Neville Isdell took the reins of a company experiencing more fizzle than sizzle when he became head of Coca-Cola in 2004.
Investors were losing confidence, the company was still reeling from mass layoffs a few years earlier and McDonald’s, one of the company’s key partners, was entertaining a switch to rival Pepsi after a Coke executive gloated that a recently signed contract with Subway was better than the one forged with the world’s dominant burger chain.
In his book, “Inside Coca-Cola: A CEO’s Life Story of Building the World’s Most Popular Brand,” Isdell talks about the challenges facing him when he left retirement to lead one of the world’s most recognizable brands.
He was called to Atlanta to succeed Douglas Daft, who departed after a short, difficult tenure. Isdell ran Coke until mid-2008, when he was succeeded by current CEO Muhtar Kent.
The 241-page book, written with the help of former Atlanta Journal-Constitution staffer David Beasley, looks at Isdell’s life, from his childhood in his native Ireland, to his teen through early adulthood years in Africa, to his climb up the ranks of Coca-Cola.
The book doesn’t dwell on controversies, such as water usage in India or the New Coke debacle (which he was not part of), but focuses more on how the work shaped his character, his personal triumphs and failures, and odd business moments like Coke’s initial foray into Moscow in which everyone drank from a glass chained to a machine.
“The coin mechanisms on the vending machines often would be broken so attendants would stand there to take the customer’s money,” he wrote “Each customer would drink Coke from the glass cup with the chain still attached. The next customer would drink from the same, unwashed cup. Clearly, we had a long way to go.”
Along the way he meets Nelson Mandela, for whose freedom he protested as a college student in South Africa, devises a clever way to go head-to-head in drinking with Russians during negotiations to bring Coke to the nation, and gets in trouble judging a beauty contest.
In a telephone interview, Isdell talked about some of his experiences.
Q: Why write a book?
A: I've always wanted to write a book. I had outlined one 20 years ago about growing up in Africa, basically what is the first few chapters of this book. But there are a lot of great books on the bookshelves with those experiences, so I thought there was enough of that. But when I would tell people around the dinner table about my experiences with Coke, they would tell me I needed to write a book, especially my daughter.
Q: This isn’t your typical dry business tome. You really get into the behind-the-scenes of Coca-Cola, warts and all. Why take this approach?
A: I really wanted it to be a memoir and anecdotal. I tried to weave around business things that happened and the fun things that happened. There are lots of things that are not in there because I only had space for roughly 80,000 words.
Q: You say that when God created the world, he created Coke first and Pepsi second.
A: It's a tongue-in-check comment that I make. Don't take that literally. It's one of the great competitive battles between brands and companies in the world. The competition is what's grown this category.
Q: One of the personal challenges you talk about is suffering from stage fright, that even as the boss, you would be nervous in big speeches before the rank and file?
A: I still get stage fright. You're go through the meeting in your mind and you're trying to figure out why you're putting yourself through this. Then after it's over, someone asks you to come to speak at their meeting and you immediately say yes. But I've learned that if I'm not nervous, I don't do well.
Q: The road to lead Coke was a long one for you. You were sent everywhere, from the Philippines to India to Eastern Europe, but you retired without making it to the top. It was only after Coke was floundering that you got your shot.
A: I was the one given turnaround situations. That's what I enjoyed. I did a lot of "new frontiers" work. But I didn't expect to go back. I was happy in retirement. When I was 53 I wrote a strategy for retirement because I saw a lot of people retire who didn't know what to do. I wanted to stay intellectually engaged and to keep moving. This was one of those challenges that kept me engaged.
Q: Coke allowed you to participate in a lot of historic moments, the fall of the Berlin Wall, installing the first neon sign (a Coca-Cola sign) in Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union or being in the office of Turkish President Turgut Ozal as he spoke to former President George Bush during the first strikes on Iraq. Who knew selling a soft drink would be so intertwined with historic human events?
A: Jimmy Carter once said he liked to talk to Paul Austin, the head of Coca-Cola when [he was president] because he got better intelligence about what was happening around the world from Coca-Cola than he could from the State Department.
Q: In your career, both as Coke’s leader and in various roles with the company, you brought a lot of bottlers under one umbrella. How do you feel about Coca-Cola’s acquisition a little more than a year ago of Cola-Cola Enterprises, the largest bottler in North America?
A: I'm not going to comment on that. But I will say that I did try to bring that about, but I wasn't able to do it.
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