The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
Howard Schultz reads as The Visionary because his leadership has always started with imagination rather than operations. He reframed a Seattle coffee retailer as a vehicle for human connection, the third place between home and work, and in doing so reshaped global consumer culture.
“Viewed the beverage business in their parlance as being in the restaurant business. And they didn't like it. They thought it was messy, and that's not what they wanted to do. So I literally pounded on the table for a year. And I think they just said, okay, get this kid out of our face.”
“Well, there were two things that I did that people said he's really lost in. But the training was so vitally important because Starbucks coffee company forgot how to make quality coffee. And we had everybody in the company retrained. Now, the thing that galvanized the entire company was something else.”
“And they had invested in Iljanali as a group. I didn't know what to do, and Jerry said, I will hold for 90 days, but you have to know on the 90th day I have to sell. Two or three days later, I'm playing basketball, and a friend of mine who was my young attorney at the time, Scott Greenberg, I tell him the story that night after the game.”
“Overnight, we began to change the trajectory within six months, we were starting to climb back. And within a year, It was a memory However The real question was what did we learn?”
OTA Leadership Index: “Public record read”
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