Motivational Leaders: Howard Schultz

Howard Schultz is the former CEO and chairman of Starbucks.

After graduating from the university with a Bachelor of Science degree in communication in 1975, Schultz found work as an appliance salesman for Hammarplast, a company that sold European coffee makers in the United States. Rising through the ranks to become director of sales, in the early 1980s, Schultz noticed that he was selling more coffee makers to a small operation in Seattle, Washington, known then as the Starbucks Coffee Tea and Spice Company, than to Macy's. ""Every month, every quarter, these numbers were going up, even though Starbucks just had a few stores,"" Schultz later remembered. ""And I said, 'I gotta go up to Seattle.'""

A year after meeting with Starbucks' founders, in 1982, Howard Schultz was hired as director of retail operations and marketing for the growing coffee company, which, at the time, only sold coffee beans, not coffee drinks.
Early on, Schultz set about making his mark on the company while making Starbucks' mission his own. In 1983, while traveling in Milan, Italy, he was struck by the number of coffee bars he encountered. An idea then occurred to him: Starbucks should sell not just coffee beans but coffee drinks.

Schultz's enthusiasm for opening coffee bars in Starbucks stores, however, wasn't shared by the company's creators.

Nevertheless, Schultz was persistent until, finally, the owners let him establish a coffee bar in a new store that was opening in Seattle.

But the success of the coffee bar demonstrated to the original founders that they didn't want to go in the direction Schultz wanted to take them. They didn't want to get big. Disappointed, Schultz left Starbucks in 1985 to open a coffee bar chain of his own, Il Giornale, which quickly garnered success.

Two years later, with the help of investors, Schultz purchased Starbucks, merging Il Giornale with the Seattle company.

In 2006, Howard Schultz was ranked No. 359 on Forbes magazine's "Forbes 400" list, which presents the 400 richest individuals in the United States.