The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company [Hardcover]

Constance L. Hays (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 3, 2004

A definitive history of Coca-Cola, the world’s best-known brand, by a New York Times reporter who has followed the company and who brings fresh insights to the world of Coke, telling a larger story about American business and culture

The Real Thing is a portrait of America’s most famous product and the men who transformed it from mere soft drink to symbol of freedom. The story, starting with Coke’s creation after the Civil War and continuing with its domination of the domestic and worldwide soft-drink business, is a uniquely American tale of opportunity, hope, teamwork, and love, as well as salesmanship, hubris, ambition, and greed. By 1920, the Coca-Cola Company’s success depended on a unique partnership with a group of independent bottlers. Together, they had made Coke not just a soft drink but an element of our culture. But the company, intent on controlling everything about Coke, did all it could to dismantle that partnership. In its reach for power, it was more than willing to gamble the past.

Constance L. Hays examines a century of Coca-Cola history through the charismatic, driven men who used luck, spin, and the open door of enterprise to turn a beverage with no nutritional value into a remedy, a refreshment, and the world’s best-known brand. The story of Coke is also a catalog of carbonation, soda fountains, dynastic bottling businesses, global expansion, and outsize promotional campaigns, including New Coke, one of the greatest marketing debacles of all time. By examining relationships at all levels of the company, The Real Thing reveals the psyche of a great American corporation and how it shadows all business, for better or worse.

This is as much a story about America as it is the tale of a great American product, one recognized all over the world. Under the leadership of Roberto Goizueta and Doug Ivester, Coca-Cola reinvented itself for investors, spearheading trends such as lavish executive salaries and the wooing of Wall Street, but when Coke’s great global ambitions ran into trouble, it had difficulty getting back on track.

The Real Thing is a journey through the soft-drink industry, from the corner office to the vending machine. It is also a social history in which sugared water becomes an international object of consumer desire—and the messages poured upon an eager public gradually obscure the truth.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Coca-Cola has become such a ubiquitous American symbol such that it's often hard to distinguish where mere substance ends (its formula is a secret as closely held as military stealth technology) and its seductively overwhelming marketing begins. But in the 1980s and '90s, Coke's new corporate management evolved it from a reliable, if sometimes stodgy, icon of American industry into one of the hottest stocks in a notoriously overheated bull market. That explosive corporate evolution is the focus of veteran NY Times beverage industry reporter Constance Hays' cautionary business history. Eschewing strict chronology in favor of skillfully weaving in appropriate pieces of the company's complex legacy and unique coporate culture to underscore their impact on the contemporary story at hand, Hays carefully dissects a company billed in boom years as a virtual perpetual profit machine of boundless potential. Coke's growth was largely the product of Roberto Goizueta, the methodical, Cuban-born chemist who'd risen through the company's ranks and outflanked fellow veteran executive/personable "super salesman" Don Keough to become its CEO. Goizueta may have been able to rise above the hubris-fueled "New Coke" reformulation fiasco of the mid-80s, but his penchant for ruthless market expansion, corporate rejiggering and tight control of the company's operating details and financial numbers would also sow the seeds for the inevitable collapse that halved Coke's value. That implosion quickly took down successor CEO Doug Forrester--ironically the original financial architect of much of the company's remarkable boom. While this is largely a business history and not a cultural one, it's filled with a wealth of telling human details: corporate pressures exerted on family-owned Coke bottlers to sell out; an obscure academic/stock analyst whose curiosity helped unravel the company's financial secrets; Machiavellian corporate politics where one era's loser becomes another's cautious victor. --Jerry McCulley

From Publishers Weekly

Hays, who spent three years covering the food and beverage industry for the New York Times, focuses on the recent efforts by Coca-Cola not just to win the cola wars but to become the most dominant beverage of all. Early chapters effectively segue back and forth between Coke's modern global strategy and the company's first century of increasing dominance. Founder Asa Candler envisioned Coke as a fountain drink, and thought so little of other sales methods he gave two men bottling rights to nearly all of America in 1899, resulting in a patchwork of plants where the sodas was made and distributed. Hays deftly shows how these local bottlers were crucial in establishing Coke's public image, yet often possessed an independent streak that rankled the company's corporate leaders, who eventually sought to regain control over much of the operations, with mixed results. She clearly admires the ambition and dedication of executives like Roberto Goizeuta and Doug Ivester, allowing much of the story to unfold from their perspective, but doesn't flinch from chronicling missteps like the attempt to beat the Pepsi Challenge with New Coke. And even though the final chapters depict the shattering of the Coke myth and the onset of financial woes, it's sometimes difficult to tell whether Hays is simply reporting on the new management's belief in its ability to bounce back or buying into their vision. Readers won't uncover the secrets of Coca-Cola the drink, but they'll learn a lot about what lies behind Coca-Cola the world's most powerful brand.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (February 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375505628
• ISBN-13: 978-0375505621
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,695,606 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A jumble of stories, March 23, 2004

By 

D. H. Richards "ninthwavestore" (Silver Spring, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company (Hardcover)

First of all, I have to recommend a far superior history of coke's first 100 years, Mark Pendergrast's "For God, Country and Coca-Cola..." Pendergrast's well researched (over researched?) book neatly and clearly tells the story of how the company started and ended up in the late 80s.

