The Big News January 2008
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SEATTLE — Starbucks Corp. chairman Howard Schultz has resumed day-to-day responsibility for the coffee chain, succeeding Jim Donald as chief executive and promising in a letter to “all partners” to reverse the company’s lapse into “bureaucracy.”
“We will now shift our emphasis back on customer-facing initiatives, better aligning our back-end costs with our business model,” Schultz wrote in a note seemingly addressed to investors and employees. The communication was posted on Starbucks’ website on Monday evening.
Although the note confirmed that Donald had left the company, it did not indicate if he had resigned or been fired. Schultz thanked him for his service, calling him “a passionate and tireless advocate for Starbucks.”
Schultz wrote in his letter that the chain would upgrade its training at the store level, add new products “as significant as Frappuccino products and the Starbucks card,” update the concept’s design, and slow domestic expansion.
Schultz also wrote about “re-igniting our emotional attachment with our customers,” a notion he had famously stressed in a memo that was released in late 2006. He cited a need to focus again on what he termed “the Starbucks Experience.”
As part of that effort, he said, the company would streamline the organization “to better support customer-focused initiatives.”
Schultz replaces CEO at Starbucks
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