Book dossier

I'd Like the World to Buy a Coke

by David Greising

When Roberto Goizueta fled Fidel Castro's Cuba in 1960, he had just $200 in his pocket and 100 shares of Coca-Cola stock in a New York bank. He also had a job at the Coca-Cola Co. By the time he died in 1997, the Coca-Cola chairman was worth $1 billion and had transformed Coke from a doddering giant into one of the world's most successful and admired companies. Under his leadership, Coke's stock price jumped 3500%, the company tripled in size, and it controlled nearly half of the world's soft drink market. I'd Like the World to Buy a Coke takes a candid look at the life and career of one of the longest-serving and highest-paid chief executives in history. Greising chronicles every phase in a career fraught with surprising twists and turns, from Goizueta's watershed decision to break away from his father and work for Coke, to his flight from Cuba, to his grooming for the chairman's job and the bitter battle for Coke's corner office. The book gives previously unpublished insight into Coke's conquest of eastern Europe and push for truly worldwide distribution, its controversial hiring of the Hollywood talent agency behind the "Always Coca-Cola" campaign, Goizueta's behind-the-scenes push to bring the Olympics to Atlanta, and his careful selection of his own successor, years before his sudden death from lung cancer in October 1997.