America deserves a leader who puts others first, leads from the heart

FROM the earliest days of Starbucks, I've been captivated by the art of leadership. I was mentored over three decades by Warren G Bennis, the eminent professor and scholar on leadership. I've gathered insights from peers, and I've drawn inspiration from our 300,000 employees. But nothing I've read or heard in the past few years has rivalled the power of the image I viewed on my cellphone a few years ago: Pope Francis, shortly after his election, kneeling and washing the feet of a dozen prisoners in Rome, one of them a young Muslim woman, in a pre-Easter ritual.

In recent weeks, I have taken to recalling that humble, inspiring act of servant leadership as I observe the antithesis: a field of presidential aspirants unable to rise above petty politics. I know candidates want to play to the party faithful during the primary season, but the challenges facing us today are too dire for another status-quo election. We cannot afford more false promises, slogans, theatrics and fool's gold. Our nation has been profoundly damaged by a lack of civility and courage in Washington, where leaders of both parties have abdicated their responsibility to forge reasonable compromises to expand the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, improve schools, transform entitlement programmes and so much more. We have become too desensitised to the horrendous metrics that define today's America, from student loan debt to food stamp dependency to the size of our prison population.

As a boy growing up in public housing in Brooklyn, I was told by my mother that I could be the first in my family to graduate from college. A scholarship and an entry-level job at Xerox created a path upwards that was typical for many of my generation.