Howard Schultz returned as CEO of Starbucks today, marking the start of his third tenure in the role. This time he is replacing previous CEO Kevin Johnson after Johnson announced his retirement last March.
You don't get Starbucks where it is today without insanely talented leadership, so I have immense respect for everything Schultz has accomplished. But I can't help but be skeptical of whether or not he's the right man for the CEO job right now.
I was listening to a speech by NYU professor Aswath Damodaran recently, and Damodaran was describing how you can view the age of a company in the same phases we view the age of humans. Companies are born, break a lot of stuff in their wild toddler years, suffer through debilitating growing pains in adolescence, stumble into maturity as a young adult, and finally drift off slowly until death. Consequentially, companies need different types of CEOs to navigate each of these different life-cycle phases. I thought wording the idea this way was brilliant.
Starbucks has gone through almost all of these phases in the 50 years since the first Pike Place location opened. Howard Schultz certainly helped Starbucks get through its adolescence and early 20s, but I'm not convinced what Starbucks needs in a CEO today is comparable to what Starbucks needed in a CEO in 1986. This is not a reflection on Schultz personally, and I really do hope he does the job well. But company needs change over time, and bringing in the founder again might not be the silver bullet. I'll be closely monitoring this Howard Schultz situation to see if he really can be the anomaly CEO that manages a team well across all life-cycle phases, and it will be wildly impressive if he can pull it off. But time will only tell.
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