Exceptional Leaders: The Coca-Cola Company

James Quincey: The wearing of the jeans, it was just a simple communication device to say things are gonna be different, because it was a very formal – hierarchical – but a very formal organization. The culture had become very inward looking. and we very much had to push the idea of a growth mindset.

Dara Mohsenian: At the Coca-Cola Company scale, culture isn't shaped by messaging alone. It's also shaped by practice. For chairman and CEO, James Quincey broadening Coke from soft drinks to a total beverage company required more than a simple strategy shift. It required a mindset shift from fixed to growth.

And that growth mindset has shaped Coca-Cola's evolution throughout its tenure. And today as leadership transitions and growth shifts across markets and generations, it defines the company's next act. This is The Exceptional Leaders Podcast, an original series for Morgan Stanley that brings you direct access to the thought leaders and change-makers at the forefront of business, technology, and culture.

I'm Dara Mohsenian, Morgan Stanley's US Beverage and Household Products Analyst. On this episode, I'm taking you inside the global beverage industry, one of the most ubiquitous consumer markets in the world, where scale, brand, and execution are constantly tested. Few companies offer a clearer look into the space than Coca-Cola.

In December of 2025, I traveled to Coke's hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, to sit down with Quincey. I've covered Coke for more than two decades, and in that time I've watched Quincey transform Coke, converting the soft drink beverage icon into a total beverage powerhouse. Quincey is stepping down as CEO in March, handing the reins to prior chief operating Officer Henrique Braun, and transitioning to executive chairman. Quincey's move Marks the end of a transformative era.

Under his leadership, Coca-Cola has adapted across 140 years and 11 CEOs. What comes next will test whether the mindset for change can endure.

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

Quincey: Pleasure.

Mohsenian: So, Coke has 30 separate billion dollar brands you've locked away the secret formula in your vault, which I saw this morning. What's the secret to building billion dollar brands in your mind?

Quincey: There's a couple of things and one part of it is a bit paradoxical, because on one hand you need to have a sort of messianic belief in an idea – the brand, what it does, what problem it solves for the consumer, the product. There's a, there's a certain degree that if you don't have a messianic belief in it, you'll never go through all the hard things that are ahead on, on building a brand.

On the other hand, it's very rarely, right the first time, you can name zillions of companies. They came up with an idea and then through 3, 4, 4, 5 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. So how do you manage the tension between believing in something and yet still being adaptable to the feedback from the consumer? That's key to creating these brands. If you think about Coca-Cola, the formula in the vault, it's not the first formulary tried. John Pound and 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 that typifies it, and that, that adaptation. But then once you got it, they stuck to it. You gotta mix that paradox. And of course you've got, you know, patience, timing, bit of luck.

It's a fun process, but it's not, it's not all, it's not all science. There's definitely some art to it too, in listening to the consumer.

Mohsenian: Obviously a lot's changed in the decades and hundreds of years Coke has been in existence. At a consumer level, how do you really conceptualize what can work in a big way in this environment from a brand perspective or as you think about developing brands?

Quincey: It all starts with the consumer. You are trying to solve a problem for the consumer. they may not know that they've got the problem.

It goes back to the many different ways of saying it, but the Ford was simple. If they'd asked them what they'd wanted, they'd have said a faster horse and instead, they got a car. So you have to kind of back your way into, what is it they need. they will give you feedback, but sometimes they don't really, and they're not answering it directly from the need.

They're answering it from, well, I got this solution, I just want the solution to be better. But that's not necessarily where it could go. So I think, really deeply understanding the consumer and, of course, how big can it be? Well, you gotta find problem, consumer problems that are big enough to be worth the effort, sometimes these innovations can be for retailers to help them sell more products, you know, the advent of the fountain machine or the vending machine or the coolers or whatever.

People prefer them cold. It's a great, enduring lesson of the importance of understanding deeply what is the consumer really interested in.

Mohsenian: Today, Coke products are sold in more than 200 countries and territories. You don't engage with Coca-Cola the way you do most products—you encounter it everywhere – in a restaurant, at a stadium, in a convenience shop on the other side of the world. The product is always cold, always familiar, and always within reach.

To understand Quincey’s perspective on Coca-Cola, you have to go back to 1996, when he first joined the company. At the time, Coke was already one of the most powerful consumer brands in the world: dominant, globally recognized, and deeply embedded in popular culture. From the outside, it looked almost untouchable.

