Stewarding an Iconic Brand Through Change | James Quincey with Declan Kelly

For nearly 140 years, The Coca-Cola Company has grown by building one of the most enduring and recognizable brand systems in the world, expanding across markets and categories while maintaining a level of global consistency. 

That scale and reach became a defining strength, but it also required a new approach as consumer behavior, technology, and expectations evolved.

When James Quincey became Chairman and CEO, he approached that moment with a mindset shaped by engineering and operational discipline. Rather than relying solely on precedent, he focused on how complex systems perform under changing conditions.

Under his leadership, The Coca-Cola Company expanded its portfolio, evolving into a total beverage company while modernizing its operating model. The intent was not to diminish the brand’s legacy, but to protect it by ensuring the system around it remained fit for the future.

In this episode of Grey Matter, Quincey sits down with Consello Founder, Chairman and CEO Declan Kelly to discuss what it takes to lead an iconic institution through change, balancing preservation with progress.

In this conversation, Quincey discusses:

•How an engineering background informed his approach to leadership and decision-making
•Why simplifying parts of the organization became a way to strengthen focus 
•Streamlining the portfolio while innovating for the future
•How leaders act decisively without waiting for perfect information
•Why “everything communicates” inside an organization, from dress code  to operating decisions
•The responsibility of protecting the core of an iconic brand while still innovating offerings

About Consello

Consello is an Advisory and Investing Platform with offices in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Dublin, Belfast, London, Barcelona, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.

Consello’s distinct advisory practices provide the complete strategic counsel today’s leaders need to grow and transform their organizations. Consello’s advisory expertise spans Corporate Advisory; M&A; Management Consulting; Talent; and Sports and Entertainment. Dedicated teams operate in each practice, led by a leadership group with deep operational experience across industries, business growth stages and market cycles and with an expansive set of global corporate relationships.

Consello’s investment business, Consello Capital, identifies high-potential mid-market companies and invests capital and expertise to transform their growth.

Transcript

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the world was changing. There was an era of ways companies were run, particularly large US companies, that was ending. The style of many CEOs, as you look across the landscape of the S&P 500, there was a generational shift that happened over the last ten years. And I think we were at the front end of what was going on. Welcome to Grey Matter. I'm Declan Kelly, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Consello. I've spent the last 30+ years advising the CEOs who are leading the world's top companies. If there's one thing I've learned in that time, the best leaders think differently. That wiring, that grey matter separates the truly exceptional leaders from everyone else. Understanding it is what allows us at Consello to help the best in the world be even better. This podcast exists because the most accomplished leaders agreed to sit down and talk about something they rarely discuss publicly, how their minds actually work. For nearly 140 years, the Coca-Cola Company has thrived on a simple formula, a secret recipe, a brand built on heritage and emotion, and of course, fans worldwide. When James Quincey stepped in to lead one of the most important and recognizable companies in the world, he brought with him an approach grounded in engineering principles and probabilistic thinking. The timing turned out to be very prescient. When he took over in 2017, consumer preferences were rapidly shifting. Digital platforms were reshaping how brands engaged with consumers. His response was both symbolic and surgical. He showed up in jeans on day one, signaling change was clearly coming. Then he streamlined the portfolio while also expanding into waters, sports drinks and coffees, becoming a total beverage company. This is a story about what happens when a different kind of leader arrives at exactly the right moment. This is Grey Matter. James Quincy. Welcome to Grey Matter. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time. I really appreciate it. You're welcome. Did you ever imagine having grown up in Birmingham and, you know, trained to be an engineer, to suddenly be in, in Coca-Cola running the Coca-Cola Company? What did that feel like, the day you walked through the doors for the first time as a leader of the business. So one no, I never imagined I'd be CEO of Coca-Cola or anywhere else for that matter when I was young. The journey of coming in on the first day. I think there are, there are two bits of it that are kind of interesting one is when they offer you the job, they don't ask you if you're going to accept it, which was kind of entertaining. Normally you'd ask someone if they said yes, and it's assumed that yes. Which actually talks a little bit about the weight of history that sits over the job and the company. And that first day, of course, there are an amazing amount of expectations, anxiety, nervousness, and