The Enemy Within

Success can breed complacency and a sense of invincibility. Success can be its own worst enemy. In the business world there are many successful companies. Trying to sustain the success for decades on end is quite challenging. When you’re on the top you become the hunted.

Coca Cola is one of the most popular brands the world has ever known. It has been so widely successful over the years that one sometimes wonders where else it has to go. Yet it has great competitors who are also successful most notably Pepsi. There is the continuous war of who will be number one.

Muhtar Kent who is the chairman of the board and CEO realized that Coca Cola’s greatest enemy is itself. After all its successes he sees the company as having become arrogant and inward looking.  He began making changes when he took over 2008. He has set a long term target of doubling revenue by 2020.

While many have viewed the U.S. market as being mature Kent sees it as a growth market. He points to the fact that the demographics of the U.S. show it will have less of an aging population than Europe and Japan.  What he is also driving home every day to the company’s large number of employees is to be constructively discontent. 

Business executives who make it to the top are also known to have large egos. For Kent he sees that arrogance is a key weakness of the company and this inward looking culture must be changed. It’s like asking his employee to deflate their ego and pride about being Coca Cola employees; a very innovative and challenging approach to lead the company to greater heights.

Reaching The Top

Indra K. Nooyi was good at academics. Not everyone takes an undergraduate degree in chemistry, physics, and math; these aren’t exactly everyone’s favorite subject. She also managed to get an M.B.A. degree from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta, India. At the time it was only one of two schools in India that offered such a degree.

There were signs that Nooyi was far from the ordinary since she also was part of an all-female rock band in her college days. This was something not really done by daughters coming from conservative middle class Indian families.

She worked for a time in India, but then decided to do something else not quite common during her time; study abroad in America. In 1978, she was accepted by Yale University and got a graduate degree in public and private management. From there she held various jobs in well-known large corporations.

Her talent was spotted by executives at Pepsi who then hired her in 1994 as chief strategist. This lay the opening for her to eventually become the company President and CEO in 2006 and Chairman in 2007. She reached the top position by restructuring Pepsi, spinning –off or divesting in some businesses and acquiring new ones. A good number of these moves involved multi-billion dollar transactions.

The change she has instituted at Pepsi has impacted in a global manner; Pepsi is one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world. Net revenues have hit $66 billion dollars on the back of 22 different brands that make more than $1 billion dollars each in sales.  Quakers, Tropicana and Gatorade are among its well-known brands.

The guitar-playing college girl from India has made it to the top of the global business world.