Muhtar Kent: Leadership advice from 41 years at The Coca-Cola Company

Thanks. You know, and what a delight it is to be here. I've spent the last two days here at Oxford, a magnificent place without any doubt. I have a friend who is Marius Papadopoulos, who is the conductor of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, and through my friendship with him, he invited me here to spend two days. Last time I was here was in 2012 during the London Olympic Games when I came here with Seb Coe, who still was not the Chair of that Federation then but a member of the IOC, and we had a symposium on sports and building bridges through sports, building bridges for cultures together. So a great honor. I do get a lot of psychic income throughout my time at Coca-Cola when I was leading the company in getting together with young people like yourselves that are embarking upon their business life, their social life, and their careers. So I get a lot of psychic income from being with all of you. So what I'm gonna do today is just to take you quickly through my journey, last 41 years, and then share with you some of the highlights, share with you also some of the things that I thought could have worked better, and then share with you also some, maybe a few lessons that I've learned that have helped me over that time. So I started my career in 1978. I answered a New York classified ad, went down and interviewed, and started working on red trucks in Lubbock, Texas, in Needham, Massachusetts, in Los Angeles. And then after a while, getting up at 3 a.m. and loading trucks and selling beverages, distributing and selling beverages, pulling them off trucks into the outlets, I thought maybe there's something else to this great corporation. So I went into the brand group. There was a brand at that time, one of the very newest brands, I think it was the third brand Coca-Cola had launched, called Fresca, and I became the Assistant Brand Manager for Fresca after 12 months on trucks. And then my career took me to four continents, different roles. One of the more memorable roles that I had was running Eastern Central Europe starting in 1988 in Vienna and making a bet that the wall would come down in 1989, going to the headquarters of the company, which was very unusual then because the Coca-Cola Company is the company that actually invented the word franchise. Franchise did not exist in the vocabulary before the Coca-Cola Company. They invented the word. Franchise means basically a partnership. You give another company that is not yours a territory to basically, for a given period of time, to become the exclusive owner of distribution and sales for that territory. So in the word of Coke speak, we call those bottlers. Bottlers invest capital. That's the most capital-intensive part of the Coca-Cola business. The Coca-Cola Company is responsible for strategy, consumer marketing, communication, and demand pull, creating demand pull. The bottlers are responsible for delivering that value created by the Coca-Cola Company's demand creation in the most effective way. And so I then went to the headquarters and I said, look, I believe the wall is coming down. I don't have time to find bottlers, and if we don't embark upon this opportunity now, if we don't grab it now, we will lose it forever. Give me 500 million dollars, which was equal to heresy. How can we spend that capital on building bottling plants? And then they gave me 280 million dollars. And I went between 1989 and 2002, built in about 36 months, built 27 factories, starting from Gdansk all the way down to Tirana in the whole of the former Soviet Union. That's the time when the first time I met Vladimir Putin was when he was Vice Mayor of Leningrad in 1989, and we did a 41-year deal for the lease of the first Coca-Cola factory in that time, Leningrad, later became St. Petersburg, when we opened the factory and he was the Vice Mayor. So we built those factories in a very speedy period of time and then found franchisees to essentially take over those properties, and we sold them all without losing any money, obviously, and they were worth a lot more once the wall had come down. And then in that period of time, we had 2% market share in that territory, 400 million Slavic people living in that territory. Now we have 80% market share. Roll forward to today, so it's a successful business and that was a very special period of time. We helped write the foreign investment law of Romania because we had knowledge of it in Poland. Give you an example. I went there and all the land was owned by the state. I knew someone who called Leszek Balcerowicz. I happened to meet him in London. He was about to become a Deputy Prime Minister in the first Polish government post-communism. I said to him, how can I buy land? Where can I get land in Poland? And he said, only place is the Church of Poland. So I went to the north. They said, go there, meet a reverend called Yankovsky in Gdansk. So I went up to Gdansk. There's a little church called St. Bridget Church, and I'm waiting to meet this reverend Yankovsky. And in the corridor there, while I'm waiting, I see a picture of a man shaking the hand of Ronald Reagan. Next to that, I see a picture of the same man shaking the hand of Margaret Thatcher. And next to that picture, I see the same man shaking the hand of George Bush. And I said, I must be in the right place. And he came and did that deal, leasing three pieces of property from the Church of Poland, one in Krakow, one