probably every other emotion under the sun and the employees, the investors, the wider world, because it is such a well-known, brand and company and all that sits on you. And I have to say, the thing that, I carried in with me was, I've got a point of view, and I'm going to go for it. And I remember when Muhtar called you aside and said, you know, it's going to be you. He described it in that moment as a generation skipping decision, because you were 52 at the time, and traditionally that was not the way the company made decisions. They picked people older, later in their career, etc. It turns out to have been quite prescient because the times that came after that were close, you know, Covid, everything else and unexpectedly tumultuous globally. And so it turns out that having somebody younger, with a totally different perspective on the world actually ended up being a very, very, very good thing for the company. Yeah. I think again, perhaps, as you say presciently, the world was changing. There was an era of ways you know, companies were run, particularly large US companies, that was ending. The style of many CEOs, as you look across the landscape of the S&P 500, there was a generational shift that happened over the last ten years. And I think we were at the front end of what was going on. Obviously went in parallel with the emergence of a lot of the tech sectors. So there was this shift, I think, already happening in general. And by making a skip in the generation choosing not just me, but a gen, a new generation of leadership that was that was already on the front edge of this wave of where the world was going, helped us unlock a lot of things that drove the growth that then came. So I think it's actually a we are an example, a microcosm of what has happened around us. Perhaps we were at the front end. And when you were growing up in Birmingham, again, you went to college and became an engineer. Your father was a chemist. Biochemist. And I assume that analytical capability, that very, very exacting sort of approach to things and reasoning, which, as we'll talk about in a moment, became a really central part of your leadership style. I assume you prepared you were, as it turns out, prepared very well for the job because of that. Would you agree with that? Certainly. There's an aspect of the job, for which all that background matters a lot. You know, not just, the analytical reasoning, but even more specifically, kind of there's a thing in electronics called Boolean logic, which is actually the fundamental underlying idea behind coding, or one of the underlying ideas behind coding that really is about there's a logic tree to most things. Also the kind of the, the kind of, grounded, an engineer is not about theory. It's about getting stuff done. It's about the pragmatic reality thing. Of course, there's some theory in it, but it's it's, you know, typically there's the, the sciences, which are the developing the theories and the engineers are putting them into practice. And so there's some element there of, yes, you learn theory, but it's like it has to turn into something. Every week you turn up at university and you're making something and it's got to work. Otherwise it fails or the experiment fails. Then you got to kind of say, why did it fail and where are we going next? So I think that combination of the deep analytics, the numbers and it's got to work in the real world was super helpful. Absolutely. That is not the only skill of being CEO, but it very much helped that I ended up with a kind of a probabilistic view of the world, which then became very important as we went on. And I think history will show that your leadership of the company involved a completely different way of running the company than had been the case in the past. Not that anything was wrong with the way it was run in the past, but you were forced to do things differently. You had to take out a lot more costs. You had to simplify the business. You had to remake the relationship with the rest of the ecosystem. You killed over 250 zombie brands. You totally, radically changed the way people thought of the company. It was like when Larry Culp, who was being interviewed on his series, got rid of the GE Lipo. It’s unthinkable. But now it seems also logical because of how the world has changed around you. So that thinking during that time, how much of that was sort of learned behavior, how much of it was organic to you and how much of it was situational? I think most of most of, what ends up being is some combination of all of the above. It’s situational or it's organic, it's intuitive, but in the end, it's analytically correct. And so if you would’ve ask me on day one, did I foresee everything that would come? The answer is no. But I knew the direction of travel in general, and I knew specifically the next few things that needed to be done. And as they were being executed on, I was able to see the next wave of the next few things that needed to be done. So if you look at the last nine, ten years, what it is not one constant set of ten things. It is waves of 3 or 4 things that each build on each other and lead to continued growth over the long term. And that's and each one, it's kind of like if you going over lots of rolling hills, you can see the top of the hill, you get as you get there, you see the next one and you can you can see where the journey is going to take you, but you kind of know you're heading that way, but