simple. easy. awesome. click or visit a retail store today. rand andola, an iconic dominant force in the $800 billion soft drink industry. it operates in over 200 countries worldwide. the beverage behemoth has a new ceo, james quincey. he spent the last two decades rising through the ranks at coca-cola. now, quincey aims to win over a new generation that shuns sugar and to show the world that he takes the environment seriously. as he advanced to a new world of technology.

james quincey sat down with us for an extended conversation. we wanted to understand how he plans to use innovation. its cultureo change while managing a global checkerboard of regulations and tax regimes. coca-cola operates in a lot of different countries. there are a lot of different legal schemes. the tax cuts. how does it affect coca-cola? >> we are still working through the numbers you our tax rate was 24% so it is not the biggest change to us. the absolute rate has not affected us as much as more domestically. but we are positive on moving the territorial systems, so we think the simplification is positive in the long run to the extent it helped create more demand. that will be good news. we are working through the numbers. ofare part of putting some

the money overseas, but in the end, if it generates more economic growth, that will lift all the boats. does david: that -- david: does that affect you at all? james: that is not the biggest moving pete rouse. david: it -- moving piece. decided whether it goes into capital investment, buybacks of shares, dividends? james: we were not short of cash at the end of the day so we have been a successful company. we got the resources we need to invest in the market but we are working through how the puts intake works. how we useooking at all bad and how we made the right capital allocations. david: one of the big issues is the so-called dreamers, the young people brought here as children. do they get to stay as adults? who areave people

uncertain about whether they can stay or not? james: we have some people in our company and in our partners who fall under the dreamers or daca program. we would love government to find a way to make that the underlying immigration reform and including finding a solution for the dreamers so it is not so disruptive and they can stay. hopefully, they will find a path to that. of course, partial solutions may be necessary, but we would love to see fundamental reforms. james: you ran mexico for coca-cola. you have seen this issue on both sides. do you see a constructive path forward on immigration? david: i think there is a path forward but i think -- james: i think there is a path forward but i think it is connected. it cannot be completely disassociated from getting both economies to grow. in the end, part of what drives the informal immigration is the

disparity in the economic outlook, so having a community where all the economies are growing helps solve that problem, too. to drivek leadership growth will help fold some of these other issues, too. from: you also see nafta both sides of the border, which is another hot issue. has nafta overall been good or bad for the united states? james: my view would be free trade deals are good overall for all participants. it has been good for north america. it does not mean it is perfect. very few free trade deals are perfect. can it be made better? yes, i hope it can be. i think it has been a powerful engine for lifting all boats. it does not mean it solves all problems. there are questions of income inequality. not all the rules are perfect. let's go forward, not backwards.

president trump was allied with many people in business. he had panels. do you get to talk about things like nafta? do they consult you or do you make your views known to them? james: where there are areas where it affects us, we make our views known to the business forums like the roundtable. there are enough points of collectively and individually, with the administration, that they know what we think. david: do you have any sense of where we are headed with nafta? there are conflicting reports. they seem to be preparing for a u.s. withdrawal. do you have any sense of where we are headed? view on negotiations if you have got to let the negotiators negotiate. if you are not in the room, you don't know what the answer is until it comes out. to keeprtant thing is saying what they believe to be true, the areas where things can

be made better. the negotiators have got to get in the room and thrash it out. it does not mean view anywhere until they tell you what the answer is. david: your native country has voted a referendum to leave the e.u. tell us how that is developing. is there a soft landing you can see? how would we get to that? joe: it does a bit about -- james: it does a bit kobach to my point about negotiations. you never know until it's cooked. economicse logic of is a softer rather than a harder brexit, and i think, in the end, whilst it will be a catastrophe one way or the other, life will be better. there will be more economic brexit,f it is a softer but a lot of details and a lot of different points of view to work out, because in the end the referendum was not between you

wanted this or that, it was not a referendum around the version of the exit, which is kind of where we are trapped at the moment, and of course, there's a lot of negotiations going on. it's very important to get it right for the u.k. and for europe as well. david: whether it is brexit or nafta, how do these trade issues affect coca-cola's business? james: i think one of the great benefits of the coca-cola system but we arelobal, extremely local. we manufacture in every country virtually. virtually everything that is sold in the u.s., made in the and virtually everything sold in the u.k. or france is made in the individual country, global trade restrictions do not tend to affect us heavily in a moment. to the extent that they increase

total economic growth, that is what matters to us, so philosophically, we are pro- global free trade because it drives economic growth. let's focus on making those deals better because it will provide the wealth to solve a lot of society's problems. david: you came in and took over coca-cola and really trumpeted innovation is critical to the future. i believe you have a chief innovation officer. maybe you are the chief innovation officer in some sense. how do you innovate a company that is so well-known around the world, has been there for so long, has such an entrenched perception of people's fears? james: it is hard. organization, it's going to be hard. from my point of view, if i am not the chief innovator, i am certain you the chief agitator for innovation, and what that means is, you know, driving the culture to try and do a few things. on top of everything else.

