Howard Schultz
speaker
633 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Howard Schultz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I can totally attest to this as a customer. I basically only use Tap to pay with my watch or phone everywhere I go now, which, you know, just felt like sci-fi a few years ago. But unsurprisingly, that capability for merchants to accept contactless payments is now also being powered by JP Morgan Payments.
the very best of both worlds.
So David Howard sent me, there's a 1988, I can't believe this was filmed, but a 1988 shareholder and employee meeting where it's great. The whole thing's like an hour and a half long. It's all there. And you are using all the same language that you used today back in 1988. We focus on our people. Those people delight the customer. The customer delights the shareholder or satisfies the shareholder.
And the conviction that you have, it's like watching a preacher. You're up there. You've got, I think, 11 stores or something. And you're like, you have no idea what we have here. We are on top of something that is going to change. And you don't say the world, America. And this thing can become America's coffee house.
And it was interesting because I think the whole room was already scared of your ambition of going nationwide with this thing that there did not exist another example of a national coffee house chain. Everything was just these little cities, these small markets.
And there's this great quote that you have at the end of the meeting that says, the company since 1971 has been growing at a very, very slow pace. As a result of that, you combine Il Giornale and Starbucks together. We're going to take your six stores that you've built in 17 years, and we're going to go to 26 in one year, and we're going to go to over 100 in five years.
And that must have just sounded bonkers. But that is literally what happened. That's what happened. The pace of growth, approximately, you just doubled stores year over year over year. Was there some moment in 88, 89, 90, where you're just looking around, realizing... We must expand as fast as we possibly can because this concept is the concept the world needs now.
And if we don't pull out all the stops, someone else is going to do it.
There were regional competitors who were making noise about doing what we were aspiring to do. And I was very mindful because one of them was franchising. That was Gloria Jeans out of Chicago.
And at one point, I think they had more stores than we did because of the franchising opportunity. And that's one of the reasons why I went to Chicago as well in 87, 88.
Because Chicago was the first market outside of Seattle and Vancouver, right? Yes. Even before LA.
And it didn't work right away. Howard Behar should be credited with so much of the cultural texture and the tapestry of the humanity of the company, said, I will go to Chicago and fix it. He went to Chicago and stayed in Chicago through the winter. And recalibrated the mistakes we were making.
And of course, he and Oren were so instrumental into the loneliness that exists as an entrepreneur and their ability to help me build the company that you know today.
Yeah, so I have in my script here, this is literally labeled the H2O era. And for anyone who was a partner at Starbucks sort of knows what I'm talking about and anybody else outside has no idea. But there's two Howards. There's Howard Schultz and Howard Behar. And Howard Behar joined in 1989. Oren Smith joined in 1990.
And the way that it looks to me from the outside, and you can tell me if this is right, you were sort of the vision and ambition that would almost like... take any ambition that anybody else had and force them to think bigger and faster. And then Howard Behar was in many ways the soul. He brought the idea of servant leadership. He brought the idea of nothing else matters if we aren't people first.
And obviously that became a huge tenet of Starbucks as we knew it through the 90s and 2000s. But that seems like it really arrived with him. And then Oren is like a numbers god.
No, he was the adult in the room, more than the numbers. He had the style. He was quiet. He was a gentleman. He was the only MBA in the company. But he was the wise man who, behind the doors, could say to me and Howard, you're both full of shit. We're not doing that.
And we listened, more or less. And was it true that the three of you had dinner every Monday night for a decade?
More or less, that is true. Sometimes more than once if we had a crisis or two, which generally we did, or we had a disagreement. There's a lot of creative conflict, especially between Howard and I, because he had to operate what we were trying to do, and at times he thought we were growing too fast or ahead of the resources.
Because he was basically training all these operators, the sort of management fleet of the company.
Showing 161–180 of 633 · page 9 of 32
← Previous
Next →