Is Starbucks really effecting a Try Before You Buy

This morning's article about Starbucks morphing into a tech company includes an interesting approach to hiring Kevin Johnson, former CEO of Juniper Networks.  Sure sounds like Starbucks is bucking the trend of Apple Pay and trying to establish themselves as an intermediary in the electronic payment world.  I'm not so sure I believe this is a good move on Starbucks behalf.  Coffee house business, yes?  Fast food emporium, probably. Electronic payments business, sounds like a weird product line extension?  Maybe Oracle will sell them Java?  That might make some sense since  Oracle has done little to take it forward.  Not giving it much more attention than a coffee klatch.

Kevin Johnson, former CEO of Juniper Networks

What I do think is a good idea is the approach to hiring Kevin as COO and trying out how this works before installing him as CEO.  Starbucks tried the caffinated approach to replacing Howard Schultz before and the jolt was too much for the company to digest. Now approaching this transition as a try before your buy, may be just the recipe for Starbucks next new offering.

Several High Profile Founder Oustings Reviewed

It's always interesting press when a high profile founder is removed from his or her role.  A recent Inc. Magazine story,  7 Founders Pushed Out of Their Companies, profiled some of the more notorious transitions.There are numerous details behind the scenes that might paint a more complete story of what really happened.  Most of us only know the headlines.  The story is subheadlined:  Why a Founder Gets Ousted, but does little to tell us much about the circumstances.  In every case there is an intriguing sub-story that often doesn't get told due to agreements among the parties or the investors' desire to avoid bad publicity.  Wouldn't it be interesting to hear what really happened?