not the exact topography of all the twists and turns that you're going to face somewhere down the road. But at the center of it, though, this is the world’s biggest marketing company. Fundamentally, this business markets the most important brand in the world and has done for a century and a half. And the idea of being a cost centric, cost native business where you focus on everything and what it cost before you figure out what you spend, was new. And so you brought a completely different, ideology to how the company was run. And I remember being here that entire time, and it was anathema to lots of people’s thinking. But if you are not a cost driven business today, people would say, oh my God, what are you doing? Because everyone else has had to follow suit. But again, you were forced, which is the history of the company finding the right moment at the right time to be in the right place and make the right decision as a leader in the industry. That is going to be one of your biggest legacies, which was critical to the growth of the business. Yeah. And then that there was this there was just a central feeling. You have to do the right thing on each variable. And by what, by that, I mean, you know, one of the first ones we did was what’s known internally as lean center, which was reducing the size of the corporate office of all the previous attempts at cost reduction they had largely not touched the Atlanta head office. And the simple reality was it was too big. We were expending too many resources with too little output from the head office and not investing enough in the brands. I mean, and everyone knew it was true. It was. It was not rocket science to know that was true. The hard part was to go, now we're going to change it. And so I think there's an important element here. One of the hardest things for leaders to do is to make the decision. People say like, I'd love to be a CEO. And I go why. And they go well you do all these cool things. There's lots of exciting. I said, trust me, none of the cool stuff comes to the top. Everything that's nice and easy has been done or decided by someone else. The stuff that ends up to you and it's kind of well talked about, I'm well known is the difficult decisions, imperfect information, uncertain set of choices, unknowns about the future world. No one's going to make those hard decisions for you. And that's what the ultimately the leadership is about. And having the courage to go no the head office needs to be a lot smaller. And everyone’s like, yeah, we knew that. Well, okay, but you didn't do it, and now we're going to do it. And then you can redirect those resources to growth and really drive the business and give the best people an opportunity to shine. Because the other thing that happens is when there's too much, of a resource, the A players go, well, what's the point the C players are getting almost the same bonus. Why am I doing the extra mile? No, it has to be we're here for the A players and we're going to drive the business. And the CEO, one of the number one things they have to do is make the courageous decisions that everyone knows is true, but no one's going to make it for you. Of course, this company is very different in that it sits in an ecosystem and not many people understand that outside of the business, because you have so many partners are central to the relationship matrix of everything that goes on. Doing this kind of a thing and bringing that community along with you because, you know, they've seen huge change over multiple decades. Company has, you know, gone from one extreme to the other in terms of its relationship with them and how they work together. That can't have been easy bringing, you know, they may have been willing, but you still have to bring everybody along with you. Yeah. I mean, look, any change is always difficult. In whichever direction you want to change it’s going to be complicated. What was important about the refranchising was not just we were able to find a whole set of families and investors who wanted to dedicate themselves to being in this ecosystem, in this relationship with the Coca-Cola Company. And they were great at being bottlers, about chasing the details, about managing large numbers of people, about deploying huge amounts of capital, none of which we were particularly good at. The bit that goes with that is knowing what you actually are good at and sticking to your own swim lane. There's this there's often a case, you know, having sat through this for a number of years, where you get business proposals from people in the field that fall into one of two camps. While we're doing this thing for, you know, in ten different ways, why don't we just do it once? The sort of centralization view of the world. The other is, well, if we vertically integrated, you know, we're already doing this and we're buying it from everyone else, why don't we just do it? I mean, like, then we could eliminate they’re profit margin. Both of them assume that you can do it better. They make an implicit assumption that is never verbalized. And the reality is someone else is doing it because they're better at it. And actually we're not good at it. So then you have to draw a line on vertical integration. Otherwise why buy anything from anyone else? The reason you do is they’re better at it, they have scale, they have capabilities, they have better economics. Stay in your swim lane. And we had not had the discipline to stay doing what