Hulk Hogan is the best WWE champion ever. I agree. But then you have this nonsense where wrestlers like Brock Lesnar are aggrandized for being a 12-time world champion.

Being a 12-time world champion is great and all, but it also means you lost the championship and had to win it back 11 times.

Of course, professional wrestling outcomes are preordained, so who cares? But why is Howard Schultz the three-time CEO of Starbucks?

I met the second Howard Schultz replacement way back when, when the two of them came to speak at an event I attended and you could tell immediately he wouldn’t last long. His name was Jim Donald and he was from Pathmark (a low quality now mostly defunct chain of grocery stores in the Northeast) and the two just didn’t coalesce. This was 2005-ish and Schutlz re-replaced him by 2008. You could tell seeing them interact it wasn’t a long-term fit and when Schultz talked over Donald on investor conference calls it was awkward.

Schultz stayed in his second stint as CEO until 2017 but then stepped back in again in 2022 after the person who replaced him retired.

Now it’s 2023 and Schultz permanently retired last week with his fourth replacement having learned under his tutelage since September. We’ll see how it goes, but I suspect Starbucks hasn’t seen the last of Howard Schultz.

And maybe that’s a good thing. Here’s a long-term chart of Starbucks stock. I’ve highlighted the times when Howard Schultz was CEO.

The stock has mostly performed a lot better with him in charge. But this seems like a failure in transition planning, no?

A successful organization cannot be led by one and only one individual. Nor should an individual believe that he or she is the only one who can lead a specific organization. Because if that’s the case, it’s only a matter of time before the wheels come off.

If you’re a leader, the most valuable way you can spend your time is on training your replacement. Maybe Schultz knows this now and that’s why he’s spent the last seven months training newly minted Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan. We shall see.

– By Tim Hanson

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