The former Chief also recounted his first meeting with the Apple founder.
Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, recalled the time Steve Jobs, the company’s inventor, yelled at him to fire his whole senior team. Mr Schultz said this on the podcast ‘Acquired.’ After completing his third stint as CEO last year, Mr Schultz recalled strolling about Apple’s campus in 2008 and confiding in Mr Jobs about the company’s issues, as per a report in Fortune.
Mr Schultz was first appointed CEO from 1987 to 2000. His second stint lasted from 2008 until 2018, followed by a return in 2022. The timing of Mr. Schultz’s second two appearances was crucial. It was a time when Starbucks was facing difficulty in 2008 and desperately needed a turnaround, and the final return occurred after the coronavirus outbreak when the ship needed to be stabilised.
The former Chief also recounted his first meeting with the Apple founder. “There was a future meeting scheduled for Starbucks and Apple around mobile order and pay and other things. I met Steve on a phone call-had never met him-was talking to him on the phone and I’m telling him what’s going on,” Mr Schultz said.
Mr Jobs then personally invited Mr Schultz to the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, to talk about the situation. The Infinite Loop campus, which consisted of six buildings arranged around an oval plaza, was home to the Apple offices at the time. “(Jobs) had a whole thing about walking. He would go out and would walk around the building. And so I went down there and basically we took a walk. I just told him all my problems-everything that was going on.”
He continued, “He just stopped me and said, ‘This is what you need to do.’ He looked and me and said, ‘You go back to Seattle and you fire everyone on your leadership team.’ I thought he was joking.”
Shocked by the same, the Starbucks executive replied, “I said what are you talking about, ‘Fire everybody’? He said, ‘I just told you. F-king fire all those people.’ He was like screaming at me in my face: ‘Fire all those people, that’s what I would do.’ I said, ‘Steve, I can’t fire all these people. Who’s going to do the work?”
“He said, ‘I promise you, in six months, maybe nine, they’ll all be gone.’ He was right. Except for one, the general counsel, they were all gone,” Mr Schultz said on the podcast.
He then said that Mr Jobs was right in his prediction, “I talked to him since then. We were on stage together at an event, and I told him, ‘They’re all gone.’ He said, ‘Well, you’re six months, nine months late. Think about all the things you could’ve done.