"Pirate" Isdell

All introductions to Neville Isdell begin like this: Joined the Coca-Cola Company in 1966, started at the bottling plant, traveled to five continents and 145 countries, developed and developed for Coca-Cola Occupying markets in dozens of countries...

His life is like a legend, but 2004-2009 was undoubtedly the most splendid chapter of this legend - he led the Coca-Cola, the world-famous company, is back on top.

You don't have to guess, you know it's a daunting task - one of Isdell's previous two heads resigned early, and the other endured for four years, always thinking " How to get kicked out of the company decently," and Jack Welch, one of the chairman candidates, felt that he didn't like the pressure and backed away.

Once a hero who can turn the tide is on the scene, pressure and challenges will go hand in hand. In this complex and delicate scene layout, the slightest carelessness can ruin the character of the play. The historical protagonist of this scene is the once-famous Carly Fiorina who faded out of the business world after she lost HP; the reality version is Stephen Elop, the current CEO of Nokia, who has " With the promise of reviving Nokia, investors are considering co-signing to oust him after he took office only two years ago.

In 2004, Isdell had been living in Barbados for three years. The 61-year-old could have spent his later years playing golf in the breezy Caribbean coast, but he chose to clean up a "mess" ". Before Coca-Cola's recession began in 1998, uncontrolled expansion had left the company fat and swollen, and its "slimming" policy in a cold economy had left it devastated and heartbroken. In addition, the century-old store is also plagued by government investigations, declining sales, and a shrinking market. The company's stock price has fallen from an all-time high of $87.94 in 1998 and has remained low for a long time, much to the displeasure of Wall Street.

As Isdell states in his new autobiographical book, Inside Coca-Cola: "The Coca-Cola Company has always been marketed in the image of offering a pleasant service . . . yet by 2004 In 2018, the corporate headquarters on North Boulevard in Atlanta couldn't laugh."

It's pretty bad by any measure. The world casts anticipation and skepticism on Isdell, but he is convinced he has a recipe for saving Coca-Cola, telling his wife Pamela Isdell: "If you let me do it, it won't work!" Isdell lived up to his promise, and by the time he retired for the second time in 2009, Coca-Cola was back on a healthy growth trajectory. Even with the global financial crisis in 2008, Coca-Cola's profit and loss statement has maintained a good performance, which is in stark contrast to the ups and downs of other European and American companies, including old rival PepsiCo. With this outstanding report card, Isdell was selected as one of the "Top 10 Comeback CEOs" by Business Week in 2009. He finally lived up to his mission.

I'm a bit more aggressive than others

In "The Conquest of Coca-Cola," one sees a figure in a dizzyingly dizzying array of titles in the midst of an ever-evolving position. It's easy to be intrigued: what drives Isdell's near-perfect workplace experience? Especially when people read this book with the mentality of learning from the experience.

Our reporter threw the question to Isdell: "Are you a born fighter?" His answer was: "The answer is clearly yes." He thought he "though not always winning, But it's a bit more aggressive than others." "Not always winning" largely means that when he was in charge of the Coca-Cola business in Germany, he suffered defeat because he did not adapt to the corporate culture and social rules of Germany and the Philippines, Zambia, South Africa and other countries where he worked before. But this failure also made him pay more attention to cross-cultural management.

The 1.96-foot-tall former rugby player feels a sense of security at the same time as a vague sense of pressure. A Briton who grew up in Africa, Isdell was indignant at the disparity in wealth among his classmates when he was still studying at the University of Cape Town in South Africa: many of his classmates came from wealthy Johannesburg and Cape Town students. People, living in mansions, driving brand new cars to school. And Isdell didn't even have a broken car, and could only live in a small school apartment with classmates of different colors. This made him feel inferior at the same time, but also had a strong desire to stand out, and he was convinced that one day he would live that kind of life. A rather dramatic detail is that his favorite drink at that time was Pepsi.

The story later seems to be straightened out: a young man with strong self-motivation entered a famous company after graduating from college. He opened a road in the mountains, built a bridge in the water, resolved countless crises, and climbed to the top of his career step by step. It makes one want to ask another question: "If you weren't at Coca-Cola, would you still be successful?" It's a bit offensive, but Isdell doesn't mind, saying: "I believe that at other companies I Just as well."

