Blog | mysite

The Epic Journey of Change...

It was early Seattle morning in February 2007 and Howard Schultz had had a restless night. A steady drizzle pattered on the kitchen windows as the founder of Starbucks sipped pensively on a brew of French pressed Sumatra, fretting about the business he had founded two decades earlier. The signs were alarming: by the end of 2006, customer spending in Starbucks stores had begun to dip and absolute store traffic had slumped to new lows. The cause of these declines was less easy to diagnose. Yes, the competition had stiffened but this was to be expected. What troubled him were the less obvious causes; “a series of subtle but ultimately telling developments that had led to the watering down of