Starbucks’ Strategy
Assignment 1
By:
Allen Jones Luna
28 October 2013
MGT 500: Modern Management
Professor: Dr. Tony Muscia

Suggest the key elements of Starbucks’ Organizational Culture that contribute to its success in a global economy. Indicate management’s role with creating and sustaining the organizational culture. Organizational culture has a significant impact on the overall performance of a company. Organizational culture is “the set of shared, taken-for-granted implicit assumptions that a group holds and that determines how it perceives, thinks about, and reacts to its various environments” (Barney, 1986). In this paper, I will examine the elements of Starbucks’ organizational culture that contributed to its success in a global economy, assess the effectiveness of its management decisions in providing innovative offerings for its customers, determine one key management competency, and speculate on whether the company would achieve long-term sustainability as a global leader in the coffee industry without the organization’s CEO, Howard Shultz. In the case of the success of Starbucks, its organizational culture has been driven and empowered by the founder and CEO, Howard Schultz. Howard wanted to expand the company and when he visited Italy prior to the overhaul of the original Starbucks he wanted to mirror the concepts of the coffeehouses in Italy. The key aspect to realize here is that organizational culture affects performance. Howard Schultz became the CEO of Starbucks in 1987. As an entrepreneur, he was influential in convincing investors to believe in his vision. The next ten years he worked with his team of experienced managers and built Starbucks from 6 stores and a small amount of employees, to a large national business with more than 1,300 stores and 25,000 employees.