David Butler - Design to grow: how Coca-Cola learned to combine scale & agility (and how you can too)

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Contents

For Allen, Claudia, Stelle, and RubyIm a lucky man. David

For Hank, Melissa, and BenIm thrice blessed. Linda

If you want to build a ship, dont drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupry

Preface

S CALE AND AGILITY. In todays volatile and rapidly changing world, these are the two essentials that every company needs to grow and remain relevant.

If youre a big, established company, youve got scale, which enables you to expand almost effortlessly from Boston to Bangalore. Over time, youve built up powerful assetsexpertise, brands, customers, distribution channels, relationshipsthat most startups could only dream about. Scale is not your problem. Your problem is agilityyou must be smarter, faster, leaner than the startup thats got your industry in its crosshairstargeted for disruption.

How can you grow (gain market share, increase your brands relevance, and generate revenue growth) with the speed and flexibility of a startup? Every big, established company, organization, and even government is at risk of being disrupted, having a so-called Kodak Moment, watching its industry upended and its competitive advantagesthe moats that have protected it for decadesdisappear overnight.

If youre in a startup, youve got a different problem. Youve got agility, actually, nothing but agility. Trying new business models, repositioning your company, developing new features, or even whole new products, within daysthings big companies can only dream aboutare not your problem. For you, building the right team, deciding which metrics matter, acquiring customers, and securing funding are what keep you up at night. Scale is your problemdoing what it takes to expand your startup into new geographies, including the land of profitability, is your challenge. Thats why most startups failonly a dispiriting one out of ten succeeds.

What if there were something that could help you grow, avoid disruption, and even take giant steps forward? What if there were something that could help you create both scale and/or agility?

There isits called design .

And thats what this book is abouthow The Coca-Cola Company uses design to grow, and how the lessons it learned can help other companies, regardless of size, industry, or geography, do the same.

For over a century, Coca-Cola has used design to scale to over two hundred countries, build seventeen billion-dollar brands, partner with more than twenty million retail customers, and sell close to two billion products a day. But the company is still learning. Over the last decade, it has focused on mastering how also to use design to create agilitysomething most established companies, including Coca-Cola, struggle with.

Well deconstruct this journey by demystifying the often confusing language of design into a set of plain-spoken, easy-to-understand principles. Along the way, well explore examples from around the world and across different parts of the companymango growing in Kenya, packaging in Tokyo, retail shops in Bogot, advertising in Cape Town, and social fountain machines in the United Statesto make it easier to understand the role design can play in helping one of the largest companies on the planet become nimbler and more adaptable to a complex and changing world. The stories themselves may be unique to Coca-Cola, but the challenges they describe are universal.

How to use this book

A few words about how this book is organized. Part 1 explains how to design for scale, and shows how The Coca-Cola Company used design across its business to create a $170 billion, global brand.

In chapter 1 we grapple with the question, What is design? then show how design creates value and what it looks like to design on purpose.

In chapter 2, we investigate how The Coca-Cola Company used design strategically to scale Coca-Cola into one of the most, if not the most, ubiquitous brands on the planet.

In chapter 3, we look at three realities that create the new normal of todays marketplace: wicked problems, the changes unleashed by the after-Internet world, and the need to create shared value. There are, of course, other factors, but these three have created a new level of external complexity, challenging every companys ability to grow.

In part 2, we discuss what it takes to join the Billion-Dollar Brand Club, and explore why its getting harder than ever for established companies to maintain their status as part of this elite group. Well examine how startups design for agility and how big, established companies can too.

In chapter 4, well explain how design can actually help any company learn to fail fast, and adapt to stay ahead of the competition. Well show how The Coca-Cola Company uses design to create adaptability from its 5-Note Melody to its manual distribution systems in Africa to the redesign of hundreds of bodegas in Latin America.

In chapter 5, well see how designing modular systems is one way for a company to stay agile enough to survive and thrive. Well look at three examples from Coca-Cola: its global juice visual identity system, a high-density mango growing initiative, and the development of the Freestyle drink machine, to see how designing modular systems really works.

In chapter 6, we see why designing open systems, such as Wikipedia, allows for greater collaboration, both within a company and with a companys stakeholders. That process, it turns out, can not only help in uncovering the best talent and ideas, but can result in cost savings along the way. We look at the development of the Coca-Cola Design Machine, its 5by20 global commitment to empower women entrepreneurs, and its initiatives around global water use as examples of open systems in action.

Finally, in the epilogue, we consider what the future will look like in a world where design is democratized. Well also explore what big companies can learn from startups to help them avoid significant disruption, and what startups can learn from big companies that would let them beat that dismal startup failure rate. Will the next wave of innovationbuilding scale-upsbe the answer for both ends of the business spectrum?

Throughout the book, we offer lessons that any company can use to grow and thrive, along with suggestions as to how you can use our road-tested ideas for getting everybody in your company on board.

In The Deep End, we provide references for anyone who wants to delve further into the ideas presented here, as well as the never-before-published Designing on Purpose manifesto that was my Jerry Maguire moment at the company, and the seed for this book.

In the course of this book, well go behind the scenes of The Coca-Cola Companys operations, ranging from how the carpet industry helped it make the decision on what shade of blue to use for the Dasani bottle to how its turning local biowastefrom sugar cane stalks in Brazil to tree bark in Russiainto PlantBottle Packaging.

Most of these problems are, of course, specific to Coca-Cola, but every business can learn from the way the company used design to solve them.

PART 1

Designing for Scale

T he first week of November 2013 saw a flurry of unusually compelling stories in the business news. Tesla suffered another battery fire, prompting fears of a recall. The Feds nailed a hedge-fund titan with a fondness for insider trading. The stock market hit a new high. However, even amid such provocative headlines, two events stood out: the shuttering of a once-mighty retail empire, and the stratospheric stock market debut of a seven-year-old Internet darling.

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