Consider the original owners' point of view... aggressive sales manager from Brooklyn joins your enterprise that is a stable and growing business then pushes you to take on huge debt and huge risk so that he can set the world on fire. Why drag his pregnant wife into this?
Not sure where Herny Baldwin and Gordon Bowker came on board (I followed this a long, long time ago and have forgotten the blow-by-blow account of the Howard Schultz take over), but my point is that once you get an enterprise going you still can struggle to keep your own ownership and own vision. Some employees you take on (especially in sales and marketing departments) may actually be looking for a hostile takeover and have already lined up capital injection.
The history of Starbucks has been sanitized to make Howard Schultz happy... get real. I do recall that his original shift to upscale Italian expresso shops was too costly and initially a financial flop. The Starbucks you see today were part of a strategic retreat from the business plan he presented to the original owners.
It seems to be a case of history being written by the winner(s). The original owner of McDonalds suffered a similar fate, but that is another story.
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Not sure where Herny Baldwin and Gordon Bowker came on board (I followed this a long, long time ago and have forgotten the blow-by-blow account of the Howard Schultz take over), but my point is that once you get an enterprise going you still can struggle to keep your own ownership and own vision. Some employees you take on (especially in sales and marketing departments) may actually be looking for a hostile takeover and have already lined up capital injection.
The history of Starbucks has been sanitized to make Howard Schultz happy... get real. I do recall that his original shift to upscale Italian expresso shops was too costly and initially a financial flop. The Starbucks you see today were part of a strategic retreat from the business plan he presented to the original owners.
It seems to be a case of history being written by the winner(s). The original owner of McDonalds suffered a similar fate, but that is another story.