in Warsaw, one in Gdansk, and built three factories. And those leases are still valid today, as is the lease with Putin, still valid in St. Petersburg. Very memorable period of time. And then I moved to become a bottler, and that's unique. I'm one of the few, I think I'm the only second amongst 12 CEOs in Coca-Cola who held the role of a bottler as well as work for the company, because then you know both sides. My predecessor Neville is there, my very good friend, South African friend Neville is there, also was a bottler in Zambia during his time in his career. And I became the bottler in the eastern part of Eastern Europe and many parts of the former communist bloc, and ran that for a while. And then I came back to the Coca-Cola Company in 2004 and moved to Hong Kong and ran Asia, and then went back to Atlanta and became the President and then CEO in 2008. And when I joined the Coca-Cola Company in 1978, it was 2.5 billion dollars in market cap, and I think when I left, there was 248 billion, four or five months ago. So the important thing is we have created a lot of stakeholder value, shareholder value over these last 35 years or so, 40 years. But more importantly, during the time that I was running, when I first became CEO, I sat down with all my colleagues and I said, who buys the brands of the Coca-Cola Company? And they brought out a statistic and they said, 68% of our shoppers are women globally. At that time, we were selling about a billion bottles a day. Today it's 2 billion bottles a day, but then it was about a billion bottles a day back in 2007. And I said, but we only have 14% of our leadership team women. What a dichotomy. 65% shoppers are women, 14% leadership. So we got to do something about this. So I put a program together called 3Ws: Water, Women, and Well-being, because when you have 880,000 employees, you've got to simplify things so people can remember what you last talked about. And so we set about goals about women leadership. We said the goal was 50%. We want 50% of the executive team to be women. Have we achieved that yet? No. But where are we? 40%. And when I left, I don't know, it's probably somewhere on there now, four or five months ago, it was 40%. So progress. At the time, back in 2007, two members of the board were women out of ten. Today, five. So we're at the top 10% of Fortune 50 companies. And then we set about a goal about water. We are one of the biggest users of water in the world. And I said, look, we have to put a goal out there. They said, you can't put a goal out there. But I said, why? We use a quarter of a trillion liters of water, 250 billion liters. By 2020, it will be half a trillion liters. Let's say we'll give it all back. Let's say we'll become water neutral. They said, no, you can't do that. And we did. We put out the goal in 2010 and achieved that in 2015, water neutrality 2015, first major user of water to achieve that goal five years out of schedule. How? Technology. Reduce the amount of water in the 1,004 factories in 207 nations. How we used to rinse every bottle that we filled with water, now we use a septic air to rinse every bottle. Huge amount of water saving. What happens when you save water? Your production costs come down. So the key is to integrate your sustainability goals with your business goals. You can't... most people have had a problem. They announce sustainability goals but they stay in one corner and they stay in a separate report. We never had a corporate sustainability report. I said we put everything in the annual report because it's part of the business. And that's to me a very big lesson. If they don't have an economic calculus, sustainability goals cannot be sustainable. And no pun intended. So then the second area that helped us in getting to water neutrality was we recycled the water, excess water that we used, and instead of putting it in the sewage, which we used to do, we recycled it and put it into the clean water system of the cities. And the third, the two was not enough, the third was replenishment projects. Capture rainwater, capture, could take contaminated water, clean it, recycle it, create clean drinking water, and give it to different towns, villages in Africa, Asia, around the world. And so we have currently about 2,200 of these replenishment projects. All of that added up to water neutrality. And then the other goal on women was that we said improving the conditions for women leadership in the company and the pipeline in the company for women leaders was not enough. What we had to do is do something bigger because we're Coca-Cola. We're in 207 nations. We connect two billion times a day with our consumers. We have 1,004 factories in 207 nations. Do something big. And we created a program called 5by20: 5 million women entrepreneurs by 2020. And that was again a simple way to do it. Partners. I call it the power of partnership. Without partners, you can do nothing. So we have an NGO in every country where the program exists, 82 countries in the world. They identify the women. We have training modules. We then train the women candidates in basic accounting and finance, in retailing, in distribution, in logistics, these areas. And then we went to the IFC and got two tranches of 100 million dollars credit from the IFC for microcredit. First is finished. Now we are into the second tranche. And then linked them up to microcredit and off they go. So out of the 25 million retailers in the world today that Coca-Cola services with its