Exceptional Leaders: The Coca-Cola Company

JAMES QUINCEY

The future belongs to the discontented. Robert Woodruff wrote that in 1936 on the 50th anniversary of Coke. If we rest on our laurels. If we think the future is owed to us, it'll be a catastrophe. The people who are trying to think a little harder about how to satisfy the consumer needs is going to win.

V.O. (DARA MOHSENIAN)

From its pharmacy beginnings in 1886, Coca-Cola has become more than just a beverage company. It's one of the most iconic brands of all time, simultaneously evoking nostalgia as well as optimism for a brighter future. Of course, enduring brands need visionary leaders. And that's where James Quincey comes in. Since stepping into Coke’s CEO role in 2017, Quincey has guided the company through a period of profound transformation, refocusing Coke as a total beverage company, flattening the corporate structure, and emboldening the organization to take smart risks. All while keeping up with ever evolving consumer tastes. As an analyst covering U.S. Beverages and Household Products, I've been closely following Quincy's career and was eager to meet with him ahead of his March 2026 retirement. So, I traveled to Coca-Cola's global headquarters in Atlanta, saw more than a century's worth of memorabilia, visited the vault holding Coke's original secret formula, and sat down for a fascinating conversation with Quincey about leadership, legacy, and the enduring power of an exceptional brand.

DARA MOHSENIAN

James, thank you so much for being here, this is an incredible opportunity. We're excited about it.

JAMES QUINCEY

Pleasure.

DARA MOHSENIAN

So, Coke has 30 separate billion-dollar brands. You've locked away the secret formula in your vault, which I saw this morning. But what's the secret to building billion-dollar brands in your mind?

JAMES QUINCEY

you need to have a sort of messianic belief in an idea. The brand, what it does, what problem it solves the consumer. If you don't have a messianic belief in it, you'll never go through all the hard things that are ahead on building a brand. And yet, on the other hand, it's very rarely right first time. You know, you can name zillions of companies, they came up with an idea. And then through three, four, five iterations, they ended up with something really, really good. And that's what they're famous for now, but they generally started as something else. And that's true of brands as well.

How do you manage the tension between believing in something and yet still being adaptable to the feedback from the consumer? And that's kind of key to creating these brands. I mean, you think about Coca-Cola, it's not the first formula we tried. Right, you know, John Poundland, he used to go down to the port of Savannah and buy different spices and ingredients and go back and mix them together. So, there was an iterative process there of coming up, not just with the brand, but with the product that typifies it. It's not all, it's not all science. There's definitely some art to it, too, and listening to the consumer.

DARA MOHSENIAN

At a consumer level. How do you really conceptualize what can work in a big way in this environment?

JAMES QUINCEY

in the end, you're trying to solve a problem for the consumer. They may not know they've got the problem. They're not answering it directly from the need. it's like, how do you solve the problems they've got with dealing with, all the people coming through the doors trying to buy beverages. And that's, you know, the advent of the fountain machine or the vending machine. Really, starting with the consumer. I think it's a great enduring lesson of the importance of understanding deeply what is the consumer really interested in?

DARA MOHSENIAN

Let's go back to 1996, when you joined Coca-Cola as an organization.

JAMES QUINCEY

Coca-Cola was a bit of iconography around, you know, the American dream or the dream of freedom and all those things. So, of course, it was kind of embedded in my mind. And, you know, I can remember playing squash with my dad and drinking a Coke afterwards. So again, everyone has an integration of the brand into their life. It was clearly a brand I loved and therefore - and there was this moment of serendipity - so I came in and joined the company. I thought, let's give it a try. Let's see what happens.

DARA MOHSENIAN

Talk about your leadership style and how it's evolved at Coke over time.

