A NEWSLETTER FROM HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING

ARTICLE REPRINT NO. U0804B

How Coca-Cola Built Strength on
Diversity

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How Coca-Cola Built Strength on Diversity
In 2000, The Coca-Cola Company settled the largest racial-discrimination lawsuit in history. Filed on behalf of approximately 2,000 former and current U.S. employees, it resulted in a $192.5 million settlement. A sevenmember task force headed by former U.S. Labor Secretary
Alexis M. Herman was appointed by the court to oversee the company’s diversity efforts. Before its four-year term ended, Coca-Cola, under CEO Neville Isdell’s leadership, asked that its oversight be extended another year.
The focus of this diversity work was treating female and minority employees equitably in hiring, evaluations, raises, and promotions. But Isdell and his team had an additional goal: to turn diversity into a business advantage. Read on for how Coca-Cola was able to do this.
—Christina Bielaszka-DuVernay, Editor
CBD: Take me back to 2000: What was your role at CocaCola then?
NI: At the time of the settlement, I was vice chairman of Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company in the U.K., the second-largest bottler in the world, and looking forward to retirement. I retired at the end of the following year, after
35 years with the company.
CBD: When did you come back—and why?
NI: The call to return to The Coca-Cola Company, this time as chairman and chief executive officer, came in 2004.
It would have been easy to pass up the offer and leave the challenges to others, but the company I first joined in
1966 and loved so much kept falling short of what I knew it could be. As a lifelong employee of the global Coca-Cola system—and as someone who has spent more of his life in
Africa than on any of the other five continents on which I have lived—the discrimination lawsuit was an embarrassment.
With the task force’s guidance, Coca-Cola was in the process of establishing a culture that embraced diversity and harnessed its strength, and I wanted to be part of this effort. CBD: In terms of diversity, where is Coca-Cola today?
NI: We have come a long way. Between 1999 and 2006, minority representation among Coca-Cola executives at the assistant vice-president level and above increased from 8.4% to 21%. The percentage of women in executive positions grew from 16% to 28% during the same time.
Below the executive rank, minority managers increased from 16% to 25.5%. Coca-Cola is now recognized by a

broad range of organizations as a leader in fairness and diversity. CBD: How did the company get to these results?
NI: We established measurable programs and initiatives designed to recruit, mentor, and retain women and minorities in our workforce. It started with a simple premise: that all our open positions would have to have diverse candidate slates before we could proceed with interviewing and selection. To support this, we broadened our recruitment strategy and required our external sourcing partners to do the same. We began to look and communicate in new places; for example, reaching agreements with approximately 50 Hispanic job boards, ensuring that our recruitment messages were being seen by candidates where they were looking.
We’ve made great strides in attracting diverse talent. Thirtyeight percent of new U.S. hires from 2004 through 2006 were persons of color, including 20.3% who are AfricanAmerican. Among senior managers, 40% of new hires in this same time period were persons of color, including
23.6% who are African-American.
In 2001, the company instituted mentoring programs which have produced encouraging results.