red trucks once a week, I'd say about 1.5 million, 2 million of them are recently created women entrepreneurs, retailers. Do they sell other goods? Do they sell Cadbury chocolate? Do they sell Vodafone cards? Do they sell other beverages? Do they sell beer? Yes. Do they have a loyalty to Coca-Cola? Yes. And so when I got up in front of shareholders and I talked about these programs, there's a calculus between loyalty and good for business. There's a calculus between strong communities and strong business. Because the way marketing works now is very different to the way marketing used to work even when I became CEO. In the days when I became CEO, the late 2000s, good products that taste good, good marketing, create positive consumer impressions, good distribution, you can go home, that's done. Today, no more. Good products, yes. Products that your consumers expect you to produce, yes. In many cases, many other beverages. So when I joined the Coca-Cola Company, it was essentially a one-brand company. Today, 3,800 products, 575 brands and counting. When I joined, they'd never seen a fruit tree before in the Coca-Cola Company. They didn't know what a fruit tree looked like. Today, 31 million fruit trees under plantation: citrus, stone fruit trees, peach, apricot, cherry, pomegranate, mango. Total area, 31 million trees, size of Belgium. Biggest fruit juice producer in the world. Straight line, I jet one hour 40 minutes, still the same plantation. So that's the extent of change. But going back to consumer, how they've changed today. What we need is to create positive consumer expressions, not impressions, expressions. What do we mean by that? All the consumers need to talk positively about your company, your brands, your character. And that's why all this is so important about the 3Ws, about creating stronger communities, creating women entrepreneurs. By the way, you know, just only in Uganda and Tanzania, 45,000 women growers of mango, small growers, 45,000 different growers of mangoes, orchards, part of the 5by20 program again. So it's not just... so we've recently added modules to give them also training in agro-culture and best irrigation practices and so forth. So a huge change. And of course, all of you will know that one of the major, major, major responsibilities of a CEO and a board is to have smooth transitions of responsibility. So that was one of the most important and top priorities for me during my tenure, especially in the last three, four years, grooming successors, ensuring that they had the right jobs. And in the end, you know, selected my successor, presented my successor to the board, gave him new responsibilities in different geographies, and then had a very smooth transition in 2017. He's probably about one hour away from here. He's British, he's called James Quincey. And then two years as Executive Chairman to make sure that everything went right. And then in last May, I retired after 41 years as Executive Chairman also. So that's in a nutshell the story. And I think, you know, in today's world, I think there's a huge role for business, government, and civil society to come together to address some of the societal issues in the world. Societal issues related to youth unemployment, societal issues related to consumer health, societal issues related to inclusion, societal issues related to growth. You know, individuals need growth. We all need to learn something new every day. Countries need growth, sustainable growth. If a country doesn't grow and create jobs, if it's democratic, there will be a change of government. If it's not democratic, eventually there'll be a revolution. It's as simple as that. And companies, you know, in today's world, nobody can say, well, I just want to tie myself to this pier and stay here for a few years. Doesn't exist. You can't. There's no way. You go back or you go forward, but you cannot stay still. And if you go back, that's the end because it's very difficult to reverse a trend. So you've got to find the calculus for growth, for sustainable growth. And what you do today will not give you growth tomorrow in the next three, four quarters. So you've got to really plan it well. In today's world, what you do today, if it's right, will give you momentum 12 quarters from now, 10 quarters from now, but not four quarters from now, not six quarters from now. And so, you know, one of the biggest things, one of the difficult things I did in my career was spend 12 billion dollars buying our biggest bottling company in the world called Coca-Cola Enterprises. It was the biggest investment that I did. Two major investments during my time as CEO: bought Vitamin Water for 4 billion dollars in the United States. That was to clearly ensure that we could participate in the growth of profitability in the non-carbonated beverage sector in the United States, which gave us a very good hand in the card game. And secondly, 50% of the global profitability of the Coca-Cola Company came from America and Europe, and CCE was the bottler of Coca-Cola in the United States and Europe, and essentially it did not have the means, financial means, to continue investment. So it was a memorable two, three months with our board, but in the end, they were convinced and they gave me the green light. I bought it and I then refranchised the whole thing to new owners, better owners, six different very strong bottling companies in the United States now, some of them public, some of them private, most of them private. And