Break the chain: Starbucks’ new CEO could maybe escape Schultz’s long shadow

livemint.com:

Incoming Starbucks Corp chief executive officer Brian Niccol is a star executive who is widely considered the best in the business. Quite frankly, it’s surprising the company was able to hire him at all. Despite the coffee-chain giant being one of the world’s most iconic and powerful brands, Starbucks has a problem for any incoming CEO.

And that problem is the role of Howard Schultz. As Starbucks’ long-time CEO who became synonymous with the company he all but founded, Schultz can’t seem to let go. He’s twice boomeranged back into the top job when the company hit turbulence.

And since he departed from the board a year ago, he has become a meddler —criticizing his successor Laxman Narasimhan and the board in a LinkedIn post and on a podcast, for example, even though he had handpicked Narasimhan, trained him, and set an aggressive growth plan on his way out the door. It’s only the latest example in Schultz’s long history of undermining his replacements. He wrote in a leaked memo in 2007 that said under then-CEO Jim Donald the company’s stores “no longer have the soul of the past." After Kevin Johnson left the company as CEO in 2022, Schultz said that he had returned to the helm because Starbucks had “lost its way." Schultz seems to have orchestrated his latest official departure from company leadership to make it impossible for Starbucks to disentangle itself from his grasp.