During his days at Coca-Cola, there were indeed a number of companies that offered him a good position, but Isdel turned them down because "none of them were as big as Coca-Cola." . The size of the stage is important, but if you lack a brave heart, few people will have the last laugh. Isdell joined Coca-Cola at a golden age for the company's overseas expansion, which saw him play the role of a pioneer all his life. He often goes to places where companies have lost their way and are losing market share. Those rushing down the "world's scariest highway" -- "Death Road" -- those adventures in bad, unfamiliar circumstances, those tough times with arrogant bottlers, aren't sitting in an office Flip through "The Conquest of Coca-Cola" to experience it.

This brave and combative quality gives Isdell a pirate-like temperament in the workplace, as he traverses the turbulent sea of commerce and grabs the market cake from his opponents.

In the Philippines, in order to defeat his old rival Pepsi, he formed a sales team called "Tiger Army", and everyone wore blue clothes during meetings to inspire employees' fighting spirit, because blue Represents Pepsi. He led push-ups on the field with salesmen in gym clothes, then ran circles around the bottling plant. From time to time he slammed Pepsi bottles against the walls of the bottling plant, ordered troops to attack, and even drove tanks into the venues of promotional conferences. Even with typhoid and malaria attacks, he would go island by island with the managers, even visiting small tin-roofed shops that he couldn't even bend over. And Pepsi executives were sitting around the Manila Polo Club, drinking beer and complaining about the laziness of Filipinos.

When this "pirate" left the Philippines, he had already "stealed" half of the market share from Pepsi, leading by a two-to-one advantage, and the local joint venture also lost $5 million a year from the original Turned into an annual profit of 4 million. Isdell was as vicious as a pirate when it came to taking the market for the company, and he led Coca-Cola to break through political barriers, ideological barriers, trade barriers, and even the threat of war. In some unstable countries, "If you are forced to evacuate in an emergency, Coca-Cola is always the last to leave, and the first to return afterward."

When capturing business opportunities for the company, he is like a cheetah Just as sensitive. When Eastern Europe was undergoing drastic changes, Coca-Cola planned factories in some countries before the situation was settled; when the Berlin Wall fell, the Coca-Cola Company in West Germany was ready to transport Coca-Cola across the Berlin Wall; when the Soviet Union disintegrated, Coca-Cola established a factory in Moscow. The first bottling plant...

Pictured and then moved

It was a terrible appointment, but it was also a perfect one. On June 1, 2004, the first day Isdell took over as chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola, he was not in the office, not even in Atlanta, but in Chicago, sitting at the headquarters of McDonald's, Coca-Cola's largest customer . He needs to quickly put out a looming fire.

McDonald's may have fallen into Pepsi's arms because of the mishandling of Steven Heyer, then president of Coca-Cola. "As long as there is a McDonald's restaurant that produces Pepsi-Cola products, it is likely to ruin my future. Coca-Cola's defeat will be unprecedented." In "The Conquest of Coca-Cola", Isdell wrote with lingering fears.

In the end, he made McDonald's feel the sincerity of Coca-Cola and further strengthened the relationship with this largest customer. From this, he also realized more deeply: the relationship with the customer is earned by the maintenance of every moment, if you think that it is a matter of course for him to be your customer, then you are kidding yourself.

Although he was busy putting out fires on his first day in office, Isdell did not reduce himself to the role of a firefighter. He gave himself a rule not to express any opinion to the media and so-called analysts for the first 100 days. It was the first time he inspected the Indian market after taking office. He had to ride in and out of the hotel's garbage truck to avoid the reporters' siege. After retiring, he remained silent about some experiences and experiences of Coca-Cola. Even, he did not send Steven Hale, who caused a huge customer crisis, to leave. Wall Street may prefer bluffing corporate leaders because they have a way to stimulate stock prices, and a rousing speech could cause the stock price to rise. But Isdell's goal is not to please Wall Street, he said: "I don't want to say anything based on my subjective opinion. I'm going to travel around the world and see how the market works, meet employees and customers, and take a look A key person who has a special relationship with the company."

Fortunately, he has the backing of a board of directors that includes the famous Warren Buffett. Buffett later recalled in a book: "I thought he (Isdell) would need a lot of help, but it turned out I didn't need much help." The reason is that 100 days of low-key sneaking has made Isdell see clearly front.

Even now, there's been a debate: Why was Coca-Cola's stock price at its highest point to date in July 1998? In fact, Isdell already knew the answer: the reason was that people's expectations for the stock were too optimistic at the time. And this is precisely the result of the unsustainable strategy established by the company's genius leader, Roberto Goinjueta, when the company's turnover was growing at an annual rate of 3%, while Goinjuai Tower has promised Wall Street an annual profit rate of up to 15%. According to records, from 1995 to 1997, Coca-Cola's share price rose far more than the company's net profit, so that the price-earnings ratio at the end of 1997 reached 40.66. When Coca-Cola's stock price hit more than $80 in 1998, its price-earnings ratio in 1997 was more than 50 times earnings per share. When Goinjuetta's bubble pops, the stock price falls.