then a very good bottling business now in Europe where we merged our Spanish bottling business, very strong families, together with what we had because Coca-Cola Company had bought Germany, I'd bought Germany in 2007, merged them all together and created a bottling company called Coca-Cola European Partners, doing very well. And that's why the company is doing well today. And then I think the litmus test for any leader is to ensure that they leave a very good, strong CEO in place, and then after they leave, two years, three years, how is the business doing? Not the day they leave, but three years, four years after they leave, is the business doing well? That to me is a very important litmus test. And so far, touch wood, it's holding together. So I'll end there. And for me, it's been a great pleasure to visit Oxford. For me, it's memorable. And one of the other important things is I didn't talk about leadership lessons. So let me just roll back for a second and talk about a few things. One of the things that I've learned in my entire career, and that probably stems from my time as riding bottling trucks and driving, bossing trucks, is to visit a store every week of my life, including the time when I was on a holiday. I would visit stores. So last two days here at Oxford, I visited stores. I take pictures. And those days, in the first days, of course, we didn't have these phones that took pictures. I take pictures with a Fuji film camera. But every time I go into an outlet, in my 41 years, I've learned something new. When I was in Asia, I'd go into an outlet every day, every week, at least once a week. When I was in Vienna, when I was in Amsterdam running Holland, when I was running Eastern Europe, I would travel all the time. The second lesson I learned is, you know, it doesn't matter if you're CEO, when I was running a territory, when I was President of East Central Europe, 20 countries, you need to have the ability to go high altitude, 10,000 feet, but also go low the same day, the same hour, up and down, up and down all the time to be successful. That's what I've always learned. Don't let yourself get lost in detail, but understand enough of the detail that you can go up and down. And when you go down, you know what you're looking at. Really, really important. And then it became even much more important as CEO that I could go up and down, 40,000 feet, 5,000 feet, 40,000 feet, 5,000 feet, all the time. And then culture, you know, culture is the key. So they asked me, what do you do as CEO? And I say, I'm the Chief Culture Officer. There's nothing I can do. The higher you go, the less you can do, always. The only thing you can hope to do is ensure the culture of the company is sound, is good, and it's where you want it to be. That people have humility. People don't hide behind the words of the Coca-Cola Company, that business card that you have. People that are always willing to take intelligent risk. Where there's no risk, there's no reward. People that are willing every day to polish the brands, because in the end, Coca-Cola is as good as its brands. Go in and polish the brands. The brand is a promise. A good brand always is a promise kept. Are you doing things to keep the promise? And then I always, you know, say relationship. If I did not have creating relationships in my life, I know I could not become the CEO. First-generation American born to Turkish parents, working on trucks, I knew I could not become CEO if I didn't create relationships with people that owned pieces of paper that said a share of the Coca-Cola Company, hosting them in my territories in Eastern Central Europe when they used to come through. Relationship is the key. And I always say to young people like you, never eat alone. If you eat alone, stop that bad habit. Never eat alone. Always eat with someone, doesn't matter, someone you never have met off the street. Break bread together. I never eat alone because the relationships are so important and you waste an opportunity when you eat alone because when you eat together, there's always a better atmosphere to talk about things that are important and that are memorable. And then something that served me so well always is humility. I've never let anyone ever carry my bag. And I always say, carry your own bags. That's figuratively, but literally too, it is important. You know, as CEO, 880,000 company, and there's a lot of people that want to carry your bags. Never let that happen. And then, you know, that's sort of in a way, those are some of the things that I wanted to share with you about my life. And now I have a lot more freedom and time, and I'll be doing things that fuse my past to the future. Because I always also say to young people, never forget where you come from, because otherwise you'll never know where to go. And so, you know, I give entrepreneurial awards at my university, send kids with my foundation to university in the United States. It's a US foundation, so they go to the United States for college. I have about 20-25 students studying at any point in time in the US. And I'm creating something at Columbia University called the Kent Global Conflict Resolution Center, which will bring young diplomats from all around the world to teach them about the Golden Triangle: government, business, civil society, come talk about their experiences in solving global conflicts. When that is up and running in December. So now I can put a dot and we can go to questions and answers. Thanks so much.

