Howard Schultz on Leadership Transition

On June 1, 2000, Schultz stepped down as chief executive, moving into the chief global strategist role to drive international expansion, with Orin Smith, his chief financial officer through the 1990s, succeeding him. The transition was framed as an orderly succession rather than a retreat, and Schultz remained chairman. International work had already begun paying off: Schultz had coordinated the first Starbucks store opening in China in January 1999, and spent the following year helping develop a customer base for coffee in a tea-dominated market. Through the late 2000s and early 2010s he directed the company to plan one to two store openings per day in mainland China, a cadence that reflected conviction the market would eventually rank among the company's largest. The 2000 handoff tested whether the culture he built could run without his daily presence, a question the following decade would answer unevenly.

Schultz again stepped down as chief executive in December 2016, becoming executive chairman, and across the 2008 to 2017 span of his second tenure he oversaw nearly one hundred billion dollars added to Starbucks' market capitalization. From the eleven coffeehouses of 1987 the company reached twenty-eight thousand stores in seventy-seven countries by his retirement. On June 4, 2018, he announced he would leave active management after thirty-seven years, with Kevin Johnson, president and chief operating officer for the prior two years, becoming chief executive and Myron Ullman taking the chairmanship, as Schultz weighed a presidential campaign. He returned once more as interim chief executive in March 2022 after Johnson's retirement, handed off to Laxman Narasimhan in April 2023, and stepped down early on March 20, 2023, weeks before testifying before the Senate committee on health, education, labor, and pensions. Each departure tested the institution rather than the man.

When Schultz returned as interim chief executive in April 2022, following the departure of Kevin Johnson, who had led the company since 2017, he was coming back to a company he had built over three decades from eleven stores and one hundred employees to twenty-eight thousand stores worldwide. He was also returning to the source of his reputation as a socially progressive and generous employer, since Starbucks had made its name extending health coverage, equity grants, and tuition-free college education to part-time as well as full-time workers. The difference in 2022 was that the reputation itself was the asset at risk, as workers across the country banded together to raise grievances and demand more from the company. The homecoming was framed as continuity, but the circumstances made it a referendum: the founder-employer who institutionalized partner benefits was now the executive whose workforce was organizing against the company's labor practices at unprecedented scale.