turally? And that was what Alexis really had in
her heart in terms of where she was. But that
wasn’t the engagement we were having. It certainly wasn’t the senior-management engagement we were having,” recalls Isdell.
Isdell joined Coca-Cola in Zambia in 1966.
He came out of retirement in 2004 to accept
the challenge of turning Coca-Cola around as
its chairman and CEO. “If you track the metrics we had to meet in regard to the suit, a
number of those metrics were being met, but
not all of those metrics were being met. There
were gaps and there
Coca-Cola Settlement In millions were significant
gaps in those met-
Work- rics,” Isdell remem-
Force
remedies bers about when he
$36 started in 2004. He
says, “One of the
things I was fortu-
$43.5 nate enough to
inherit was there
$113 had been an overall
Cash engagement study,
African- not related to the
American-
employee salary adjustments metrics of the suit
itself but to the
Total Settlement: $192.5 million overall engagement
of the company as
a whole and what the employees as a whole
thought about where the company was. That
was a measure against our peers, against other
high-performing companies. It’s a standard
measure so we are able to make valid compar-
isons. And that was a pretty damning docu-
ment. We were significantly underperforming
fast-moving consumer-goods companies. We
were certainly way below high-performing
companies. And if you go back to what the
people were saying—verbatim from the inter-
views—they had lost confidence in leadership,
they felt we were arrogant, they felt we lost the
world to wind.
“We had a problem, we had a very significant morale problem as a company on a
whole,” admits Isdell.
He says the first measure for engagement is
“How do your people feel about working for
you?” From the recent employee survey, he
knew Coca-Cola’s employee-engagement levels
weren’t good and he also knew negativity
about the company was seeping
outside as well.
“We also had
dropped down on
other lists; we
would be on the
list of top 10
employers, and
then we didn’t
even appear.
Headhunters told
us they had great
difficulty attracting
people to work for
Coca-Cola, so all
those data points
fell together,”
Isdell recalls.
Coca-Cola
Makes a
Comeback
From the first day
that Isdell stepped
back on the campus at the Coca-
Cola North
E. Neville Isdell, chairman
and CEO, The Coca-Cola Co.
“My family moved from
Northern Ireland to Zambia,
in a still-segregated Africa,
when I was 10. I became a child
of Africa and fell in love with
the continent and its beautiful
people … From my parents, I
developed an appreciation for
fairness and justice. I was at
the University of Cape Town
in the early 1960s when
Nelson Mandela was banished
to Robben Island across
Table Bay.”
America headquarters in Atlanta, the
culture started to change.
“The first day that I appeared, as chairman-elect at the time, on this campus again was on
the fifth of May of ‘04, and I was told we were
going to meet in the quadrangle downstairs. It
was a lovely, sunny spring day, and they said,
‘By the way, there are no remarks, we are not
going to speak to anyone, we are just going to
mingle, no remarks.’ I said, ‘Well, if that’s how
you want to do it, then that’s the way you
want to do it,’” reflects Isdell. “I get there and
someone put up a stage and a microphone,
and they said, ‘Well, it wasn’t planned, we are
not going to do anything.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s
really peculiar because [if] you put up a stage
and a microphone, then that’s the way people
tend to face. I think we are going to have to
say something.’ So, I got up there. I didn’t
have anything in my inside pocket, I didn’t
have anything [prepared] to talk about. I got
up and I talked about people and the spirit of