I was covering Coke back in 1996. Even then, it was the ultimate benchmark, the standard against which global consumer companies were measured. Scale was its advantage, consistency was its strength. And for a long time, that formula really worked.

But in the early 2000s, the world began to change. Consumer preferences shifted. Health concerns took greater center stage. And growth in developed markets started to stall. Suddenly, the very scale that once protected Coca-Cola made it harder to adjust. The question wasn’t just about size, it was whether this global icon could still adapt.

James Quincey’s career spans that entire arc. He saw Coca-Cola at its peak of performance, and lived through the era when change became more important for the company. At a company this large, transformation’s not just about strategy, it’s about a fundamental shift in how decisions are made, it’s about how priorities are set and whether the culture either fuels progress or quietly stops it.

That realization defined Quincey’s tenure. He didn’t just tweak the brand, he repositioned Coca-Cola as a total beverage company. He simplified the portfolio. And most importantly, he took a culture that was built for consistency and also reshaped it for evolution, trading safe bets for smart risks and adapting faster to a changing consumer.

Quincey: I joined Coke in ‘96. I was at that stage in my career where you either generally stayed in consulting, or you went and, you know, you did something like, but operating the corporation. And essentially Coke wanted some internal consulting people, with a promise that, we'll give you a shot at general management if you weren't too crazy. And so it was that serendipity of what they were looking for and what I was looking for. So that was one aspect to it. The second was, the Coke brand. It's a huge brand. Remember, of course, you were leaving college at ‘96. Well, I left college in ‘86. Coca-Cola was a symbolization. I grew up in the Cold War. I can remember going through Checkpoint Charlie's like, I can remember all these things. And so Coca-Cola was a, a bit of iconography around the American dream or the dream of freedom and all these sorts of things.

So it was, of course, it was kind of embedded in my mind and,I can remember going and sharing them, playing squash with my dad and drinking a Coke afterwards. So they've gone, everyone housed an integration of the brand into their life. It was clearly a brand I loved and therefore I came in, and joined the company. I thought, let's give it a try. Let’s see what happens.

Mohsenian: When you came in as Coke's CEO, you 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?

Quincey: The first thing that's super interesting about the question is the premise that I was the first one to say it, which is generally held. It’s not true. Actually, it had been launched at least a decade before, if not even more, and yet it had not worked. So the first thing was the realization that actually the, the other old adage, you know, culture eats strategy, 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 re-litigated.

And everything got subsumed to Cokes. Actually, the insight 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, and thrive within the evolves company.

Mohsenian: Culture's 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. I don't think I'd ever seen that before. Talk to us about what that meant to the organization and how you've tried to evolve the culture over time?

Quincey: The jeans moment was in a way, leveraging the simple idea that everything communicates. If you go to a town hall or an investment event, like you make good notes, so you capture it all. But most people, like, they, they walk away with a few big impressions rather than zillions of details.

Mohsenian: Mm-hmm.

Quincey: And so the wearing of the jeans, it was just a simple communication device to say things are gonna be different, because it was a very formal – hierarchical – but a very formal organization.

And that use of the jeans as here's the moment of change was reinforcing the idea, we've gotta be different. And the culture had become very inward looking. and we very much had to push the idea of a growth mindset about making people curious about the consumer and the customer, not what's going on in the building, and the simple mechanism I used to give to people is, 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 10. If you can't get into positive numbers, you've got zero chance of changing culture.

Mohsenian: What have you learned? How did your leadership style evolve at Coke over the years?

Quincey: I've been here almost 30 years. And you, 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. Let's do something better. You learn from seeing leaders you admire, and frankly, leaders you don't admire say, well, that I'm not gonna follow that example.

And so there's been a natural process of learning and growing. And to some extent, as you, 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.

It requires you to be open to getting the feedback and to, incorporating new ideas and new ways of doing things.

Mohsenian: James Quincey's big legacy — the thing he'll be remembered for—is turning Coca-Cola into a "total beverage company." But there were other decisions he made that I think were just as important.

In 2020, seven months into the pandemic, Coke’s Management does something really bold. He took Coke’s entire portfolio — and we're talking 400 different brands here —and he cut them in half.

