Manager Job

You can’t expect your employees to exceed the expectations of your customers if you don’t exceed the employees’ expectations of management.

Howard Schultz (born July 19, 1953) is an American businessman, and entrepreneur best known as the chairman and CEO of Starbucks and a former owner of the Seattle SuperSonics. Schultz co-founded Maveron, an investment group, in 1998 with Dan Levitan.

Early years

Schultz grew up in a subsidized public housing project (Bay View Houses) in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, New York. He attended Canarsie High School and is the eldest of three children. He is of English descent. He has a sister, Ronnie (b. 1956) and a brother Michael (b. 1961), who both live in New York. His mother lives in New Jersey and his father, of whom he often speaks in interviews, has passed away. He is a father of two children and currently lives in Seattle with his wife. He owns an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and a house in East Hampton, N.Y. .

Schultz attended Northern Michigan University on a football scholarship. In 1975, he became the first of his family to graduate from college when he earned his bachelor’s degree in the arts and sciences. He is a member of the Theta Iota chapter of Tau Kappa Epsilon.

Career

In 1982, he joined Starbucks Coffee Company in Seattle as the Director of Marketing. After a business trip to Milan, Italy, he tried to persuade the owners (including Jerry Baldwin) to offer traditional espresso beverages in addition to the whole bean coffee, leaf teas and spices they had long offered. After a successful pilot of the cafe concept, the owners refused to roll it out company-wide and Howard Schultz started his own coffee shop named Il Giornale in 1985. Two years later, the original Starbucks management decided to focus on Peet’s Coffee & Tea and sold its Starbucks retail unit to Schultz and Il Giornale. Read the rest of this entry »