Yeah, look, I mean, politics is not our business. Our business is to create long-term value for our stakeholders. But policy is important. Stability is important. Policy is important for investment laws, are important. Stability of the capital we put into a market is important. So from all of that, I mean, but then you take some risks too. So when I put part of that 280 million dollars into Eastern Central Europe, there was no foreign investment laws. They were just being written. But speed was of essence. So you take a punt and you basically hope to God that you're right. I mean, I took a punt that the wall is coming down and I started traveling, setting and...

Hiring people before the wall came down, hiring engineers, looking for land, making deals, four leases in 1989 in Poland, in Russia, what was the Soviet Union. And if the wall hadn't come down, I probably wouldn't be standing in front of you here and talking. If it was delayed, I don't think the people who gave me that money would be very happy. But then, you know, some things you have to take away with the... where there is no risk, there's no reward. And politics, I'll tell you another story about politics and then we'll go to the next question.

You know, Coca-Cola is considered to be the quintessential American brand, right? I mean, that's cover of Time, cover of Newsweek, cover of Life, all of this during the last two years of Bush when brand America was at its lowest, except for now. Except when brand America was at its lowest, we did not suffer because we have local partners. Power of partnership. Everywhere in South Africa, every year, year after year, last 20 years, Coca-Cola is the number one brand, not number one foreign brand, number one brand. But that's just one. There's many places in the world where that's the case. So that was the power of local bottlers. That was key to us not hurting when brand America was at a very low point. Then you may like him or you may not like him, but the facts are that brand America improved dramatically during Obama. He may not have done everything right, but brand America improved. The metrics for brand America improved dramatically. We did not benefit from that either because we didn't suffer. Today brand America is much lower than the last two years of Bush. Look at the metrics, the Pew metrics, and we're still not, thank goodness so far, suffering as a result of that because of the power of local partners.

Sam Nunn is an incredible senator, one of the senators that basically has the squeakiest, cleanest name ever. He was the head of the Armed Services Committee in Congress, a citizen of Georgia. So he was born 45 miles south of Atlanta. And so Coca-Cola has about 2 million share owners in the state of Georgia, so it is incredibly connected to Georgia. So we always have had some influential, well-known people, business people and politicians from the state of Georgia. That is the sole reason that when he retired from Congress, we appointed him to the board of Coca-Cola 20 years ago. And I think we haven't had one single area where we've benefited from a state law in the United States or a federal law in the United States. So that just tells you, we've just benefited from his respect and integrity, that's all. And then we've got, we had people like Warren Buffett on our board, even more well-known, largest share owner. Later on his son came on the board. Now no Buffets are on the board because Warren has retired from all boards essentially. But you know, we have a pretty well-known board. Patricia Barton, who's the CEO of Bank Santander, is on our board. Bobby Kotick, Barry Diller, all very well-known people. We have one of the best boards in the country.

Yeah, you know, I am convinced that the model that we now call it the capitalist model, the public company model, whichever name you want to give it, I am convinced that it's going to be fine-tuned. There's no question. I think it's going to take a little bit longer time, it won't happen next year. So in the meantime, I would say everyone has to ensure that their sustainability goals are tied to economics, real economics, and they keep going and delivering stakeholder value, delivering community value, delivering value for employees, delivering all the stakeholder values and creating, growing so that they can create but also sustainable long-term shareholder value. And in the meantime, I think they need to voice their influence in the direction that makes sense for them. I think today if we push too hard in getting rid of quarterly reporting, people will say, 'Well, here they are, the CEOs are trying to hide now behind this new initiative.' So I think we've got to make sure that there's a sufficient dialogue that takes place and that there's consensus in whichever way that people want to move, and you know, twice a year, whatever the new model is. But I think there's momentum building, but it's not anywhere close to where it needs to be yet. That would be what I would say. But I think it's really important to say that there's going to be other areas that need to be tweaked in the model also. And you know, I talked about the three W's before. My successor has announced a fourth W: World Without Waste. That Coca-Cola will collect every single one of its bottles, two billion today, maybe three billion by the goal, a third, 2030, that it fills. If it cannot create a fully biodegradable bottle by 2030, and about 40 percent of the global R&D of Coca-Cola today is going towards that project, a biodegradable bottle. So there's four W's now. My successor James announced that about five months ago.