JAMES QUINCEY

I mean, I've been here almost 30 years. And, you know, you learn and mature. You learn from your own experiences. Like, ‘okay, this works. This doesn't work. That's not so smart. And let's do something better.’ You learn from seeing leaders you admire, and frankly, leaders you don't admire. Okay. Well, I'm not going to follow that example. And so there's been a natural process of learning and growing, and maturing over the 30 years and to some extent, you know, as you go up in the organization, you start off kind of very focused on getting stuff done. And it gets a little more conceptual as you get up to the top of the organization. But it's really been a steady process of learning and growing, which at the end, what does it require? It means it requires you to be open to getting the feedback, and incorporating new ideas and new ways of doing things. 

DARA MOHSENIAN

Coke's truly a global beverage company. How does that impact the way you manage the company, your leadership, the global orientation?

JAMES QUINCEY

Well, firstly, I think that that experience, talks to the possibilities at Coke, which is you can go almost anywhere in the world and have different management experiences. And it demonstrates the globalness of the organization that you can be almost anywhere. But each of those experiences was different. And that talks to the localness of the business. You know, running Argentina is very different to running Mexico is different to running Europe. Each of these businesses in each of these countries has something very unique about it. You know, and I was the Argentine country manager in their crisis in 2001- 2002.

DARA MOHSENIAN

Fun times.

JAMES QUINCEY

Yeah, I arrived in the country - it was one of the most expensive places in the world. A few years later when I left, it was one of the cheapest. And, you know, everything can change overnight in some of these countries. The premium on agility, the willingness to reconsider everything from first principles, having a very broad view of the organization because all variables can come into play at any time.  You need to be much more holistic, and much quicker, and much more willing, to change things on a dime. And also, the results can be much better on the way up. And they can be much worse on the way down. And then you go to a Europe where that generally is not true. Not all variables at play at the same time.

The difference between good and bad is a much smaller margin of error. It feels more institutional and set piece. But then of course it puts the premium or puts the intensity on the of the competition on those few variables that are in play at a much higher level than perhaps you would have in a Latin America or an emerging market. So, I think being able to learn each of those different experiences makes it much better as a platform to then try and run the global company.

DARA MOHSENIAN

Can you highlight the emerging markets opportunity you see over time?

JAMES QUINCEY

The simplest way, I think, to think about the global beverage market. And as we're talking beverages, think two bottles. You’ve got one bottle that's the developed economies. That's about 20% of the world's population. In that bottle people are paying for about 75% of what they drink each day.

So commercial beverages largely fills the bottle in the developed economies. Of course, that's made up of alcohol, nonalcoholic drinks, coffee, tea, etc., etc.. And our share is, you know, in the low teens of the total commercial beverages. We don't play in every piece, but it's a relatively low share of the total money. So, we got lots of opportunities to continue to gain share of the money that's being spent in the developed economies for the beverage share. But that's just the developed market, which is 20% of the world's population.

The other bottle actually represents largely the emerging markets. That's 80% of the world's population. And there they are only paying for two and a half of the drinks out of ten that they're consuming. And our share is, I think, high single digits. So, actually, the most important feature of the global beverage industry is it's yet to be created, is the empty emerging market bottle. As the industry leader, we can help grow. And obviously, we think we can gain share in both the developed and the emerging markets as we do.

DARA MOHSENIAN

When you came in as Coke’s CEO, you really refocused the company from primarily a soft drinks focus. And you talked a lot about making Coke a ‘total beverage company.’ Could you talk about the genesis behind that thinking and how you've evolved the company?

JAMES QUINCEY

People had realized we needed to be a broader beverage company before, and had tried to break out. But it was left at the intellectual level. And the culture basically ate the idea and stopped it. The company was very much culturally - Coke first, second and third without any opportunity. And every country gets to decide and they can keep changing everything.

Once you've got that, it’s very difficult to galvanize about a new idea that you need to move around. Because everything got relitigated. And everything got subsumed to Coke's. Actually, the insight in a way and the action was to resell the idea of a total beverage company in a compelling way, and bring with that a cultural change strategy that allowed it to then prosper and thrive within the evolved company.