These are brands that had been around for decades: Tab, Odwalla, Zico coconut water? Gone. These weren't big sellers anymore. They were "zombie brands"—still on shelves but not really moving and justifying the shelf space. But the nostalgia was there.

As an analyst covering Coke, that decision changed my view. It showed me Quincey was willing to make hard choices. He wasn't going to let inertia keep the company stuck.

By cutting those 200 brands, he could pour resources into top-performers like Coke Zero Sugar, Topo Chico, and Ah-Ha sparkling water. Billion-dollar products.

But there was another important piece to Quincey’s strategy. Emerging markets. He recognized the necessity of geographical diversity and focused on driving volume growth in developing markets and increasing per-capita consumption across the world’s emerging economies.

And this is where I think Quincey’s background becomes really important. Before he was CEO, he spent years running Coca-Cola's operations in Latin America: Mexico, Argentina, the whole Southern Latin America region. And saw firsthand what it takes to grow in volatile, unpredictable markets, where you can't just copy-paste strategies from other regions. Furthermore, his experience running Europe gave him the blueprint for how to manage developed markets and specifically how to drive corporate value in a lower growth value environment.

Mohsenian: Coke's truly a global beverage company. You've had stints in Europe, Latin America, and other regions. How does that impact the way you manage the company, your leadership, the global orientation?

Quincey: 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, and it demonstrates the globalness of the organization.

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. It was different to running Europe, and it's different running the company. Each of these businesses in each of these countries has something very unique about it.

So, of course, when I was more in the Latin America side, and I was the Argentine country manager in the crisis in 2001, 2002 –

Mohsenian: Fun times.

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. Everything can change overnight in some of these countries.

So the premium on agility, the willingness to reconsider everything from first principles, having a very broad view of the organization. 'Cause 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. In Latin America, at the height of the hyperinflation, that was the eighties, they took price increases twice a day. I think we were in 2001, 2002. We were doing it once, once or every one or two months. In Europe, much like the US they take up one price increase a year, and it's a complete required COVID for there to be two.

So the degree of all variables at once is very different. But then of course it puts the, the premium or it puts the intensity on 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 [00:16:00] company.

Mohsenian: James's experience running Coke's Argentina business offers a useful lens for understanding the company's growth opportunities and challenges. It’s a market shaped by inflation, currency volatility, and rapid change; where staying close to consumers and adapting quickly is vital to driving results. And that lesson extends globally.

In developed markets, consumption is mature and competition is intense. In emerging markets, the growth opportunity is larger, but capturing it requires navigating pricing constraints and infrastructure challenges unique to each region.

High-growth markets bring volatility and demand different economics. While Coca-Cola can’t control inflation or build roads, it can adapt pricing, package sizes, and distribution to meet consumers where they are.

The question isn’t whether demand exists, it’s whether Coke can capture it profitably, market by market.

Can you highlight the emerging markets opportunity you see over time? and also touch on developing commercial beverages in those markets, and how you convert consumers?

Quincey: The simplest way, I think, to think about the global beverage market, and as we're talking beverages, think two bottles – they'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 if they're drinking a hundred milliliters, whatever, they're paying for 75 of 'em. So commercial beverages largely fills the, the, the bottle in the developed economies. Of course that's made up of alcohol, non-alcoholic drinks, coffee, tea, et cetera, et cetera. and our share is, in the low teens of the total commercial beverage, we don't play in every piece, but it's a relatively low share of the total money.

So we've got lots of opportunities to continue to gain share of the money that's being spent in the developed economies for the beverage thing. 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 they're only paying for two and a half of the drinks out of 10 that they're consuming. And our share is, 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. That 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.

Mohsenian: Quincey’s “two bottles” framework clarifies where growth actually comes from. In developed markets, beverages are already embedded in daily life. The opportunity is incremental: gaining share, expanding occasions, and premiumization.

In emerging markets, the dynamic is different. Consumption exists, but much of it is unbranded or noncommercial. The opportunity isn’t entry — Coca-Cola has been present for decades — it’s building frequency through affordability, accessible options that fit local habits and economics.

Few companies have the scale, distribution system, and patience to really profitable pursue that kind of long-term opportunity and drive growth consistently. How effectively Coca-Cola executes will help define its next phase.

Mohsenian:You've had an incredibly successful tenure as CEO, over the last decade.

Quincey: Thank you.

