In 2017, under the leadership of The Coca-Cola Company’s Chairman and CEO James Quincey, our company began a journey to change our culture. We would need our people to be curious, empowered, agile and iterative, exhibiting what we call growth behaviors.
“We need to have lots of curiosity about how things could be different, could be better, and how we respond to the way things are changing and then, of course, there needs to be some courage to try new things,” Quincey told analysts in a July 2017 earnings call.
For a 134-year-old organization like The Coca-Cola Company, this was a call to action. We are extremely proud of our heritage and our history, and we have built brands that are recognized by consumers globally. We also recognized that it was time to evolve to become a total beverage company and focus more on the needs of consumers. It was important for us to listen, experiment, and fail—and be okay with it. Typically when you try something new, there’s a 50 percent chance of failing. For a culture like ours, failing was not an option. Or was it? Perhaps smart failures would be an important part of our learning, too.
This is the story of our business and cultural transformation starting with a reset of our business strategy. We took a step-by-step build approach over a four-year time period to set the foundation right, and then learn and iterate. In this journey, we leveraged technology to the fullest, digitized and scaled solutions to create consistency in experience and self-reliance on behalf of the people and their managers. Our intent was to build a high-performing and learning organization that is humble and agile.