we were good at the marketing, the innovation, the kind of the franchise strategy of the brands and the portfolio. And by doing that and resisting the temptation to do someone else's business, we grew faster and they grew faster. Like getting out of each other's way made us both much better and the same with centralization. There needs to be some degree of competition of ideas, a bit like a capitalist economy. You know, if there's only ever one idea, there's nothing new. And so there has to be some allowance for that in order to drive the ecosystem forward and becomes a bit of a struggle of ideas. But when you align around one and stick to your swim lane, it's the most powerful system. I've heard you talk before about, you know, how simplicity is such a critical part of the success of the company. In fact, one could say way back to 1886 when John Pemberton started selling his elixir for life. That will be 140 years old next year. That he really all he cared about was something simple. Just a very simple moment within arm's reach of desire, as you call it later. When this company has historically deviated from that over many, many, many, many decades, it hasn't gone well. But when you keep it simple, it has. Yep. How do you inculcate that culture across the whole company when you're changing so quickly as a marketing firm? And how are you able to do that? Because I think it's fascinating on a human level. And you get people to follow you so many, so many tens and hundreds of thousands of people. People love the result, but they don't love the process. This is by its very essence of being a marketing company, an expansive company. We want to do more brands. We want to do more products. We want to have more ideas. We want to have more campaigns. We want to engage more consumers. We want to engage more customers. It's an expansive idea, and the culture that gets created there is expansive, which is why you have to worry about the consequence and the unintended consequences, which tends to be extra cost because they're doing lots of stuff. And the tail end of the failed projects that aren't killed and when you mentioned, you mentioned earlier the killing off the zombie SKUs and the zombie brands, and the reason I ended up, I wanted to call them zombies, actually, there was a great deal of resistance to me calling them zombies, because that was I was being mean about them. I was denigrating them somewhat. I'm like, no, I'm evoking a simple idea for people on if this thing is growing, it's tiny and it's never going to grow again. It's a zombie. It needs to be put out of its misery. But that's the simply calling it a zombie. Mobilizes the system around now we know what we're looking for. Let's take them all out. Even though and again, I was here, thank God when I saw it happen. Everyone loves their individual brands. And so when their zombie is put to sleep, of course they take it very personally. And at the time, it must have been quite difficult to get, you know, to have 250 funerals, so to speak. It was difficult. I'll come back to it like the problem keeps coming back. Think of it. Think of it simply though and then this sort of explanation works. I've got we've got 30 million customers around the world. Outlets we visit every week. There's about 16 million pieces of our own cold drink equipment out there. It’s single door, it has so many shelves. There's only so many bottles, accounts you can put in there. Every zombie that's in there that doesn't sell, is occupying space that could sell something else. That's not just good for the Coca-Cola Company, it's good for the consumer. They get what they want. It's good for the retailer. They can sell and make more money. It's good for the bottler. They cover their overheads. So it is actually a disservice to everyone by keeping something in that corner that doesn't sell the zombie. And you take it out. And when you say it like that people are like, okay, that makes sense. Now, as you said, that doesn't necessarily mean the consumers love the fact you've killed their favorite brand. There are a couple of brands, for example, here in the US where people constantly try and get us to relaunch. In fact, there was one campaign on Surge. We did go out with a limited edition run and came back with it when still not in full service on it. And Tab some some of the viewers may remember Tab. I don't know who's done it, but someone has paid for an outdoor billboard just down the road that basically says bring back Tab. So some have actually spent a lot of money to try and convince me we should have a limited edition run of Tab. So these consumers love their brands. I love the fact that they love their brands, but they have to make economic sense for everyone in the ecosystem. We mentioned marketing earlier and how important it is to this company. How is your view of marketing evolved over the 30 years of your tenure with the company? Because the consumer today is obviously very different, has a different buying pattern, different set of needs, and expects to be spoken to in a very different way. How do you think about that now? This is one of the great, marriages that has to happen in the company. Let's take the brand Coca-Cola, a brand that is unchanging in the almost 140 years. Basically still got the same formula, original taste, similar shaped bottle shape hasn't changed, color red white, script. I mean, there's so many unchanging elements of this thing. And yet over the