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This story was updated from June 2018.
With a portentous tweet and a “60 Minutes” appearance, Howard Schultz has all but declared his candidacy for president.
What’s less clear is how he will do it. The former Starbucks CEO said he plans to run as a centrist Independent, describing both political parties as broken. But public reaction to that idea hasn’t been so welcoming. Schultz is a lifelong Democrat who would probably pull votes from whoever the Democratic nominee turns out to be. Splitting the center-left vote could give an edge to President Trump, assuming he runs for reelection in 2020. That has generated outrage among some Democrats, along with threats of a Starbucks boycott and other forms of protest.
However it shakes out, Schultz has a long and successful business career as his leading credential. He built and ran Starbucks for 31 years, stepping down as chairman last June. “He’s clean. He’s serious. He believes in America,” says Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn, who has studied Starbucks’s business model and co-authored a Harvard case study on Schultz’s leadership at the company. “He understands how to speak in a voice that a lot of people can relate to.”
Here are some of Howard Schultz’s other credentials:
Blue-collar upbringing. Schultz grew up in public-housing projects in Brooklyn, New York, with a father he described in his biography “Onward” as “an uneducated war veteran [who] never really found his spot in the world, [and] held a series of really rough blue-collar jobs to support our family.” Schultz put himself through college and went to work for Starbucks, then a small Seattle coffee chain, as head of marketing in 1982.
Business innovator. Schultz bought the small Starbucks chain with some other investors in 1987, well before coffee culture was a thing in the United States. One key insight was his desire to turn an otherwise dull counter operation into a community portal where people would linger and socialize, as he had noticed people do in Italian coffee shops in the 1980s.
Genius for marketing. Schultz describes himself as an entrepreneur fascinated by the “magic of the merchant’s art,” as Koehn and colleagues write in their Harvard case study of Starbucks. Schultz made baristas the performers in his stores and encouraged employees to connect with customers. As Starbucks CEO, he insisted the company couldn’t just sell coffee; it needed a compelling narrative that would draw people in and keep them coming back (and persuade them to spend $5 for a cup of coffee). It worked: Schultz built Starbucks from a local chain with 11 outlets into a global giant with more than 28,000 stores in 77 countries, 300,000 employees, nearly $25 billion in revenue and $3.5 billion in profits.