Starbucks: Howard Schultz vs. Howard Schultz

You can get a sense of what's important to someone by the stories he tells. At Starbucks (SBUX), a company diminished in ways both tangible and ineffable, Howard Schultz is telling a story about milk. Starbucks uses a lot of the stuff. As part of Schultz's efforts to improve the quality of the millions of lattes and cappuccinos Starbucks serves, he forbade what had become the common practice of resteaming milk. That meant the baristas were pouring millions of dollars of leftover milk down the drain. As store managers for the first time began thinking about how to operate more efficiently, an idea emerged. It was simple, obvious, and made everyone wonder why no one had thought of it before: They could put etched lines in the steaming pitchers so that the baristas would know exactly how much milk to use for each size drink. Before, they just guessed. "The celebration of that line in the halls of Starbucks has become a metaphor," says Schultz. "How many other lines can we find? We've found a lot because no one was ever looking. The people who have found those lines have become part of the folklore."

Can you think of many other executives who would turn something so prosaic into folklore? Or who would have left something so basic to chance? But we're talking about Howard Schultz, and about Starbucks, which for most of its existence was fast-growing and free-flowing, a place where the experience was everything. A place where the boss led by instinct, where authenticity was what counted. Schultz liked to say that Starbucks had taken the road less traveled.