century and more we have had to make the marketing relevant to every generation of consumers. So the Coca-Cola Company was one of the first to put ads for vouchers in newspapers. We were one of the first to do giveaway influence. We were one of the first to do outdoor advertising, radio, television, arguably a little late in social media. But as the new platforms have taken on, you’ve got to engage with consumers in ways that are relevant for them. That's what you've got to do. So there's a huge amount of innovation that goes on in how to engage on a marketing sense with a brand that is relatively unchanging. I guess human values, which are relatively unchanging. The magic is to bring that to life for every generation through the marketing medium that most works for them. And what do you think AI is going to do to that, or will it have any impact? Look, AI is definitely going to revolutionize marketing, but I'm not sure exactly how it's going to end up. And there's a spectrum here. On the one end of the spectrum, you can imagine that AI will dramatically reduce the unit costs of making an ad, so it can help advertisers make many more. And because of the nature of the technology, it can make it much more personalized, to you, towards you in any sort of medium. So you can see an explosion of advertising, creativity and personalization. On the other end of the spectrum, you could find that consumers are driven crazy by the number of ads and seeing themselves pasted in, we could have Declan pasted into all your ads. You might go that's enough of that. I don't want to see that. Definitely. There we go. And I actually find that consumers use AI to block all the advertising. So this can be used in two completely different ways. And you might find that instead of way more personalized ads, that what you want to spend money and time on is things that are live. Because if you want to be in a live event, you can you need to be there. But again, if you look at some of how live music is changing, live sports are changing, there's a tremendous intersection with digital online and AI. So I think it's going to profoundly change the nature of marketing and the costs of marketing and where people invest their money, but it’s not going to change human motivations and it’s not going to change the core values of our brands. It will be about us doing justice to how do we engage with consumers, as every generation of Coke managers has done all the way back to newspaper ads. Everywhere you go, the brands that you represent, everywhere you can see them from the moon, you can see them everywhere. It is an awesome responsibility to have the responsibility to be the guardian of these brands. Do you ever think about it in that context? Everybody in the world loves what you get to decide on every day. They all have a point of view. Do you ever stop to think about the enormity of that responsibility? No. I think if you did, you might start, kind of getting afraid. You’ve got to make some courageous decisions and big decisions along the way. The other thing is, I'm not I'm not changing the Coke brand. Like, in a way, one of my number one objectives is to not let anyone mess with it. And so, you know, part of what you're describing is the like iconography that's been installed over decades of history. Like, imagine if I, if I let someone come along and change it. No there's a bit that has to part of the magic of that story is that you can see stuff that's been there from the 60s and beyond. Like, I have a I have a piece of coke. It's an outdoor sign that was stuck on the outside of a mom and pop store, but it's from Cuba. It's in Spanish, it's from Cuba. I got it up on my wall to remember one of the previous CEOs. But that's that's from the 50s. Like there's a bit here that that part of the objective is to protect the enduring authenticity of the brand whilst the marketing changes underneath. And so saying no to a whole load of things that people might get creative on is part of what needs to be done. So in a way, it's easy because the answer's no. You can't change it. As you look forward with this company, how do you see the whole subject of consumption changing and how people consume your brands, not how they receive them or how they hear them, but actually how they consume them and the occasions, because there's 2 billion occasions a day, right, in reality around the world, somewhere. So how do you think about that? Yes, the industry is changing. I mean, the the underlying fundamentals that have created growth in the industry are very simple economic growth, urbanization, the growth of the, across the world of bringing all the economies, all the countries into the economy. So the underlying growth drivers of the industry, have been enduring for a very long time. If you do a little, the engineer in me if you do a histogram of industry growth, it's super concentrated around a few numbers, like 4 or 5% growth each year. So it's it's an enduring growth industry because it's got very profound underlying structural factors driving that. Now how and what people drink changes over time depending on how good the companies are in marketing their own products, how their lives evolve, but many things remain enduring. Having a drink with a meal, having a drink with friends, having a pick me up sometimes in the day, having a recovery, like the the and actually a lot of the structural occasions are pretty constant. And so it becomes around satisfying