Good morning. Leadership in the digital age means being innovative, shaking things up, and taking risks, even if you’re the CEO of an iconic company that’s more than 100 years old.
James Quincey, CEO of The Coca-Cola Company joined Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen for a fireside chat on Tuesday at Adobe Summit 2025 held in Las Vegas. Quincey began working at Coca-Cola in 1996, becoming chief executive in 2017. In front of a packed audience, the two Fortune 500 CEOs discussed how Quincey began his tenure.
For his first meeting with Coca-Cola employees as the CEO, Quincey made two bold decisions: He didn’t wear a suit and the beverage he sipped wasn’t a Coke. Quincey said he was trying to send two messages. One was cultural change—basically, get with the times, he said.
Coca-Cola was “very formal, hierarchical, and stuck in our ways” during that time, he said. “We needed to break out of it.”
He continued, “You ask people what they remember, and the main thing was, ‘he wore jeans and it wasn’t a Friday,’” and he wasn’t drinking a Coke, Quincey quipped. “That was a big deal,” he said. “That was a very powerful communication for them.”
The second message was about the product. Everyone thought that Coke had to be first, Quincey explained. “You have to love Coke the most,” he said of the prevailing mindset. But if you do that, you’ll trap everyone in a product strategy where you don’t let people choose, he said. “You’re selling what you make, rather than what sells,” he noted.
He chose to make his points through what he wore and drank that day because—”Everything communicates,” he said. It’s not what the CEO says, it’s what the CEO does, he told the audience.
Coca-Cola has 33 million physical outlets around the world, and sells 2.2 billion 8 oz servings of its products every single day, Quincey said. To do that, you can’t just accept the status quo when doing business, he explained. Quincey calls himself the “chief agitator for innovation” to continue to make core brands relevant. “It’s really about trying to serve unmet needs and expanding the numbers,” he said.
And “I’m the chief zombie killer,” he added. The company now has 200 brands nationally, but five years ago, they had 400. During the pandemic, he chopped products—such as Tab and the Odwalla juice and smoothie brand—that weren’t doing well. “If it doesn’t work, it’s got to go,” he said.
Quincey’s take on personalization: “The end consumer really wants to be the center of their own story and narrative. And that’s part of what all this personalized creativity is about—engaging them in their own narrative. Digitization has done that.”
He also acknowledged that Coca-Cola recently endured backlash due to its AI-powered Christmas commercial. It doesn’t feature any real-life actors. Ads using generative AI are less expensive and quicker to produce, but the technology has difficulty with human resolution, he said.
“We generally want to make ads with people in it,” Quincey said.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com