10 BIG THINKERS FOR BIG BUSINESS
Before joining Starbucks, he was cofounder of Johnson Development Corp. with his friend Earvin (Magic) Johnson. The two convinced Starbucks that there was a market for high-priced coffee in inner-city neighborhoods. "The forcefulness of Ken's conviction is important," says Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz, who spent many months wooing him to Seattle. "He is not afraid to stand up to the status quo."
Of course, it helps when the status quo is faltering. A CD at Starbucks can ring up big numbers. A recent Ray Charles release sold more than 730,000 copies. In the wake of that and other successes, Lombard now holds some hefty bargaining chips. Competing music retailers threw a fit--to no avail--when they learned that Starbucks would be selling a new release by singer Alanis Morissette exclusively for six weeks. And when Atlantic Records chairman Jason Flom, hoping to get an exclusive, held a private performance of his promising all-girl band Antigone Rising for Starbucks executives, Lombard's team liked it but thought the group's album was a bit too edgy. So Flom promptly agreed to re-record a live, all-acoustic version that is now sold exclusively at Starbucks. "The potential impact is significant," Flom says. Starbucks already has one of the biggest wireless networks around, and Lombard can envision a time not too far from now when coffee drinkers worldwide can fill up their --computers or cell phones with music every time they visit. Movies, too. Earlier this year Lombard and Schultz trekked to the Sundance Film Festival for a private meeting with Robert Redford. "We all walked out of there thinking that there should be a way for us to work together," says Lombard. And, yes, he admits, he was just the tiniest bit star-struck.
--Jennifer Ordonez
It wasn't the call Linda Chatman Thomsen wanted to get just after her appointment as enforcement chief for the Securities and Exchange Commission. For much of the previous three years, Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, had done his best to try to make the SEC look bad, bringing case after case against firms regulated by the federal agency known as Wall Street's "top cop." Spitzer, who once told an audience he wouldn't let the SEC "do a house closing for me," wasted little time getting to the point: " 'I'm filing a case this morning'," Thomsen recalls him saying. "Is this a securities case?" she asked. Spitzer said it was "a major case" before telling her he was "just kidding" and congratulated her on her new job.
That may be the last nice thing Thomsen will hear for some time as she settles into one of the toughest positions in Washington. It used to be that the SEC was an agency independent from political pressures. After all, its mandate--to regulate securities markets and protect small investors from fraud and abuse--appears to be the most bipartisan of issues. But since the stock-market bubble burst in 2000, the SEC has become a political football of sorts, attacked by Democrats like Spitzer for not being vigorous, and some Republicans for clamping down too much.
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