News
ICSC: DAY THREE
May 26, 2011
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| Tuesday?s luncheon keynote speaker, Starbucks chairman/CEO Howard Schultz, shared some insights from his recent best-selling book, Onward: How Starbucks Fought For Its Life Without Losing Its Soul. The ubiquitous coffeehouse company has grown to 17,000 stores in 50 countries. He said that for years, Starbucks was on a ?carpet ride? in which everything it touched—every product, store, city, and country—?almost turned to gold.? But in 2007, with the global financial crisis brewing, Starbucks for the first time posted negative comp store sales. Schultz, who had stepped down as CEO in 2000 to become chairman, overseeing the company's international expansion, returned as CEO to address the company's ?self-induced? mistakes. One of those mistakes: embracing growth as a strategy as ?opposed to a tactic.? |
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| Starbucks became the poster child for excess, he said, but what troubled him the most was that the one thing Starbucks stood for—?the integrity and the quality of making a perfect cup of coffee?—had been compromised. The company took the unparalleled step of closing every one of its stores to retrain 125,000 employees. Months later it held a $32.5M meeting in New Orleans to remind 11,000 store managers about the company's values and culture of giving back, donating 55,000 hours of community service—mostly in the city's hard-hit Ninth Ward. He said Starbucks learned the valuable lesson that ?hubris, arrogance, and a sense of invincibility? can create a carcinogenic disease inside the company. In calendar 2010, Starbucks had the most financially successful year in company history. |
