31 Howard Schultz Leadership Quotes to Inspire Your Entrepreneurial Journey
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About Howard Schultz
Howard D. Schultz is an American businessman and former CEO and chairman of Starbucks, the highly successful coffee company. He served as the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of the Starbucks Coffee Company from 1986 to 2000, and then again from 2008 to 2017. Schultz also owned the Seattle SuperSonics basketball team from 2001 to 2006. [ 1]
Born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 19, 1953, Howard Schultz graduated from Northern Michigan University with a bachelor’s degree in communications before becoming director of retail operations and marketing for the Starbucks Coffee Company in 1982. After founding the coffee company Il Giornale in 1987, he purchased Starbucks and became CEO and chairman of the company. Schultz publicly announced that he was resigning as Starbucks’ CEO in 2000, though he returned to head the company from 2008 to 2018. He then revealed his intention to run for president as an independent in 2020, before ending his bid in September 2019. [ 2]
Howard Schultz Leadership Quotes
We’ve put together this collection of the best Inspirational Howard Schultz leadership quotes on how to inspire your entrepreneurial journey:
One of the fundamental aspects of leadership, I realized more and more, is the ability to instill confidence in others when you yourself are feeling insecure
Howard Schultz
When companies fail, or fail to grow, it’s almost always because they don’t invest in the people, the systems, and the processes they need.
Howard Schultz
People want guidance, not rhetoric. They need to know what the plan of action is, and how it will be implemented. They want to be given responsibility to help solve the problem and authority to act on it.
Howard Schultz
When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.
Howard Schultz
Authentic brands don’t emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies. They emanate from everything the company does…
Howard Schultz
If you want to build a great enterprise, you have to have the courage to dream great dreams. If you dream small dreams, you may succeed in building something small. For many people, that is enough. But if you want to achieve widespread impact and lasting value, be bold.”
Howard Schultz
To stay vigorous, a company needs to provide a stimulating and challenging environment for all these types: the dreamer, the entrepreneur, the professional manager, and the leader. If it doesn’t, it risks becoming yet another mediocre corporation.
Howard Schultz
I think the currency of leadership is transparency. You’ve got to be truthful. I don’t think you should be vulnerable every day, but there are moments where you’ve got to share your soul and conscience with people and show them who you are, and not be afraid of it.
Howard Schultz
Work should be personal. For all of us. Not just for the artist and entrepreneur. Work should have meaning for the accountant, the construction worker, the technologist, the manager and the clerk.
Howard Schultz
What I would say to young entrepreneurs is there’s so many moments in your life where you have these dreams, and people are trying to protect you, and they say, perhaps, friends, family, parents sometimes, they don’t agree with it, they think, ‘This is just too high of a hurdle.’ And I don’t agree with that.
Howard Schultz
To be an enduring, great company, you have to build a mechanism for preventing or solving problems that will long outlast any one individual leader.
Howard Schultz
Hiring people is an art, not a science, and resumes can’t tell you whether someone will fit into a company’s culture.
Howard Schultz
Managing a business, small or large, today requires an extremely disciplined, thoughtful approach with regard to the pressure that people are under.
Howard Schultz
Whenever I see someone carrying a cup of coffee from a Starbucks competitor, whether it’s an independent coffee shop or a fast-food chain, I take their decision not to come to Starbucks personally. I wonder what I, as Starbucks’ chairman and ceo, might have done to keep them away and what I might do to encourage them to come back or to try us for the first time.
Howard Schultz
Providing our customers with innovative and unique ways to discover and acquire all genres of great music is another way we are enhancing the Starbucks Experience.
Howard Schultz
I think if you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve got to dream big and then dream bigger.
Howard Schultz
And with the right mentor, don’t be afraid to expose your vulnerabilities. Admit you don’t know what you don’t know. When you acknowledge your weaknesses and ask for advice, you’ll be surprised how much others will help.
Howard Schultz
Effective leaders share two intertwined attributes: an unbridled level of confidence about where their organizations are headed, and the ability to bring people along.
Howard Schultz
While we are a coffee company at heart, Starbucks provides much more than the best cup of coffee. We offer a community gathering place where people come together to connect and discover new things.
Howard Schultz
At its core, I believe leadership is about instilling confidence in others
Howard Schultz
Business leaders cannot be bystanders.
Howard Schultz
We believed very early on that people’s interaction with the Starbucks experience was going to determine the success of the brand.”
Howard Schultz
Whatever your culture, your values, or your guiding principles, you have to take steps to inculcate them in the organization early in its life so that they can guide every decision, every hire, and every strategic objective you set.
Howard Schultz
Entrepreneurs must love what they do to such a degree that doing it is worth sacrifice and, at times, pain. But doing anything else, we think, would be unimaginable.
Howard Schultz
Even though people are under economic pressure, they still want to support those brands with values that are compatible with their own.
Howard Schultz
All great companies have passed through bad years that forced soul-searching and rethinking of priorities. How we deal with them will be the litmus test.
Howard Schultz
I could not allow us, or myself, to drift into a sea of mediocrity after so many years of hard work
Howard Schultz
Whatever you do, don’t play it safe. Don’t do things the way they’ve always been done. Don’t try to fit the system. If you do what’s expected of you, you will never accomplish more than others expect
Howard Schultz
Any business today that embraces the status quo as an operating principle is going to be on a death march.
Howard Schultz
The challenge of the retail business is the human condition.
Howard Schultz
I hope that you enjoyed this collection of Howard Schultz’s leadership quotes. Get your daily dose of motivation in bite-size, For FREE on Motiveex app.
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Originally published at https://motiveex.com on November 11, 2020.
