Howard Schultz should give Starbucks' CEO the time and space he needs to deliver

livemint.com:

Like legions of disgruntled former employees who preceded him, Howard Schultz took to LinkedIn last week to complain about what had gone wrong at his old company. Without naming names, the former Starbucks CEO—who all but founded the coffee chain—slagged his successor, writing that after such a significant quarterly earnings miss, “there must be contrition" and that the company should “own the shortcoming without the slightest semblance of an excuse." Schultz has a point.

The quarter was a disaster: Sales fell for the first time since 2020 and earnings came in well below expectations, with William Blair analyst Sharon Zackfia calling the results a “stunning across-the-board miss on all key metrics." The company’s earnings call did not leave investors with a lot of confidence that it had the situation under control; shares plummeted as much as 16% the day after the company reported, the most since the early days of the pandemic. But if Schultz really wants to see Starbucks turn around, the best thing for him to do at this point is butt out.

The LinkedIn post was just the latest example in Schultz’s long history of meddling and backseat CEO-ing—tendencies that may very well have kept Starbucks from finding a stronger candidate to replace him. Any advice Schultz has to offer should come alongside a bit of that contrition he’s talking about.

He conveniently omitted an important piece of context in his LinkedIn post—that he has only been off the Starbucks board since September and out of the CEO chair for just more than a year. It really is not possible for things to have gone this far sideways so quickly.