DARA MOHSENIAN

Culture has been a huge focus for you at Coke. One of the seminal moments was when you showed up for the first analyst day in jeans.

JAMES QUINCEY

The jeans moment was, in a way, leveraging the simple idea that everything communicates. To say ‘things are going to be different’ because it was a very formal, hierarchical, but very formal organization. Here's the moment of change. It was reinforcing the idea ‘We’ve got to be different.’ And the culture had become very inward looking. It's a large organization. It became inward looking because things got very hard to do. So of course, you direct more energy internally. And we very much had to push the idea of a growth mindset, and understanding that everything we did communicated or reinforced that strategy. And the simple mechanism I used to give to people is ‘every time you do something that is coherent with what you said you wanted, you score a point. And every time you do something that's not coherent with what you said you wanted, you get minus ten.’ If you can't get into positive numbers, you’ve got zero chance of changing the culture.

DARA MOHSENIAN

AI seems to be transforming everything at this point. Where do you think it could be most impactful for Coke?

JAMES QUINCEY

in the long run, I think it's most interesting as a demand creation, consumer engagement, retailer engagement vehicle. In the short term, I think it's more likely to be productivity. That's where it's easier to see it's impact, whether it's the effectiveness with which you make the Christmas ad or some of the other things we've been doing, helping the salespeople be much more effective.

I think those sorts of examples, are the near-in ones, which are kind of easy to grasp. As it goes forward and as AI systems of Coke can talk to the AI systems at the retailer, can interact with the consumer's AI systems, then really it's about demand creation and competitive advantage.

DARA MOHSENIAN

You've had an incredible tenure as CEO over the last decade. 

JAMES QUINCEY

Thank you.

DARA MOHSENIAN

How do you ensure the organization is positioned for success post your tenure?

JAMES QUINCEY

Actually, it starts on day one. It's one of those kind of weird experiences on being a CEO. You start and immediately begin the conversation of how to replace yourself. It's kind of, it's sort of unique in that way. And you do. That's what we and you know, the board and I have been doing ongoing all through my tenure is stewarding all the talent down through organization.

Think of it as a huge kind of funnel, if you like, giving people opportunities to grow, promoting the ones with the best and the most long-term potential, and constantly looking for a stream of successes to each job and ultimately successes to the CEO job. So, it’s been an ongoing process. You can't start the day before you want it. It has to be something both for the CEO and the organization that's an enduring and ongoing piece of the management development program.

DARA MOHSENIAN

Looking ahead, what's still on your agenda?

JAMES QUINCEY

I used to say something like, ‘well, hopefully there'll be nothing left to do,’ but that is a wildly naive thing to say because the reality is the world keeps changing. Consumers needs have an enduring part to them, but they also have, kind of, they come in new forms of manifestations. How and where you will engage with them has changed. So, if you just look at the journey of marketing over the hundred and four years of the Coke Company, it's gone from, you know, started with sampling, then it's got ads in newspapers, then it's got billboards, then it's got radio, then it's got TV, then it's got social media. Now we're kind of on the verge of the agentic agent. The consumer is still there with a need to drink liquids.

But how you engage is changed every time. So, really the challenge will always be, and it will be an enduring challenge, is how do you make the brands relevant to every generation of consumers? How and where do you make that happen? And that'll be an eternal job.

DARA MOHSENIAN

How do you think you'll be remembered as Coke’s CEO?

JAMES QUINCEY  

I used to say, ‘I hope I'm not remembered.’ But I'm not sure that's a very good answer. I hope there's a degree of fondness and success and respect. But at the end, the important thing about history is that recent history should not be marshaled in service of the future.

JAMES QUINCEY  

You know, I hope they forget me. Not because they didn't like me or they didn't think it was good what I did. But the future is so full of growth, has so many opportunities, and they're so successful that they're looking forward and not looking at the recent past.

DARA MOHSENIAN

Well as always, that was very informative. Thank you so much for being here.

JAMES QUINCEY  

Thank you.