Howard Schultz

Why organisations work with Howard Schultz

• He is one of the only major executives to have led a full crisis turnaround at the same global company twice. That longitudinal experience produces a very different quality of insight than a single transformation story.
• His 2011 number-one New York Times bestseller “Onward” presents a specific and testable argument: recovering a business means restoring what people came for, not restructuring around it. Within three years of his 2008 return to Starbucks, the stock had risen more than five times from its crisis low.
• His case for employee investment is built on commercial evidence, not values rhetoric. Starbucks under Schultz was among the first U.S. companies to extend healthcare to part-time workers and to offer equity participation to hourly employees. He presents attrition, service quality, and customer loyalty as the direct outputs.
• Named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year in 2011 and included in Time’s “Time 200” most influential people, he holds ethics recognition from Columbia Business School, Notre Dame’s Mendoza College, and UCLA Anderson – providing academic validation of a practical executive record.
• As co-founder of Maveron, a consumer-focused venture capital firm with $1.3 billion in assets under management, he brings pattern recognition on consumer brand durability well beyond the Starbucks story.

Biography highlights

• Chairman and CEO of Starbucks across three leadership periods (1986-2000, 2008-2017, 2022-2023), growing the company from 11 stores to 28,000 locations across 77 countries
• Took Starbucks public in 1992; oversaw nearly $100 billion added to the company’s market capitalisation between 2008 and 2017
• Author of four books including “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul” (2011), a number-one New York Times bestseller
• Named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year in 2011; included in Time magazine’s “Time 200” most influential people
• Ethics and leadership awards from Columbia Business School (Botwinick Prize), Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business (Hesburgh Award), and UCLA Anderson (John Wooden Global Leadership Award)
• Co-founder of Maveron (1998), a consumer-focused venture capital firm with $1.3 billion in assets under management and early investments including eBay and Zulily

Biography

The most destructive leadership decisions at scale are rarely made during crises. They accumulate during the growth years, when speed and efficiency gradually crowd out the cultural foundations that made a business worth building. Howard Schultz experienced this from the inside, as the architect of Starbucks’ global expansion and the executive who had to reverse the damage when it became visible.

His 2008 return as CEO is documented in “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul,” a number-one New York Times bestseller. The argument at the centre of the book is precise: the path back to financial health ran directly through culture, not around it. Employee retraining, the restoration of the in-store experience, and a deliberate recalibration of what Starbucks stood for came before the financial metrics recovered. Within three years of his return, the stock had risen more than five times from its crisis low.

His approach to employees follows the same logic. Starbucks under his leadership was among the first U.S. companies to extend healthcare benefits to part-time workers, and it offered equity participation to hourly employees through a programme called Bean Stock. Schultz presented these not as social obligations but as commercial decisions: loyalty, retention, and service quality are measurable outputs of how people are treated, not side effects of good intentions.

Named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year in 2011 and included in Time magazine’s “Time 200,” Schultz holds ethics recognition from Columbia Business School, Notre Dame’s Mendoza College, and UCLA Anderson. As co-founder of Maveron, a consumer-focused venture capital firm with $1.3 billion in assets under management, he has extended this analysis of brand durability well beyond the Starbucks story. His perspective reaches audiences navigating growth, crisis recovery, and the sustained tension between operational efficiency and cultural health.

Key speaking topics

• Values-based leadership at scale
• Crisis leadership and organisational recovery
• Brand culture and long-term commercial performance
• Global consumer brand strategy
• Employee investment as competitive strategy
• Entrepreneurship and growth
• Corporate responsibility and business ethics

Ideal for

• CEOs and executive leadership teams navigating rapid scaling decisions or organisational turnaround
• Chief People Officers and HR leadership examining employee value proposition at scale
• Brand, marketing, and commercial leadership in consumer-facing organisations
• Boards and senior leaders weighing cultural priorities against short-term commercial pressure

Audience outcomes

• A tested framework for treating culture and commercial performance as mutually reinforcing, not competing priorities
• Concrete, sequenced lessons from a live turnaround at global scale – what decisions were made, in what order, and why
• A reframe of employee investment from a cost line to a commercial variable with traceable outcomes
• Perspective on how a brand’s identity is preserved or eroded through the decisions made at pace and scale
• Practical insight into leading across multiple organisational phases, including growth, institutional crisis, and recovery