How Coca-Cola Learned to Combine Scale and Agility
David Butler is Coca-Cola’s vice president of innovation. Every day it’s his job to create the systems, process and relationships necessary for the company to produce as much value as possible through innovation. He is a self-proclaimed “systems geek,” surfer and natural optimist. He is also a keynote speaker at the 2015 MHI Annual Conference.
In the past decade, Coca-Cola has added ten billion-dollar brands to its portfolio and doubled its stock price. Butler also believes that the company is now on a trajectory to double the size of its business by 2020 – “essentially replicating in the space of a decade what took the company 100 years to build.”
He urges firms to learn from this success. Butler believes that, in today’s world, every company is at risk of having a “Kodak Moment”—watching its industry and the competitive advantages it has developed over years, even decades, vanish overnight. The reason? An inability to adapt quickly to new business realities.
The lesson is that in today’s challenging global climate, established businesses are in danger of not being able to adapt quickly enough, while nimble start-ups fail due to their inability to scale. “Tomorrow’s business winners will be the ones who know how to combine the two,” he predicts.
At the 2015 MHI Annual Conference (October 4-7 in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL), Butler will share both the successes and failures of one of the world’s largest companies as it learned to use design to be both agile and big.
In this behind-the-scenes keynote, he will use plain language and easy-to-understand case studies to show how this works at Coca-Cola—and how other companies can use the same approach to grow their business. This session is a must-attend event for leaders inside large corporations as well as entrepreneurs just getting started.
Click here to learn more about the 2015 MHI Annual Conference and register to attend.