Three months after Isdell's comeback, Coca-Cola issued a statement saying: "Resolving this problem is difficult, it will take several years, and it is impossible to be profitable in the short term." Dissatisfied, but Isid knows that what he wants to do is definitely not "let the stock market lead the way".

Once the stock price of old rival Pepsi surpassed Coca-Cola, the media began to respond with Isdell's pirate style, "The Wall Street Journal ran a cartoon of a Pepsi can smashed in Over my head," Isdell writes in his book, full of self-deprecation, "we shrugged off Wall Street's distrustful gaze and began to quietly redesign The Coca-Cola Company."

As Isdell kept his mouth shut to the media and watched around the world, he noticed the pent-up anger and anger in people's hearts. Later, he led management on an internal investigation, in which he learned that many employees had lost trust in the company's leadership. But Isdell has his own trump card, and he knows that Coca-Cola's most powerful resource - the brand is still there. In 2004, the world's largest comprehensive brand consulting group Interbrand announced the results of the world's 100 most valuable brands, Coca-Cola topped the list with more than 67.3 billion US dollars.

He copied verbatim employee complaints from the survey and posted them on the conference room wall. The complaints included "we don't trust those in office," "our marketing sucks," and "we don't have a strategy at all."

Under the beating of these complaints, Coca-Cola's management began to realize that they have a responsibility and ability to shape the company's future.

A revolution that begins with belief

Everything comes naturally. After all the foreshadowing was done, Coca-Cola issued the Development Manifesto, a candid assessment of where the company should be and where it should be headed.

"This manifesto is a roadmap for the company's development. For example, it clearly states that we will not play outside the company's ideas and will no longer buy any movie theaters and fast food restaurants. It redefines the connotation of the company, pointing out that the company is not a company A cold-blooded, profit-only machine built on the strength of the Coca-Cola brand, on our belief that we can become an iconic company again."

Wall Street, which always values numbers, is skeptical of this. The declaration was dismissed, but under the agitation of the declaration, the company has been enthusiastic. As Isdell said: The manifesto was drafted by 150 presidents, but the execution rested on the entire staff. Much like a remake of the original in the Philippines, Isdell has once again used his trump card – motivating employees and leading by example. Many employees remember the scene when he rolled up his sleeves and knelt on the ground to code Coke bottles with the employees. Isdell concluded afterwards: Motivating employees was like a trick, and I said to them, "Okay, this is your company, this is our company, how can we solve problems? You know how to run a business, so you must Know the solution. I don't want to find a bunch of external consultants to solve the problem, we have the ability to rely on internal staff to correct mistakes."

And his most important management lesson from this is "learn to mobilize your team" : You can be the best accountant, technician or global strategist in the world, you can work 100 hours a week, but the people who are at the forefront of the market are the employees of the company, and you can't if you don't mobilize them Become a successful business leader.

This revolution in belief brought employees and management together again, and since then, the "Beverage Industry Empire" has begun to step out of the quagmire.

Subsequently, Isdell began a drastic reform: he purged the senior staff of the Coca-Cola Company, worked hard to promote the adjustment of the company's system to avoid "hardening of the blood transfusion function", and adjusted the senior executives in charge of branding, marketing, bottling and other businesses in an all-round way. , and strive to increase marketing costs, especially advertising expenditures. He pushed through the restructuring of the decentralized bottling business, pushing new products such as Coke Zero and Minute Maid that proved to be hugely successful when the company's management team expressed skepticism. He continued and innovated Coca-Cola's consistent participation in corporate social responsibility-related activities, and maintained Coca-Cola's corporate and product brands. By the time Eyo left office in 2009, Coca-Cola had achieved a competitive advantage over its major rivals in most markets around the world. These drastic reforms have worked, in large part, thanks to his low-key sneaking in at the beginning of his tenure.

At the beginning of his tenure, Isdell agreed with the board of directors for a five-year period. From his first year on the job, he has been considering his successor and has deliberately paved the way. He believes that when he retires again, the strategy he formulated "must be able to guide the direction of the company for a long time. This has to be a lasting strategy, and it has to be recognized by my successor and based on it."

The media often ask him the question "what did you leave for Coca-Cola?" He has only one answer: unless my successor succeeds, I have nothing left.