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07/27/06
Remarks
at the National Urban League Annual Conference Luncheon
Georgia
World Congress Center
Atlanta,
Georgia
E.
Neville Isdell, Chairman and CEO, The Coca-Cola Company
As prepared for delivery
Bill Pickard... Business Pioneer Honorees... ladies and gentlemen...
On behalf of all my colleagues at The Coca-Cola Company -- welcome
to our home town.
I understand that Marc Morial is at the White House today for the signing
of the Voting Rights Act re-authorization. If Marc were here today, I
would congratulate him and the entire leadership of the National Urban
League for everything you have done to ensure the extension of this important
law. Well done to all of you.
I would also congratulate the entire leadership of the National Urban
League for your wisdom in holding the 2006 Annual Conference in Atlanta
in July. As a total beverage company, this makes perfect sense
to all of us at The Coca-Cola Company, and we thank everyone here for
your business this week.
Thanks, also, to Atlanta Urban League President Clinton Dye and the entire
Host Committee for your tireless dedication to the task of returning the
Annual Conference to Atlanta. And thanks to all of you for joining us
today.
The Coca-Cola Company is especially pleased to support the Annual Conference
with our friends from UPS, and I am personally honored to serve as conference
co-chair with Mike Eskew.
Coca-Cola and UPS connect the world in profound -- but profoundly
different -- ways: my company is fundamentally about bringing people
together through moments of refreshment... teaching the world to sing,
in the words of Billy Davis' famous jingle. Mike's company connects the
world through its remarkable network of drivers, trucks, package cars
and planes; UPS is one of the most vital links in the global supply chain.
Economic and social progress -- the growth everyone here desires -- takes
both kinds of connections, personal and commercial... It
takes red and brown.
And that brings me to the theme of this conference: "Building
economic power for Black America."
Now, I don't pretend to be an authority on urban development or economic
empowerment. (I know there are plenty of real experts on those
issues in the audience today.) However, based on my experience with an
Atlanta company, and as a resident of Atlanta, it strikes me that this
city -- and the people and companies who call it home -- can be taken
as an object lesson in building lasting economic power... about
welcoming individuals and ideas, wherever they're from... about being
local and international... and about accepting the opportunities and
risks presented by a diverse global economy.
For what it's worth, here are my thoughts.
The last time the National Urban League held its Annual Conference in
Atlanta was 1991. That was a very big year for this city.
- Plans were being drawn up for the 1996 Olympic Games, which the city
had been awarded in September of 1990 in Tokyo.
- One of the world's great logistics and delivery companies -- UPS --
moved its headquarters here.
- And -- most apparently -- people began to move here in droves:
In 1990, the 10 county metro-Atlanta region was home to around
2 ½ million people. Today, its home to more than 3.8 million
-- an increase of nearly 50 percent.
One of the most important factors in the city's growth lives on, right
across Marietta Street at Centennial Olympic Park. (As a matter of fact,
the Georgia World Congress Center hosted weightlifting, fencing, wrestling
and several other Olympic events exactly 10 years ago this week.)
In order for Andy Young, Billy Payne, Maynard Jackson and Shirley Franklin
to bring the Games to Atlanta, there had to be a core... a foundation...
something to build on. First -- and I mean that literally, before
this city became known as Marthasville and Atlanta -- there was Terminus,
a railroad depot between Marietta and Decatur, a short walk from here.
As the railroads grew, Atlanta grew, becoming a major multi-modal transportation
hub.
My point here is not to recite a lot of ancient Atlanta history. My point
is that a city's fundamentals matter... that its core industries
make all the difference over time. That's the reason Delta Airlines moved
from Monroe, Louisiana, to Atlanta in 1941. It's the reason -- five decades
later -- Mike and UPS moved here from Connecticut.
Because Atlanta was a great transportation city, it became a great business
city. 120 years ago, the first glass of Coca-Cola® was served at Jacobs
Pharmacy, a couple blocks north of the city's rail junction. As The Coca-Cola
Company grew -- as our hometown grew -- thousands of other businesses
took root and flourished, too.
Today, Atlanta is home to six Fortune 500 companies, tied for ninth with
Houston, Munich and Osaka. Now, in the grand scheme of things -- and compared
to the thousands of small businesses that are the backbone of our economy
-- this is a mostly meaningless indicator. I bring it up, though, to make
a point about the global economy: It changes as it grows. Next
year, one of those companies -- BellSouth -- will become part of San Antonio-based
AT&T. Last year, Georgia Pacific was acquired by Wichita-based Koch
Industries, and Scientific Atlanta merged with Cisco Systems. GM and Ford
have also announced plans to close their assembly plants here.
Now, I don't want to sound like Pollyanna about this. I know what it's
like to see a factory close down... to wonder if you'll be the next one
laid off, and whether you'll have a new job before your benefits expire.
I know it feels like a death in the family. I know, too, that if you're
the one out of a job, it doesn't make it any easier to know that the economic
flexibility that allowed you to be cut loose also helped attract billions
of dollars of investment and thousands of new jobs from Korea, or Germany,
or Japan, or California.
