Ron Lewis – The Coca-Cola Company
Lewis leapt onto a podium at Supply Side West in May and passionately extolled the virtues, for The Coca-Cola Company, of thinking and acting like a start-up.
As Coke’s chief procurement officer, Lewis recognizes that “disruptive innovation” is key to the company achieving its 2020 goal of doubling sales.
He recognizes that Coke’s VEB group – setup in 2009 to identify the next generation of ‘billion dollar’ brands needs to make bets.
“But instead of making huge bets, let’s make more smaller bets, and let’s make them earlier. And if we’re going to fail, let’s fail fast,” he said.
Lewis then drew an interesting analogy with Kodak’s decline, warning his audience against complacency: “Every market leader is at risk of having that Kodak moment. We don’t want to get behind the trends. You innovate or you die.”