the enduring occasions, the needs with changing lifestyles and that actually creates different needs for different subcategories within the beverage industry. So it is a constant need to follow the consumer to see where the world is going and to make adjustments to the portfolio, whether that be categories, package sizes, channels they're sold in, price points, whatever it is to to best fit with the consumer. I guess that was the genius of the Total Beverage Company, where you basically came out and unveiled a completely different strategy, which again, lots of people didn't really understand at the beginning, and then they understood it very quickly once they saw the effectiveness of it. Yeah, I mean, it was the Total Beverage Strategy, like you said, was about following the consumer. If the consumer wants a drink, we're going to make sure we're the leader. So we're a leader in every category around the globe. But the other piece that then went with it, which kind of relates to the previous question, is even though we set the total beverage category, which is about then getting profoundly good at each category, was they still kept thinking, you know, it was going to go wrong every year. So we added to that, all weather. Because it was like, okay, total beverage that worked last year. What about this year? No, it's an all weather strategy. It goes back to the simple idea. There are profound reasons the industry grows and there are some structural competitive advantages for the Coke system, which is why we're not just a leader, but we win each year a little more share. And that that you just follow the model for a few decades. And it's the incredible value creation machine. And the number one challenge then becomes being clear on deciding what's not going to change and what absolutely has to change to keep up. First meeting you had here, first town hall, you arrived in a pair of jeans. You didn't hold up a bottle of Coca-Cola and say, you know, I'm going to drink it like everybody else. You have brought in an informality to that working environment, but an unbelievable, unprecedented rigor to the operating focus of the company, where every single metric is measured to an insane degree of, of, specificity. Because it's about having a plan and understanding that everything you do communicates. I think a lot of managers make the mistake of thinking that what's on the PowerPoint is 90% of the message. It's not even close to that amount. And the example of wearing the jeans is when we did the announcement of me taking over, we did the town halls, the press releases, and all the normal things you have in a corporate transition. And if you'd done a survey of employees the next week, I said, what's the number one thing they remember? It was that he wore jeans and it wasn't a Friday, but it wasn't an accident. It was a purposeful choice because it very much comes from the idea that everything communicates. And the all the messaging would turn into a kind of cloud of words, but the symbology of doing something that was instantly memorable, told them change was coming. And so there was nothing accidental about it. It was all part of a strategy to communicate. We're going to change, and this is the direction we're going in. And you also wanted to tell them I'm one of you. Basically, I look like you. I dressed like you. I come to work just like you. And that I think, really did resonate with people because you did not take a decision. And again, I witnessed it. You didn't take a decision or ask people to do something that you wouldn't have done yourself. So culturally quite different. Again, quite deliberate. Absolutely. I mean, part of the jeans was about the culture is going to change. It's going to be more direct. It is what it is and really drive it into and and to kind of be more egalitarian in terms of the structuring. It’s not a it's not socialism, but it's like we need to drive this together. We have to get away from some of our very historic, very hierarchical. I mean, one of the reasons we ended up with so much cost in the corporate center it was very hierarchical. Everything had to go through many layers and processes. It's like it was expensive and it was slow and that was no longer fit for purpose. You know, most things that got created made sense when they were created and they may have lost their way. They may have still been good for a different time, but they were not what we needed going forward. And so it was really all about constructing and reinforcing a singular message that we needed to be a different company. We needed to get back to growth. We’d spent a decade with revenue growing at about 3% and earnings per share flat at $2. It was it was almost an inside joke among the analysts Coke will never get out of $2 a share, we had to draw a line in the sand and say, no, now change is coming. We're going to get back to growth of the top, top line and at the bottom line. And therefore everything that came had to follow that logic. The one thing that I say to managers, imagine if you were scoring yourself on a change management process, every time you do something that's consistent with the change your espousing, you get one point. And every time you do something that's not consistent with what you're espousing, you get minus ten. How would you do? Because that's how people experience it. The dissonant things you do are very disproportionately weighted in their minds. So you have to be ruthlessly