Okay, I'll start and then you'll remind me what the questions are too. But I think first about the inspiration. You know, I find the inspiration from being out. I always used to try to be out 70, 80 percent of the time because the best ideas are out. You get inspiration from ideas when you're out. And so that was my Ever-Ready Duracell, being out, going out, traveling, going out, seeing and being seen. That was to me the most important way that you can get a sense of the culture, is it working, is it not working, what's working, what's not working. And then, you know, failure. It's when we, back in 2012, 10, 11, 12, the company was not growing as it should. And so those were very tough years. Very tough years to do anything, leave alone talk about three W's. Shareholders weren't happy, the share price hadn't moved sufficiently, we were lagging the S&P 500. And so those were very tough years and very tough years to get anything done, you know, leave alone a big acquisition. So there was little psychic income and it was really important to try to get the energy into the leadership team and into the bottlers. And we created a Vision 2020 that included the bottlers. And the first attempt, the bottlers weren't interested in Vision 2020. They said, 'Where's my oxygen before I talk to you about food?' So we had a meeting that resulted in a failure. It was basically the bottlers were pretty much in revolt. And I remember that time in Boca Raton, I went back to my hotel and I said, 'This is much harder than I thought.' But you always learn also from bottlers because it's their own money, they're all business people, they're all families. We had essentially, you know, we had in the world 250 billionaires, those were our bottlers. Each one of them are in their own right a billionaire. And you have to capture their imagination, capture their money, their capital, so that they're not invested somewhere else and they invest in your business. It's an influencing model. And so when we hired people in the Coca-Cola company, we made sure that they are class-A influencers. That was the single ingredient that I was looking for the most. How can my leaders influence? Because when you sit across a billionaire, it's not that easy to influence a billionaire if you're not one. And so that was the day. But I remember that first meeting was a great failure. And so we then grouped together and said, 'What do we have to do differently?' And we tweaked everything and we went back. The second one was, you know, I remember it vividly. At that time, wrongly, I had thought that it would be a good idea to buy another big public consumer brand business. And I worked hard at it. And I thought, you know, I was there and I was very far away from it. And I was so happy that I wasn't able to cross the fence because it would have been a terrible shackle on the feet of the business and myself. But again, you know, it's about having enough people that you have relationship with that you can get true advice. I never took it to my board. It would be bad, very bad, if you took something like that to your board and they rejected it. But I had enough feelers that I then at the last minute decided to move away from it. But I was very close. So things like that have happened a lot. But overall, I think you learn. You know, I always say, make mistakes. Let's make mistakes. I always used to say that to the team, 'Let's make mistakes, let's not repeat them. Let's make mistakes, let's not repeat them.' And I missed a question on obesity. What was the question?

Yeah, so my take on that is again simple. Thirty years ago, five percent of the beverages had low or no calorie. Today, about 45 percent of the beverages have low or no calorie. Twenty-five years ago, three brands. Today, 3,800 brands. The best dairy company in America, Fairlife milk, cold-separated milk, can't keep it on the shelves. And so huge transformation of the portfolio, huge transformation of the packaging. Now the best sellers are the smaller pack, the small bottles, small cans, much lower calories. And again, biggest juice producer in the world, nutritional beverages, and a lot of low-calorie beverages. So for us, again, if you look at all the consumer products companies, we have led that charge. And so physical well-being, we're certainly on the right path. Mental well-being, with five million women entrepreneurs who've hired another three and a half million women entrepreneurs, that's a lot of good mental well-being for the communities because those communities have got stronger. 880,000 direct employees, indirectly 8.8 million because the multiplier effect is 10 to 1 in the supply chain. So financial well-being, because in today's world, youth unemployment is the biggest problem in the world, and we are one of the biggest private employers as Coca-Cola in the world. And so that's really an important factor also in financial well-being. So all those areas, have we finished? Absolutely not. I mean, I think Coca-Cola has announced a new 5 by 20 program or 10 by 30 program, whatever it is. So you never finish, it's an ongoing work. Five board members who are women, maybe we should go to six, 40 percent on the way to 50. And you know why? I didn't have, you know, one of my again areas that I found I didn't succeed is I should have had at least one of the two candidates that I considered for CEO should have been a woman. I couldn't get there. My successor will because the foundation is very strong.

