Howard Schultz – Author Biography
Early Life
Howard Schultz was born on July 19, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in public housing in the Canarsie neighborhood. His father was a truck driver who was injured on the job with no insurance or compensation — an experience that shaped Schultz’s lifelong obsession with employee welfare. He was the first in his family to attend college, earning a football scholarship to Northern Michigan University.
Career
Schultz worked in sales for Xerox and then for a Swedish housewares company, where he first encountered Starbucks — then a small Seattle coffee-bean retailer and one of his clients. He joined Starbucks in 1982, left to found his own coffee chain Il Giornale, and then bought Starbucks in 1987 with investor backing. As CEO, he grew it from a handful of stores into a global empire of tens of thousands of locations, stepping down and returning twice (2000 and 2017–18, then interim CEO in 2022).
Major Works
Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (1997, with Dori Jones Yang) and Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul (2011, with Joanne Gordon), chronicling the company’s near-collapse during the 2008 financial crisis and its turnaround.
Writing Style and Themes
Schultz writes earnest, values-driven business memoir. His central theme is that a company can pursue profit and humanity simultaneously — his father’s injury made him determined that Starbucks would offer health insurance and stock options even to part-time workers. His books blend entrepreneurial storytelling with moral argument: that business leaders have obligations beyond shareholders, and that culture is a company’s true competitive advantage.
Legacy
Schultz is one of the defining CEOs of the modern era, the man who turned coffee into a global lifestyle and made Starbucks the world’s most valuable restaurant brand. His employee-benefits model influenced corporate America, and his books are staples of business school reading. He remains a prominent voice on the responsibilities of business in society.