coherent with what you're asking for. One of our collective mentors and great friends now long since passed. Sadly, Don Keyhoe used to talk about something called the consequences of the consequences. And I remember the day you were appointed. He called me up and he said, this guy understands the consequences of the consequences. I think that really does sum up the way you think as a leader, because even as evidenced in this interview, you think about things beyond their, here and now. And is that something that you constantly seek to refresh intellectually like in what you read and how you think and who you speak to? Let me let me throw out a couple of ideas. There's one thing from Coke history that I love, and it's so true and useful. The previous and famous CEO of Coke, Robert Woodruff, wrote almost 90 years ago on the 50th anniversary of the Coca-Cola Company a speech, which didn't have a title when he wrote it. Speeches were shorter in those days. It was one and a half pages, typewritten, and he had not given it the title. And he wrote on in pencil a title for the speech The Future Belongs to the Discontented. That idea that no matter what's happened today or in the past, whether you've had miserable performance, okay performance or you've knocked it out of the park, that doesn't guarantee you the future. None of them do. And you've got to be discontented if you want to be great in the future. And it's a it's a simple idea. One of the things I love is the ideas that organize everything around you, that the those simple ideas and the, the old saying the pen is mightier than the sword. If you can find the simple idea, it organizes everything almost on its own because it's so clear for people what to do. So that's the first thing. And then, you know, getting into my own mind it’s kind of a parallel of the discontented. I'm always experimenting. Like last year, probably the management team was. I spent way too much daydreaming and lost in my own mind. But that's part of my thought process is just going over things in my head. And I wonder what would happen to this. Like, oh, like, why would that make sense? And just that kind of it's not quite skepticism, but it's in that kind of space. Okay. Well why does that make sense? And then exploring any variations in the like well that doesn't quite like the what happens if we just it's it's I mean it's downside is it’s almost daydreaming, but it's really the constant process of testing the logic of every scenario, which is then of course leads you to, well, if if that happens, what happens next? Because you know, whatever you do, you'll have side effects. It'll cause other people to react. What happens then. And you can keep following the train. And so whether it's the thinking it through or the old saying of just keep asking why and why is that and you don't like the answer, so tell me why that it's it's that curiosity and exploration of where does this lead, whether it's thinking about a company, reading books, checking out new ideas. You know, I, I laugh with the family, they'll watch anything and I'm like, I don't watch. I don't want to watch anything that hasn't got a plot. Like they'll watch all the reality. I like I have no interest in them, like nothing's happening. I'd like to see the plot. What's the idea? Because every plot has an idea. You've done an awful lot in a very short period of time. You've done so much and certain things have occurred, Covid and other things, of course, that necessitated that happening. What's the one thing when many years from now, you're not here and you've left the company and you've retired? What is the one thing in the DNA of this company that you hope is preserved from your time here? Well, and now you've added the in my in my time here. I don't have to say that they look after and preserve the Coca-Cola brand. I think they should look back and go. He said, I wish I'd gone faster. Because how many CEOs have you ever met who've said, I wish I went slower? None that I've ever met. And so it's, you know, and I know that's a kind of circular function, because once you know what you want to do, of course, it's like you're impatient to get it done. But so much of what happens actually could be done quicker. And if you talk about the creating the value of the microwave or whatever, really, we know it goes back to that idea right at the beginning. The organization knows a lot of what needs to be done. How can we get it done faster? We're in every country. We're in every category. So what drives growth next? Getting things done faster. James. This section of the interview is called The Uncharted Path. It's where I ask you quickfire questions that you don't have time to think about. And then you're going to give me the answer. Okay. First of all, explain where we are. Let's take a look around here. This is Robert Woodruff's office. Robert Woodruff, was the legendary CEO of the Coca-Cola Company for many, many, many decades. From the early 20s he was still involved in the company in the, in the 70s. But there's presidents and people for many, many years. And this was this is literally his office preserved. It's very cool. And everyone's aware of the history because you have the Woodruff Cup and all the things that go with that, which recognize exceptional talent and performance inside the company each year. And yet, the reason that people remember Woodruff is he didn't actually have any children. Oh wow. And so he donated