Word: drinking
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...barely two years as CEO, Ivester appears to have done what no mere soft-drink rival could have hoped to accomplish--dimmed the luster of one of the world's brightest brands. It wasn't just Coca-Cola's seven-quarter-long profit slide. When dozens of Belgian schoolchildren fell sick after drinking Coke products last June, Ivester maintained what looked like an arrogant silence for more than a week before traveling to Belgium to apologize. (The incident resulted in a 65 million-can recall.) Nor did he burnish his company's image by failing to promote Carl Ware, senior...
...question gnawing at everyone is whether a company that already controls 51% of the world's soft-drink market can sustain Ivester's relentless strategy of pumping up sales 7% to 8% a year. "Coke has been this perpetual growth machine," says Ari Ginsberg, a management professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, "and now all this has happened...
That should have set off warning bells in Atlanta. But Ivester, known for his bulldog tenacity, pushed ahead with expansion plans. Coke had built its omnipresence in the 1980s by welding together a motley collection of soft-drink bottlers into the most powerful distribution channel on earth. Ivester felt compelled to fill that global network despite the spreading financial contagion. Instead of paring growth targets, he embarked on a flurry of acquisitions to put more products into the pipeline...
...conducted a series of dawn raids on Coke facilities from the Continent to Britain in search of evidence that the company was offering retailers illegal kickbacks for favored shelf space. That investigation is ongoing. And last month French authorities rejected Ivester's $840 million bid for the Orangina soft-drink business. Observes John Quelch, dean of the London Business School: "The power of global brands may be strong, but they are not strong enough to preclude the need to cultivate [government] relationships at the national level...
...native Georgia, Daft is a jovial former math teacher with a wry sense of humor, a diverse range of interests and a creative streak. He pushed to develop Coke's biggest seller in Japan, for instance, and likes to joke that it is not a cola but a syrupy drink called Georgia Coffee...