Mohsenian:How do you position the organization for success going forward? And during your tenure there's been so much volatility and the markets have been so dynamic, how have you managed that within the construct of a team?

Quincey: The craziness of what's happened in the last 10 years has been a true rollercoaster, but in the end, you, you, you can't imagine you are building a management team for one type of future. This world could still diverge in all sorts of strange ways tomorrow morning and beyond.

So really the whole point of management development that that feeds into succession is building people with a breadth of experiences, a breadth of capabilities, and a mindset and a culture that if and when something new happens, they can adapt to it. And obviously COVID was a simple example. Now all of a sudden something happened that no one had seen. On April 2020, the everything happened at the same time. The global volume of the Coke company went down 30%. I don't even know the last time that happened. And yet, we came out of it. We adapted, we shared the experiences, but it was really about having people with the capabilities and the open mindedness of, Okay, like, how do we get on this and get back on track?

Mohsenian: You're a student of history. I spent a lot of time today in Coke's archives, very plentiful. How do you think you'll be remembered as Coke's CEO?

Quincey: I hope there's a degree of fondness and success and respect.

And to some extent, 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 in the recent past.

Mohsenian: What are some of the past leaders, when you go back through the years, you've looked back on or you think their message really resonates today to Coca-Cola, and what are those messages?

Quincey:  Every leader has something that resonates, whether it's because they did the right thing or they did the wrong thing. And sometimes it's the same leader.

Mohsenian: I've been around for both.  

Quincey: But sometimes, the brilliant leaders still got things wrong, and so it's not just about using the good things that the great leaders did and the bad things that the less great ones did. But actually the fact that you can demonstrate one leader who you admire actually did smart things and not some smart things, it's very useful 'cause you know, no one's gonna be, no one's gonna be perfect. Robert Woodruff, he had a way with just coming up with some very simple expressions that I think, the more you think about them, the more impact and leverage they can have.

Some of my favorites are, “the future belongs to the discontented.” He wrote that in 1936 on the 50th  anniversary of Coke. What can you take out of that? It's so true. It's like if we rest on our laurels, this industry is so big. Okay with growth, with good profitability and tons of competitors, there's the number of people out there who want a bigger piece of the pie is legion. If we think the future is owed to us, it'll be a catastrophe. And in a way, the people who are trying to think a little harder about how to satisfy the consumer needs is gonna win. And so the future really will belong to the discontented with what the solution is today, and they will get more of the pie. The other one, I really like is to put Coke within an arm's reach of desire, which talks to the strategy of ubiquity, of positioning. It's a double meaning 'cause the arms reach talks to the physical, wherever you walk, you've gotta be able to grab one. But of desire talks to both the marketing that's done previously and the quality of the execution in the store.

It's gotta be the right size package, chilled, the call to action. It talks the whole arc of the engagement narrative with the consumer all the way to the product. So if we keep driving that, so he has a few of these things. And actually, 2025 is the hundredth anniversary of another speech he wrote, which was in 1925, which was entitled, “The Best Time to Make a Change is when You Don't Have to.” Which is kind of an early version of the future belongs to the discontented at the end of the day. Don’t wait.

When you're winning, there's nothing guaranteed. And so the last, because it's a history question, at our global system meeting, I reminded people that just 'cause we've done well over the last few years, the future belongs the discontented. And because we're in Rome, I put up the Latin, the Roman, which is Memento Mori.

So when, if you were a successful general in the Roman Empire and you knocked it out the park and you came back for all the glory, they marched you into the city in achariot with all the fanfare. They put someone on the back of the chariot who kept saying in your ear, Memento Mori, which means, translates roughly to remember you die, which is, don't let it all go to your head. There's nothing about it that is guaranteed tomorrow. And I think that that drive to remain discontented is an underlying theme from the Woodruff years.

Mohsenian: Well as always, that's very informative. Thank you so much for your time.

Quincey leaves Coca-Cola having made the hard choices: simplifying the portfolio, reshaping the culture, and broadening the company’s ambition beyond its core brands. But his deeper legacy is just as important albeit more subtle: an organization designed to think, decide, and adapt when conditions change as leadership passes to Henrique Braun.

Thanks for listening to Exceptional Leaders from Morgan Stanley. For the video version of this conversation, visit morganstanley.com or our YouTube channel — and be sure to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.