Starbucks Corp CEO Howard Schultz officially steps down
End of an Era
Howard Schultz, Chief Executive Starbucks Corp has officially stepped down from today, 2 March, 2014.
But with Schultz, you’re never really sure that he’s gone.
Earlier, the longtime CEO had handed over the reins to a hand-picked successor. And twice before he boomeranged back into the CEO job, claiming he had returned to right a company that had lost its way.
But this week,there was a surest sign that the Schultz era at Starbucks is officially over. The company and the union representing its employees said they had agreed to start discussions about how to reach collective bargaining agreements.
It’s the first real indication of any sort of thaw between the two parties, which have been locked in a bitter battle over workers’ efforts to organise.
These initial steps toward an agreement were unlikely to ever have happened with Schultz in charge.
He’d been adamantly opposed to a union at Starbucks; in fact, the labour organising at the company was one of the factors that precipitated his 2022 return..Howard Schultz didn’t start Starbucks, but he built it into the company it is today.
And in him, the best and worst parts of founders and longtime CEOs are often one in the same. Everything is personal for them.
They inject a company with passion and dedication, but that also can mean they make decisions using emotion rather than reason.
Hence,for Schultz, the arrival of the union was deeply personal. He believed that only badly behaved companies needed unions to protect their workers; in his mind, Starbucks was not that kind of a company, and he was not that kind of a CEO.
News Edit K.V.Raman
