Watching his parents experience hardships, he dreamed of building a company that treated employees well.

Starbucks founder Howard Schultz is a leader who used his life story to define his leadership. In the winter of 1961, seven-year-old Schultz was throwing snowballs with friends outside his family's apartment building in the federally subsidized Bayview Housing Projects in Brooklyn, New York. His mother yelled down from their seventh-floor apartment, "Howard, come inside. Dad had an accident." What followed would shape him for the rest of his life.

He found his father in a full-leg cast, sprawled on the living room couch. While working as a delivery driver, he had fallen on a sheet of ice and broken his ankle. As a
result, his father lost his job and the family's healthcare benefits. Worker's compensation did not yet exist, and his mother could not go to work because she was seven months pregnant. The family had nothing to fall back on. Many evenings, Schultz listened as his parents argued at the dinner table about how much money they needed to borrow and from whom. If the telephone rang, his mother asked him to answer it and tell the bill collectors his parents were not at home.

Schultz vowed he would do it differently when he had the opportunity.
He dreamed of building a company that treated its employees well and provided healthcare benefits. Little did he realize that one day he would be responsible for 140,000 employees working in 11,000 stores worldwide. Schultz was motivated by his life's experiences to found Starbucks and build it into the world's leading coffee house.
After being CEO for thirteen years, he has turned the reins over to his successors but remains as chairman.