The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [2]
It was a straightforward decision, especially knowing that he was the president. I saw Coke in 1988 as a company that understood what it was doing and was doing the right thing and was obviously enormously valuable as a result.
If you wanted to invent a human personification of The Coca-Cola Company, it would be Don Keough. He was and is Mr. Coke. He’s of the Ben Franklin school, “Keep thy shop and it will keep thee.” Basically, what he has always done is do the right thing by Coca-Cola and he believes that it will always do the right thing by him.
Don’s best ability is to cut to the chase on an issue, to cut through the bureaucratic fog. Keep it simple is his principle and mine too.
Herbert Allen says that the only two businessmen he knew who could have become president if they had run for office were Jack Welch and Don Keough. I agree with that; they both had that natural brilliance. They are both people we can learn so much from.
After all these years, every time I see Don Keough I feel as refreshed as I do after drinking a Cherry Coke. He never loses his carbonation. I’ve seen him on the board of Coke and now at Berkshire. Don is as enthusiastic and committed as ever, full of plans, energy, ideas, daring us all to dream. I am delighted that this book will help so many other people share in that unique Keough vision.
—Warren Buffett
Introduction
MORE THAN TWO DECADES ago as president of The Coca-Cola Company, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a large convention of customers meeting in Miami. The theme of their meeting was “Join the Winners,” and they asked if I would speak to them on how to be a winner in business. In short, they asked for the secrets of success.
It was a flattering assignment, but there has never been a shortage of speakers and writers willing to dispense tried and true advice on how to succeed in business without really trying. From football coaches to ex-CEOs to psychologists to teachers, preachers, and fortune-tellers, the success gurus have paraded their wares across the pages and stages of the world. And while there is some good in everything, most of those efforts boiled down to the easy bromides of “Work hard” and “Do what your mother tells you.” After a lifetime in business, I’ve never been able to develop a set of rules or a step-by-step formula that will guarantee success in anything, much less in a field as dynamic and changing as business.
Take the whole question of leadership, which has been studied to death, always inconclusively. A sociology professor who had spent his entire academic life studying leadership once said that he had followed the careers of nearly two thousand students who had gone through his classes, and after all this research he had arrived at the conclusion that the only way to identify a leader is to look behind the person to see if anybody is following him or her.
So when I was asked to talk about how to win, my response was I couldn’t do that. What I could do, however, was to talk about how to lose and I offered a guarantee that anyone who followed my formula would be a highly successful loser.
So I delivered a little speech that has been refined over time into “Keough’s Ten Commandments for Business Failure” and which evolved over more time into this little book, which draws on more than sixty years of experience, beginning in 1949 with the then-new medium of television at WOW-TV in Omaha, Nebraska.
I had my first taste of television while attending Creighton University on the GI bill after service in the navy in World War II. With some hazy idea of maybe going on to law school, I got a degree in the humanities, majoring in philosophy. Over the years, however, I’ve never seen a help-wanted ad for a philosopher. I enjoyed studying the great debates over man and his place in the universe, the nature of good and evil, the shadows and realities of life. While