeline to senior management positions.

The underpinning of all of this is a CEO who sets the tone and requires that all senior managers and middle managers make DEI one of their business priorities—not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because more-diverse teams are going to transform the way the company solves problems and expands.

I think we’re far more aware of the need to overcome unconscious biases now than most corporate leaders were in 2008—but we’re just starting to see how wide a net you cast when you have a culture of DEI. When I became the CEO of Jamba Juice, I inherited a company that was founded by a gay man and was generally welcoming to the LGBTQIA+ community. However, it isn’t hard to find workplaces that have plenty of white women, as well as gay men and women, in leadership roles, but few people of color of any gender. Nor have many companies gone out of their way to open up to transgender and gender-nonconforming people.

Furthermore, representation without true inclusion is incomplete. What I’m saying is, DEI is a continuous experience in checking your unconscious biases, learning from people you might otherwise overlook, and intentionally bringing in people with a variety of cultural perspectives. When you take this approach, you get a wider, better range of ideas. True, it usually takes a while for the team to come together, but when it does, you get better problem-solving. The focus on culture is all about the team rather than individuals. There’s rarely one big, magic moment when someone says “Eureka!” and the skies part. What did happen at Jamba Juice, though, was that our diverse teams had big ideas for turning the company into a healthy-lifestyle brand that reached into new communities and venues.

When I became CEO, most Jamba shops were in strip and shopping malls and urban commercial centers—places that might be destinations for loyal customers. Our diverse ALTs came up with the idea that we should reach out to more consumers on their own turf. So we opened Jamba Juice stores on more college campuses, and we went into K–12 schools, including many in underserved neighborhoods, honing a role for the company as a solution provider in schools looking for healthier food and beverage options. We added steel-cut oatmeal and sandwiches to the menu, so that Jamba could be a breakfast and lunch destination. We added hot beverages to appeal to customers in colder climates at any time of year. We brought Jamba Juice concessions to school, community, and sporting events, a way of reinforcing our commitment to communities. The ALTs determined that there was a market for juice smoothies and healthy snacks in Asia, and among travelers in general, so we expanded globally and more than tripled our presence in airports.

Founder Kirk Perron himself joined our continuous-learning effort as a resource when Starbucks announced it was going to start serving juices and we needed to develop a strategy to meet this competition head-on. We were able to compete successfully because of brand strength; people associated Jamba Juice with overall healthy lifestyles. We had celebrity athletes like Venus Williams and Vernon Davis as franchise partners and spokespeople, and it helped that our founder was closely associated with an active lifestyle.

Sadly, Perron died in June 2020, an untimely death at the age of fifty-six, apparently of cardiac arrest. He was a true visionary. I can only say that he lived well and created a brand that just might be strong enough to outlive us all. (Now known as just Jamba, it was acquired by Focus Brands in 2018.)

Just as notable as the redesign of Jamba Juice’s business strategy was the purposeful culture that we created. Our action-learning-team members brought insights on social and environmental initiatives that they cared about, and we developed a few programs that helped make Jamba Juice more of a company that mattered in the lives of people. To name a few of the things we did, we were partners in the Obama administration’s “Let’s Move!” campaign, dedicated to solving the problem of childhood obesity by creating a healthier start for children, and we launched our own “Team Up for a Healthy America” initiative to encourage adults and children to adopt healthier diets, with Venus Williams—who owned several Jamba Juice stores herself—as a celebrity spokesperson. Through the Department of Labor’s Job Corps program, we sponsored vocational training at the Treasure Island Advanced Culinary Arts program in San Francisco.

With many of our stores on board to participate in reducing carbon emissions, we started a project to lower our electricity usage, and we introduced food containers, utensils, and napkins all made from recyclable materials.

These projects served an additional purpose: they made Jamba an exciting, cool place to work, and helped create bonds within a diverse pool of employees. In the traditional corporate world, you have executives who know one another well, through family connections and old school ties, from playing golf together and belonging to the same clubs and churches. Needless to say, in a diverse leadership team, people don’t get hired or promoted through these types of social connections. Socializing with colleagues outside of work has never been a big component of how I work, but I’ve found more-constructive ways to have people come together in community. At Jamba we brought our associates together for company outreach work—for example, coastal cleanups, planting gardens at schools, and spending time with young people through Junior Achievement. We sponsored half-marathons—I ran in several, even though I hadn’t run in a marathon before—and that was a chance for our staff to mingle and feel that they had personal stakes in our healthy-lifestyle brand.

Now, when you take the helm at a troubled company and announce that you’re going to be making big changes, inevitably there are going to be people who don’t want to see things change. I’ve always addressed those who resist with a combination of patience and a few requirements that are nonnegotiable. On the one hand, transformation is a multiyear journey, and some detractors will come around when they begin to see how well it works. On the other hand, I let everyone know from the start that we are going to treat all people in the organization with respect, we are going to unbias our systems (more on that in the chapters that follow), we are going to educate ourselves about unconscious biases, and we are going to be more inclusive in our hiring and assignments. If you find these conditions problematic, you probably need to go, but otherwise give transformation a try.

In resetting the culture at Jamba Juice, I set high expectations for performance—i.e., results—and I demanded inclusive cross-functional teamwork, with leaders who were aligned with this way of working. I knew when I came in that not everyone was going to be a fit with the new corporate culture. I changed about a third of the leadership team within the first six months. For the most part, we mutually agreed that it was time for them to go. In asking for manager engagement, I particularly targeted middle-level managers. At every organization I’ve helped lead, I’ve found that middle-level managers really hold the key to delivering cultural change, because they control the work experience of everyone in the chain of command below them. I designed a new incentive system, in which up to 20 percent of store managers’ compensation was determined by engagement, climate, and organizational health scores, using a variant of the Gallup Q¹² survey to measure employee engagement and performance outcomes.

At the same time, however, if you are leading this kind of transformation, it’s equally critical to have diversity at the top; that way you not only show all stakeholders what a true meritocracy looks like but you also populate the board and management with people who are likely to support the structural changes you want to accomplish. In my first year at Jamba Juice we brought two women onto the board, one of whom was African American. When I started at the company, management was 80 percent white men; by the end of my first year, half of the managers were women and people of color. Within three years the company’s market cap had soared by 500 percent.

A diverse culture performs better because the more variety you have in thinking and expertise, and the greater the variety of people you have in a room, the more innovation you’ll have, along with better awareness of trends, markets, and risk. I am confident that the new range of voices on our board changed the way the company thought about its people and its business. With a less diverse board, my overall plan for structural changes might not have been supported in the same way.