Chairmand and CEO of Starbucks

Howard Schultz, chairman and chief global strategist of the Starbucks Corporation, is a 54-year old self-made “King of Caffeine.” He has a net worth of $1 billion, and has consistently been profiled in Forbes’ prominent lists. He also serves as a member of the board of directors at DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. Among the many notable awards he has garnered are Business Week’s Top 25 Best Managers (2001), Restaurant Business’s Top Six Entrepreneurs of the Year (2001), Columbia Business School’s Botwinick Prize in Business Ethics (2000), and Restaurants and Institutions Executive of the Year (2000). Many written works about his leadership style and the Starbucks legacy have been published in recent years as well.

For Howard Schultz, success meant a great deal of sacrifice, determination, ingenuity and unwavering faith in himself and his company. Brought up by hardworking parents who held blue-collar jobs, Howard Shultz was particularly moved by his father’s efforts to provide for the family. Later on he would be often quoted as saying that he wanted to create “the kind of company that my father never got a chance to work for, in which people were respected.” Indeed, the training, benefits, and pride that all Starbucks employees are accorded with are testaments to how Howard Schultz has done his father proud.

After graduating from the Northern Michigan University on a football scholarship, he worked in Xerox Corporation’s sales department for three years. In 1979, he joined Hammarplast, a Swedish company that sold house wares. Finally, in 1982, he became the director of sales and marketing for — what was then — a little coffee bean store known as Starbucks.

During a legendary trip to Milan, Italy, Howard Schultz was so enamored by the traditional espresso beverages that he proposed to add this to the whole bean coffee, tea leafs, and spices they have been offering. His conviction that the espressos will be a good investment was so strong that when the higher-ups weren’t as convinced, he decided to take it into his own hands and began another coffee company, Il Giornale (meaning “daily” in Italian) in 1985. Eventually, he bought out Starbucks from its original owners. After renaming Il Giornale into Starbucks, he aggressively expanded the company into what is now a 12,000-store international institution that serves around 40 million customers weekly.

Howard Shultz is trying revive Starbucks.