In some ways Hays book is a sequel. At its best it tells the story of what happened to the giant syrup manufacturer after 1990. But the main problem with the book is Hays insistence on a non-linear style that works poorly when presenting history. She often starts a story and then stop--moving on to pick up another thread. Sometimes she comes back to finish the first thread, often she just mentions it in passing in another thread. The result is a convoluted, hard to follow story of Coke in the 1990s. Perhaps it is a refreshing change from the straight forward "and then this happened" approach, but it makes for difficult reading.

Hays does a good job researching, she obviously spoke with many key people in Coke's world (or used other sources). Often though the book reads like a magazine article, long on colorful quotes and interesting asides, short on a central narrative drive.

If you have read Pendergrast and want to get updated (through the turn of the century at least) then Hays will do the job. But if you know only vague details about Coke then you should start with For God, Country and Coca-Cola.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Outdated on arrival, March 8, 2004

By 

Gaetan Lion - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company (Hardcover)

New York Times reporter Constance Hays is an excellent business journalist, but her book is already so dated that it is no more than a mundane history book. Unfortunately, it pretends to be a contemporary analysis of The Coca Cola Company's management practices. And, in this regard it just fails.

The book spends a long time on the origin of this all American company. It also develops well the very successful 16 year tenure of Roberto Goizeta from 1981 until his surprising death in 1997. It does a good job of covering the miserable and short tenure of Douglas Ivester from 1997 to 1999. He made so many mistakes within such a short time, that he was forced out before he could do any more damage.

Unfortunately, Hays hardly covers the valiant efforts of Daft, CEO from 1999 until February 2004 to turnaround the company. Thus, her criticism of Coke's management leadership is already two CEOs and nearly four years behind as the book just hits the stores. For this explicit reason, I would pass it up.

Instead, I recommend a similar but far superior book written by another top notch NY Times journalist: The End of Detroit: How the Big Three lost their grip on the American Car Market written by Micheline Maynard. Maynard's analysis is far sharper, current, and relevant than is Hays' in The Real Thing.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rigorous Analysis of Real Crises, March 15, 2004

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company (Hardcover)

Many of those who are already familiar with the long and colorful history of the Coca-Cola Company may share my own curiosity about the problems it has struggled with in recent years. What happened? A question of greater interest to me, what caused all the problems after a century of increasingly greater sales and profits? In this volume, Hays provides a brief but sufficient review of the company's history through 1980 before focussing the bulk of her attention on Robert C. Goizueta's 17 years as CEO until his unexpected death in 1997, and then on M. Douglas Ivester who succeeded Goizueta for only two years until being forced out. In certain respects, Hays resembles a cultural anthropologist as she rigorously analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the two CEOs as they struggled (with mixed success) to sustain the Coca-Cola Company's market dominance, both domestically and internationally. As she presents her material, I was convinced that many of the problems they faced and some of which they inherited are similar to those which Louis V. Gerstner encountered when he became CEO of IBM. Specifically, a highly political corporate culture, well-entrenched resistance to change, estrangement from customers, and contempt for early-warning signs of imminent deterioration of both prestige and profits.

To her credit, Hays demonstrates meticulous care and commendable circumspection when explaining that several of the problems which the Coca-Cola Company encountered during the past two decades were by no means unique as its globalization initiatives proceeded, given internal upheavals in emerging markets and currency devaluations over which it had little (if any) control. It was also among the corporate victims of anti-Americanism which, if anything, has become even more virulent during the last 12-18 months. Nonetheless, one of her central themes is that the Coca-Cola Company was as relentlessly committed to a defective "formula" for growth worldwide as it was protective of its super-secret formula for syrup. Meanwhile, the company weakened long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with many of its independent bottlers. Some of the most engrossing material in her book examines a number of executive-suite dramas (and melodramas) which suggest, to me at least, an inability and/or unwillingness among senior managers to affirm in their conduct certain values with which the company had once been so closely identified, notably in areas such as corporate good citizenship and strategic partnerships based on trust.

Recent developments suggest that current CEO Douglas N. Daft and his senior management team continue to struggle with many of the aforementioned problems and, through their determined efforts, the Coca-Cola Company is beginning to solve them. Hays observes that "They knew the formula. They had done it before. They would just have to do it again." Hopefully they will succeed, guided and informed by lessons learned during recent years...lessons which are specified or implied in this riveting account by Hays of "truth and power" in a company which, for more than a century, has been synonymous with so many of the "best and brightest" achievements in the history of American free enterprise.