all of his shares to a Woodruff Foundation. So if you go around Atlanta, you find if you know what his name was. Woodruff. Winship, all these sort of things. You will find the Woodruff Arts Center, the Winship Cancer Center at Emory, like a huge portion of the city is actually being held by the donations that basically came from Woodruff and the use of his Coca-Cola shares to drive the success of the city. It's unbelievable. Give me an example of one of the decisions you've made that went against your instincts as a CEO. But you did it anyway because you thought, that's the advice I've been given. And I decided to take the advice and do it. Look, I'm always tempted on this sort of question, by using the Frank Sinatra or Sid Vicious answer which is regrets I've got a few, but then again, too few to mention. But I'll add a little more to that, which is normally when it's happened, there's been something where my my gut, my intuition was like, just doesn't quite feel right yet. And for whatever reason, I've let people go off and do it. And then let's exploded in our faces and I'm like, I should have stopped them. And that characterizes the vast majority of all the ones where things have gone wrong. Okay. What's one thing about you that nobody knows or would be surprised to know? Not nobody knows, but will be surprised to know about you. That doesn't come up in the day job every day. It doesn't. I'm an Aston Villa fan. Oh well, we all have our problems, anything else? And particularly this year. What else? I love skiing, and I'm running out of knees, but I love skiing. When did you last change your mind about something important? And what did you learn from it? In a funny way, I change my mind quite often. And that's because. And and we didn't talk about it. Being an engineer, I kind of have a probablistic view of the world. So I very rarely think that this is right and will always be right or this is wrong and will always be wrong. You know, circumstances in life change. And so I kind of like, I can drift up and down the spectrum without problem. And, and, there was a famous saying about, you know, one of the most important things is to be able to hold contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. So I can sit there and think, well, actually, X makes sense. And in the same time consider that it makes no sense at all and think which one do I actually. So I think that ability to think in probabilities and to be able to compare and contrast completely contradictory ideas in a kind of unbiased way is useful. What's one part of your personality that you've tried to either evolve or keep in check over the course of your time as CEO? One of the things that I've had to learn to be better at is doing big people events. It doesn't come naturally to me. And you don't like talking about yourself, which I know makes you very uncomfortable in doing this. I know. Which I'm very grateful for. I know I agree 100%. Okay. Two more. So give me an example of something that looked like failure at the time when you guys made a decision or you did it, you did something but ended up being an accelerator against your expectations. And you were very that at the end, how it worked out. Look there, there have been a number of investments we've made, and it's partly the nature of the business that there was a lot of questioning as to whether they were going to work, including at times I'm like, man, is this ever going to. Is this ever going to. I mean, the most recent success story is Fairlife when it was 12 years in the making. It's a boom. Every other competitors trying to get into protein and protein meals. But there were times like, is this ever going to be a big thing? It was it was tiny. Has problems. And like people are like, no, it's crazy. And like, you got to keep the faith. Someone has to keep the faith to get a new idea to be big. Without a few real, dedicated evangelists nothing small ever gets big in the beverage industry. And there was a guy, Mike McCloskey, and his team, but he needed support and like and there were plenty of people like this in there. And he kept the faith. And sometimes you’re like, oh my God, another problem, and you almost lose it. But then it turned out right. Okay. Last question. Best piece of advice you've ever received in your life? And who was it from? That's a super competitive list. Super competitive. Or you can name more than one. I think I think, look, I, we talked about it in the, in the, in the main interview. I think Woodruff on The Future Belongs to the Discontented is super important. I think everything communicated when you're a manager and a CEO, is super important. I could keep going down the list, but, I mean, those two are super relevant. For our business, I think that the the third one, you know, over the years, I had a whole series of just completely, wildly different personalities, and they each produced a nugget. And so, there's no one form of leadership. They were super leaders, but they were all very different. And they've each helped build me with different nuggets of advice. There'll be people like, oh, James, don't be so black and white kind of you know, there's a little more gray here. And others, it's it's just help get formed by different people. There's no one person who can who can help you build a portfolio of thinking. Well, whoever did it, I think they did a good job. I appreciate you, man. Thanks. Thank you so much for taking the time. Good. Thank you.