Howard Schultz on What's Brewing at Starbucks
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Around 2000, it felt natural to hand over the chief executive role to Orin Smith, who had helped me build Starbucks (SBUX). I was a little bored, and I felt like I was repeating myself. I became chairman and had no intention of coming back as CEO.
We didn't do a lot of succession planning, and the truth was that Orin only wanted that job for maybe three to five years. When he left, we brought in Jim Donald. The company had been hitting a home run in terms of growth every single year, but I could smell that things were wrong. We weren't creating a soulful, romantic experience anymore: We'd lost sight of the experience around the coffee, and we were too focused on ringing the register.