Coca Cola Organization

The Coca Cola Company, founded in 1886 in Atlanta, the United States, is the world’s largest nonalcoholic beverage company. Coca Cola currently owns and markets more than 500 beverage brands (Anonymous, 2010), including waters, sports and energy drinks, juices, tea and coffee, which are distributed in over 200 countries throughout the world. Along with Coca Cola, the company also owns Sprite, Fanta and Diet Coke, which are four of the world’s top five nonalcoholic beverage brands (Anonymous, 2010). As a company with a history of over 120 years, the Coca Cola Company now has an operating structure with seven operating segments and approximately 139,600 worldwide employees (Anonymous, 2010). Today, Coca Cola has subsidiaries around the world and has developed its own management and distribution system. The relative data and evidences shown in the following analysis will illustrate the effectiveness of the current structure model of Coca Cola and how managers of Coca Cola applied the hybrid structure to manage the subsidiaries in different regions efficiently and the strategy of decentralization to reduce the management cost and improve autonomy of these different departments. Furthermore, Coca Cola values its unique organizational culture and has set different mission, vision and values to guide the organization, the segments, and its teams. These invisible forces have been serving as the “Roadmap” for the company to achieve the long-term goals. In the second part of the report of the company culture, facts and stories mentioned would give examples and interpret how the “liability of a strong culture” could impact Coca Cola’s competitiveness and why it is so important for Coca Cola to understand customers’ needs in order to introduce more customer-orientated organizational culture rather than outcome-oriented culture. Organizational Structure
Coca Cola is a typical complex organization by having seven operative units in geographic areas around the world,