Oh yeah, I have no idea about what global conflict. The reason is I had a close friend called Admiral Jim Stavridis, who was the former head of NATO in Europe, who was the head of the Fletcher School in Tufts. And he would occasionally invite me to go and speak there. And they didn't have a program, they just had a professor of conflict resolution there. And then I looked at, I mean, take your phone out, every minute there's a conflict. Every minute, then it's growing in the world. It's not subsiding, it's increasing leaps and bounds. So I said, you know, in my time, in my life now, I want to concentrate on things that maybe can help my children have a little bit of sanity in their life in future years. So that's why I decided, you know, maybe I can make a little difference. And what I wanted to do is not have this as a chair or professor or theory in any way, but I wanted to have young diplomats who are going to become one day ministers, prime ministers, heads of government, ambassadors, have them connect, relationship, have them meet together for 15 days in New York. And then I will bring in one day, you know, I'll invite de Klerk to come and I will say, 'Explain to these young diplomats what made you release Mandela from jail. Why did you do that? How did you resolve that conflict in your head?' Former political leader, one corner of the global triangle, out of the Golden Triangle, the political leadership. Next day I'll invite maybe Andrew Liveris, chairman, who's a close friend of mine, chairman and CEO of Dow Chemical. Come, Andrew, and talk for a day. Not talk, I mean, you'll answer questions, will be like this, about how you merge two conflicting cultures, Dow and DuPont. Explain to them. So we're focused on business conflict, financial conflict, political conflict, social conflict. Another day, Bill Clinton, you know, you mentioned my friend, I'll say, 'Come and explain to these people how you resolve the Bosnia crisis. What made you resolve the Bosnia? How did you resolve?' So it will be this kind of a thing. Ban Ki-moon, others, they come and talk to us about the biggest conflict you had in your time as Secretary-General to these young diplomats. And it'll be 15 days, 10 sessions. We'll write it up, put it on YouTube each case, each day, and I'll moderate. And that's basically, and maybe hopefully it'll have a little bit of impact. We'll select the countries at random, six countries will be invited to send six diplomats each, 36 diplomats for 15 days, two weeks, 10 sessions. And then we'll fine-tune it. This is the way, you know, we've architected it right now. And I spent time with your Dean of the Kennedy School of Government, brilliant lady, and you know, we'll partner with institutions hopefully like your government school and then with other schools and other institutions like the UN, UNDP, and so forth. And we'll see how it works. And then we'll fine-tune it as we go along.

Honestly, honestly, I'm not alone most of the time. But if I am, I mean, I was, you know, I sail a lot now these days, in the last three, four months. And if I am in a port, I'm walking, I want a cafe, coffee in the little Greek village, and I go there and I say, 'Can I join you?' You know, no problem. I've never had anyone say no.

I read, I read spy books. I read my books. And I read a lot of, you know, women spy books. I love spy books. I read them very quickly and I read them on my iPad and I don't read much else.

