The Coca show: As the search for a new CEO gets underway globally, the generic game gushes on in the Indian market

BACK OF THE BOOK

Now, now, now, wait-a-minute: isn't Coca-Cola the 'Real Thing' anymore? Why would a history of a fizzy brand, mankind's shift towards which is said to be about as certain as an expanding universe, open with a reminder of America's leading cafe chain? Caffeine? Hubble-holy-bubble-addiction?

Anyhow, with Mark Pendergrast's formidable For God, Country & Coca-Cola for competition, with all its de-caf (or is it re-caf) de-ope secret formula stuff, New York Times' Constance L. Hays serves up a fairly effervescent refresher-just as the thinking caps go back on to choose a successor to Doug Daft, who got the top job of The Coca-Cola Company in late 1999. Of the entity, that is, that makes the cola syrup and markets the brand.

But what is Coca-Cola? Carbonated water. Brain tonic. Dark and light. Part of life (as New Coke found). Bottle of liberty. Self-evident pursuit of thirst. Trusted consistency. Sweet V for victory. Sublimated essence of America. Or even a 118-year-old global brand to go "with the quest for world peace". Hays strays only slightly from the book's keep-it-simple-silly (kiss) formula for lappability here. "It originated in a time of turmoil," she waxes lyrical, "as an antidote... and in its essence there is conflict."

The Real Thing By Constance L. Hays Random House PP: 396 Price: Rs 960

That doesn't betray signs of any Coca-colonialist plot, does it? Ah, flip forward to the heavyhanded post-1981 campaign to subjugate the distribution system (of mainly bottlers) and yank it under Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE). It makes for a sordid little storm in a man-blown glass bottle-that curvaCEOus icon that bears the alliterative allure of the label lettered laterally across.

Blended with management intrigue, noble intentions and corporate hubris, it's quite a heady tale-of ends, and the means to those ends. John Pemberton's original 1886 Coca-Cola was envisioned as a drugstore soda-fountain drink. Bottling just happened to happen, sort of-and came to outsell fountains by the 1920s. While Bob Woodruff, CEO till 1981, comes across as a benign patriarch wise enough not to claim any credit, Doug Ivester, the CCE schemer, is portrayed as a bean-counting control freak. And that too, one working for a stock-fixated CEO in Roberto Goizueta-who took over in 1981, dabbled in show biz (Ghostbusters n' all), catapulted the stock, and died in 1997.

Successor CEO Ivester's EFF-ups are presented in jaw-clenching detail, from allegations of racism and mercenary behaviour (symbolised by the temperature-priced Coke dispenser supposedly sanctified by the law of demand and supply), to insensitivity towards "psychosomatic" sufferers of cola indigestion in Belgium. In Hays' history, ex-President Dan Keough is Coca-Cola's hero, for allying with Warren Buffett in 1999 to oust Ivester and save the brand in consumer heartspace. This is the book's climactic sprayburst, with the new CEO Daft left "thunderstruck" by it all.

What was Daft's phase like? Is a generational shift needed? Is Steve Heyer the new guy for the job? Left unsaid. The brand, though, has made its sharpest moves in India since its 1993 Agra relaunch only recently-claiming the 'generic' position in consumer mindspace. Any further universalism, and it needn't even be 'American' anymore; its origin would matter less than the market's inherent openness. And openness has been the real story, really. While late-18th century Europe prided itself in its steamy cafes and sparkling springs, it took a liberal America to welcome fizz-inventor Joseph Priestley, who fled there to ask his questions: on the truth of natural wonders, and their amenability to mortal manufacture.

"Britannica Is A Cradle Of Knowledge"

Britannica chief Jorge Cauz on the first encyclopaedia brand to sell 1,000 sets per year in India.

What are Britannica's objectives in the Indian market?

We came to India five years ago with two main objectives. The number one objective is to make our content available to as many people as possible in the local market. And the number two objective, though we can debate which came first, is to build the business here. We have achieved both. There were three things we needed to do. One was to lower the price of the content. The second... we found our breadth and depth of content related to Indian interests was not enough, so we created content to satisfy local needs. Thirdly, we started publishing in vernacular languages.

The content does not reflect the point of view of a white Anglo-Saxon man, it reflects a global identity. This is a key difference from the past on what is the state of knowledge today. Britannica is a cradle of knowledge. We do not create knowledge, we organize it.

How come Google has more salience as a knowledge brand? Has Britannica really made full use of the Internet's interlinking mechanisms?

That's not a knowledge brand, it's a search service. In 1995, we launched the first encyclopeadia ever online. It's an ongoing project to ease content navigation and link databases.

The Slow Pace Of Fast Change By Bhaskar Chakravorti Harvard Business School Press PP: 216 Price: $29.95

If the success and failure of innovations pique your interest, if you're given to groaning about the 'pace' of change, and if you've had occasion to think about what has jocularly been called the 'gnash equilibrium' of game theory, grab this book-now. Bhaskar Chakravorti, partner and thought leader at the strategy advisory Monitor Group, presents a crisply focused book on addressing the 'paradox of network effects' in a tight-knit market. The paradox of consensual constancy. The premise: "...innovations and highly connected markets share a complex relationship: everybody loves the idea behind a good innovation, but embraces it only when others embrace it as well."

To think different is not enough; think new equilibrium, and how to get there. To do which, Chakravorti draws on the inter-dependency insights of game theory-and John Nash's 'Beautiful Bind'. "In Nash's framework, an equilibrium of choices occurs when each party in a market makes a choice that it considers to be the best one relative to available alternatives, assuming that all the other parties in the network are doing the same." To game theory first-timers, the finer implications could be quite baffling. Try this: "In a connected environment, the publicly observable outcome that emerges from parallel choices might be counterintuitive when viewed in the aggregate." Gulp!

Anyway, formulating and deploying a strategy shouldn't stress the grey cells much: "imagine a desired plausible endgame", the author suggests, and then work backward to orchestrate individual choices. The nuts-n-bolts are left to you, the innovator.