240 InManagersWeTrust
adds value “to everyone who touches it.” Shareholders, bottlers,
Coke’s customers, and end consumers all benefit from Coke. Goi-
zueta emphasized particularly Coke’s relationships with its bottlers.
Throughout the world, a once-fragmented group of bottlers increas-
ingly consolidated on a country-by-country basis—in Japan, Ger-
many, and elsewhere—to gain substantial competitive advantages. As
for the customers, many restaurants must sell three hamburgers to
make the same profit they make from selling a large Coke. Coke
went out of its way to let its customers know this.
Conquering Economic Adversity
Concentrating on the long term by emphasizing short-term prudence
is how Coke and Goizueta conquered the economic adversity of the
early 1990s. Coke deployed its resources amid global economic mal-
aise to cope with the slowdown through strategic pricing and cost
controls. It deployed those resources to capitalize on those condi-
tions by making flexible marketing investments. In this two-front
campaign Goizueta never wavered from his conviction, shared by
Keough and Coke’s other top managers, that a hybrid perspective is
optimal: What distinguished Coke was its simultaneous “constancy
of purpose” and its “continuous discontentment with the immediate
present.”
That hybrid perspective was doubly valuable in facing adversity
and proved the adage that tough times make the strong stronger.
The aggressive investment in the long-term growth and value of the
business, in good times as well as in bad, is what’s behindFortune
magazine’s regular ranking of Coke as one of the most admired com-
panies in America, especially for its long-term investment value.
Goizueta’s long-term orientation gave succor in bad times, as did
his unwillingness to waste energy on forecasting the economic fu-
ture. It is not possible to control external events such as “global
economic trends, currency fluctuations and devaluations, natural
disasters, political upheavals, social unrest, bad weather or schizo-
phrenic stoc kmar kets,” but Goizueta notes that he and every other
manager has complete control over his or her own behavior.
Managers cannot allow themselves to be distracted by the exter-
nal environment. What they can and should do is focus the man-
agement team on what it can control: resource deployment to build
a foundation for future growth, whatever the current economic cli-
mate. The future, in those terms, is in no way preordained but in-