I also know this: Atlanta is going to be OK. The city will continue not
just to grow and thrive... but to lead. New jobs -- and new job seekers
-- will continue to move here... because we are open to risk, and open
to change... and because we know who we are.
And as all of you know, Atlanta is also -- crucially -- the cradle of
the civil rights movement. The importance of this history to Atlanta cannot
be over-emphasized. Other cities have world-class transportation systems
and research universities and arts facilities and all the other things
Atlanta is so justifiably proud of. However, no other city can claim our
civil rights heritage. And no one who understands Atlanta can fail to
appreciate how profoundly this history continues to resonate.
Atlanta (as everyone knows) has become an enormously popular destination
for African-Americans:
- Between 1990 and 2005, the number of what the Census Bureau calls
"blacks and other races" in metro Atlanta more than doubled,
from nearly 785,000 to more than 1.6 million, with the population share
increasing from 30.7 percent to 43.4 percent. The gains were broad-based,
too, taking place in all 10 metro Atlanta counties.
The growth of the African American population has had a correspondingly
favorable impact on governments and businesses.
- Along with Prince George's County, Maryland, DeKalb County, Georgia,
is now one of the wealthiest majority-black counties in the United States.
- And -- to take just one headline from the last two weeks -- the number
of minority-owned businesses in metro Atlanta area increased more than
72 percent in five years.
I could go on, but I think you get the point: the movement endures in
Atlanta... and it endures for all Atlantans.
Last night at Ebenezer, Dr. King's spirit challenged me to consider what
I, as the chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company, should
do next. I hope you will forgive me one moment of confession, but I was
enormously gratified that Coca-Cola was able to join Mayor
Franklin, UPS, Delta Air Lines, Home Depot and others in our hometown
to keep Dr. King's papers right here in Atlanta, at Morehouse College.
In the weeks before he was assassinated, Dr. King spoke of a "second
phase" of the civil rights movement. This second phase was concerned
with economic justice, and of it, Dr. King said, "It must not be
just black people, it must be all poor people. We must include American
Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and even poor whites."
What is business' obligation? David Packard, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard,
once observed, "Profit is not the proper end and aim of management
-- it is what makes all of the proper ends and aims possible."
Just a few days ago, however, the one man who knows more about profit
than arguably anyone else on earth said something equally arresting. Speaking
to Charlie Rose shortly after his $30 billion bequest to the Gates Foundation,
Warren Buffett asserted, "A market system has not worked in terms
of poor people."
Both of these observations strike me as undeniable. The question is whether
they must be irreconcilable.
UPS, Coca-Cola and the entire private sector have an essential and central
role in the creation of economic and social value. One way we do that
is by supporting institutions that can benefit from our resources and
expertise. Mike's on the Board of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, for example,
which is named after the wife of the founder of UPS and is the country's
largest foundation dedicated to disadvantaged youth. I'm on the Board
of the Corporate Advisory Board of the Global Business Council on HIV/AIDS.
Most businesses, and most business leaders, devote time to these issues
because they are good for society and they believe.
Even more important, however -- and as Adam Smith understood two centuries
ago -- businesses create economic and social value simply through our
everyday operations... by making connections, as it were.
But it cannot be, and should not be, our job alone.
Managing any large enterprise today is a daily tutorial in reality:
economic reality... political reality... the reality of international
relations.
Perhaps that why I find it so nourishing and reassuring to participate
in something that reminds me that there are people and places in which
idealism still abides.
I think of the National Urban League as a kind of custodian of idealism...
and I thank you for performing that important role.
In April, our Company held its annual meeting of shareowners. The most
vocal and passionate-sounding people in attendance were college students,
and I tried to share with them the facts about our Company and to answer
their questions about our business practices around the world.
I know that in their minds, the jury is still out about The Coca-Cola
Company's commitment to social justice, and how effectively we are balancing
the objectives of making a profit and making the world a better place.
But I also found myself re-assured by the fact that idealism is alive
and well on college campuses.
Because idealism shaped me, too. Much of my outlook on life and the world
were formed growing up in Zambia, and on the campus of the University
of Cape Town in the early 1960s. I realize now that one of the
great glories of being a university student is something like a birthright
to be energized by idealism which does not always have to pass the test
of practicality.
It seems to me that over the last several decades, the word "idealism"
and the underlying dynamic that we call "idealism" may have
been pushed aside as a day-to-day value.
If that has happened, I have no doubt that we have paid a price for letting
it happen -- and we will continue to pay a price until idealism re-emerges
as an energizing value for all of us.
Can practical idealists be winners today in business and government and
other leadership positions across our society?
If the answer is no, then we are all in trouble. I believe the answer
is and must be an emphatic yes.
This Annual Conference has been another indication to me that idealism
survives... and I find that heartening... and I am grateful.
I thank you for all you have done over the decades to protect idealism
and to summon the better angels of our nature.
Thank you very much.
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