That's my... had no idea. I mean, I was born in New York, I grew up in Asia, in Bangkok, and went to school. I started school in Bangkok, I went to India, continued my schooling there, the American school. I went to Tehran and continued there. Then I went to a Jesuit boarding school, basically. And then I went to university in England. And then I went to the United States because I was born there, I had a passport. And I worked for two months in a bank that was bought by another bank, but that was bought by another bank that was bought by another bank called Bankers Trust that went away 30 years ago. And I hated banking. And I said, I saw this ad, there was no email or internet or anything like that, I saw this ad in the New York Times and I went down and interviewed and got a job on a truck. And I had no idea what I was going to do. And that's what happened. You know, life is never a straight line. And I had many ups and downs in my career too. You know, I mean, when I left the Coke, there was a fellow called Roberto Goizueta who was the chairman and CEO, legendary chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, and he died on the job. He died from cancer in 1997. And he and the president there were a partnership. He had a CEO called Don Keough. Don Keough was my mentor as well as this fellow Roberto Goizueta. I mean, what I did in Eastern Europe kind of broke through and got noticed by everyone in the company at that time. I was 38 years old. But he died in 1997 and I decided to leave the Coca-Cola Company after 20 years and work for a bottler. And I mean, it wasn't like, you know, 'Or keep my position here, keep my seat warm, I'm coming back.' I left because, you know, the guard changed and I was close to those people. The new people that came, I wasn't close to and I didn't really click, the chemistry wasn't there. And I resigned and left the Coca-Cola Company. But I had kept up my relationship with people on the board who, you know, seven, eight, nine years later were still on the board. And they asked me to come back. Relationship, relationship. You know, in the old days, I mean, I used to write letters until my right hand was tired. And now of course you don't need to do that, you just, you know, email and keep up with people. And so it's really, really important. You know, I call about 10, 15 people a day at least, all around the world, ask them how they are, you know, how they're doing, how their kids are doing, because it's so important to nurture relationships because I think they're a key to success in the world. So yeah, I mean, I had met this guy, he'd come to my university just to give one lecture, this guy Leszek Balcerowicz. He was teaching at, I think, the LSE, and he come to where I was studying and given one lecture. And I kept up with him and he allowed me to buy three properties on a vinyl release, three properties in Poland. Well, I had no idea, the church of Poland, that was the land, biggest landowner of Poland in 1989. So relationships, you know, have benefited me tremendously in my life. And so I think I advise all of you, you know, that piece is a really important piece. And then when they asked me to come back, they said, 'Where do you want to go?' And I said, 'I'd never worked in Asia.' And so it was 2004 and I said, 'Oh, you know, China.' Well, at that time was 20 percent of the GDP of America. I said, 'I really want to go.' And so I was based in Hong Kong and I ran Asia for a few years, which was fascinating. Now it's 60 percent of the GDP of America.

Yeah, you know, I mean, I think in my time we probably did about 10, 12 acquisitions. Juice companies in Africa, juice companies in the United States, still water companies, Vitamin Water, SmartWater came with Vitamin Water, but SmartWater, yeah, I think they were just launching it when we bought it. So it really became a big premium water after we acquired it. We bought plant-based companies in China, soy-based beverage in Latin America, lots and lots, small, medium-sized, nothing huge. As I said, I had some plans to buy something really big and luckily I didn't embark upon that. But small bolt, for the benefit of our investment community, I always refer to them as bolt-on acquisitions. They've worked well in general. You create some brands yourself, you buy some and you grow some, and then you buy some and you nurture them and have them in your portfolio. I think the key today is consumer wants choice, choice, choice, occasion, occasion, occasion. The morning is a different occasion, the afternoon is a different occasion. There's 2 billion households in the world today, the world that we know, seven billion people, 2.1 billion households. They drink 21 beverages a day, every household in the world drinks 21 beverages a day. 2.1 times 21, of the 21 beverages, two and a half are ours. So the potential is huge. That's why my successor bought Costa Coffee, you know, because coffee is a big beverage, it was an important beverage. So we want to participate in that. That's why we acquired Monster, the energy drink company, we bought the biggest shareholding there. So you absolutely must participate in different occasions of the day. And so that's in essence what we're doing. And then, you know, with the juices, we've created mostly our own brands. If you go around, they have different names, but the look and feel of the brand is the same everywhere. So if you go to Minute Maid in China, looks the same as Minute Maid in the United States, looks the same as Hi-C in Latin America, looks the same as Cappy in Europe. Although there are different names, when the consumer sees it, it's very similar to the Al-Qaeda strategy, although they have different names, the look and feel is the same.