stay curious. if we are not curious about the outside world, about the consumers, about what is changing, how will we innovate? curiosity is very passive. you have to drive empowerments. they can get up in the morning and go and do something. i think the next thing is you have got to be inclusive, connect the pieces. you have a tremendous global system. sometimes, your idea has already been tried somewhere else. felt into probably the trap of trying to make things perfect before we did anything in the past. we need to learn from some of the software companies. that gives us both innovation and speed, and if we keep pushing those four things, i think we will make progress. david: and how do you know? how does james clancy know if you're getting things done? you're sitting on top of a very

large organization. how do you judge whether people are really changing their behavior? james: it is hard to know. the only way forward is to look for multiple signals. there is no one number, one metric. we have employee surveys where we asked people, we can look at the sales number and measure the success rate or the number and success rate of things we put into the marketplace. we can look at what our research and development pipeline is generating and are we really getting new patterns, are we really making progress? one has to have a dashboard to look across and see if there is progress. david: how is technology changing the way you do business, and for that matter, your workforce? ♪

david: technology. how is it affecting coca-cola? talk about how it is affecting your relationship with your consumer. things like e-commerce, how you market your consumer. james: we kind of look at -- how we engage with consumers, you know, it used to be tv advertising. now, it's social media. the ways of engaging are changing rapidly. who the customer is and how

that happens is changing rapidly. with the consumer, around the world, tv is still the biggest vehicle. maybe less so in some of the developed economies, but it is still the biggest vehicle. a lot of it is going to social media. we work closely with a lot of tech companies trying to find ways to continue to have a brand. paying for got to the content to be developed, whether that is through advertising or sponsorship, so i think there is a lot of change going on. we are adapting. i think we feel we are kind of whends the front end, but i am totally clear of his it will be different in five years and very different in 10 years, and we will have to keep evolving to stay close to the consumers. do you seeh markets the fastest innovation when it comes to e-commerce? when you get on your act and order something that gets delivered, for example. is it china, the united states,

europe? james: i think that places like shanghai and some parts of western europe are on the cutting-edge along with some of the bits of the u.s., but really , the u.s., in many respects, does a lot of advanced e-commerce, but i can tell you it is very in bats -- advanced in places like shanghai. it's higher ine, some of those places. when you want to learn what is going on, i would be tempted to tell you to go to shanghai. david: we are used to going to a fast food restaurant and there is coca-cola there. you don't have that when you are on your app. james: no, but you have to get it. if you went back even two years or three years and china, for example, when a lot of the apps systemsmobile payment came in, we were not on the menu. even worse, we were trying to sell a returnable glass bottle

to the restaurant which had no way of being in the delivery system. we had to reengineer our business system very quickly to be present on the app, so what is the virtual representation of what you would normally see in the store, and how do we change the packaging portfolio so we can be part of the delivery system? we have a lot of places in it is 50% of the restaurant sales. david: that is a relationship with the consumer. talk about coca-cola as coca-cola. how is technology changing the way you do business and your workforce? james: it is changing and lots of profound ways. a largee terms, we were company and one of the few that could afford to invest in expensive i.t. systems and do our own stuff, our own programs. no longer the model. we had to move to the cloud. we had to move to standard programs that whole industries use. and we had to use the mobile.

the one thing i always say is put it on the phone. everything can be done on the phone. let's move everything to mobile. the old days of i.t. had training budgets. why? everyone knows how to use the apps on the phone, so it is profoundly changing the way we work and i think it will continue to flow through the organization. we have a big program of digitizing companies. david: the efficiency is from digital? ames: it changes into different profile. people are having to adapt to doing things in a different way. we have actually made a lot of departmentsur i.t. to move to different skill sets, so it is certainly changing the nature of employment and the sorts of profiles you want. shether you buy the service or do it ourselves makes a difference to where the employees are. more employment is being generated in the economies. david: in coca-cola compete with

silicon valley and the digital start of 20 are trying to recruit the young computer scientists? james: atlanta is a fast-growing economy. georgia has been ranked top one or two bank place to do business in the u.s. for many years in a row. the local political system has done a great job and so has the city. it is a very competitive economy and we do very well in it. we are happy to see atlanta and georgia growing, and may have done a lot to invest. it has been very successful. towardss you look really substantial growth in these new beverage categories, are you looking at acquisitions? are you looking at organic growth? you have been inclined to look for smaller startup brands. is that the future path to a significant degree for coca-cola? james: i think it is going to be both. we have grown organically. the niche brands. where we see that something is a

really good idea, we invest in them. sometimes we buy them. there is a quid pro quo. they get capital we inject. we can introduce them to the globe, not just the country they have launched in. that helped us double the number of billion-dollar brand reseller on the world. anthink it is going to be sn "and" strategy rather than one or the other. beverage company. why did you make that decision and doesn't make you any more vulnerable even to acquisition? your $200 billion market cap is a pretty big acquisition. focused on beverages because that is where the greatest synergy and the greatest application of our know-how and our fabulous global bottling distribution is. that will be the most synergistic with what we have

already got. it is the best growing market. it is a great market. we have a good position. we can create a lot of synergy. it is a question of choices. i sometimes say never say never, which causes confusion because people say you have not ruled anything out. what it is a question of is most logical. beverages is what's most logical for us to do. in terms of how we think about the consolidation, in the end of the day, i am convinced that investors goldstar goes to ose who grow with expanding margin. optimize the margin. that is still largely over the long term. i am clear if we focus on driving topline growth, which we believe we can with our strategy , we will attract an investor base that will be very happy with us over the long run. david: by 2030, you want to be getting a bottle back for

everyone you put out. that is a lot of bottles for coca-cola. how are you going to track all that plastic? ♪

>> world without waste. great goal. you have a big, new packaging announcement to why is it important for coca-cola as a business? james: it is important to us for a very core part of our values. we always believed that to have a healthy business, you need to be operating in a healthy community. when today's biggest problems is packaging waste. we have done a lot on making things recyclable. we invested a lot of progress on reusing it. we need to collect it. this announcement is about the big missing piece in generating a world without waste. which is collecting back the plastic. i think that will do great things to help us grow into the future without creating waste.

it is good for us and great for communities. david: how are you going to plastic?ll that you want to be getting a bottle back for all the plastic you put out there. how are you going to track all that plastic? james: we need to bring back every person in the world, if they bring that to bottles a models aat is -- two month, we collect every bottle we put out. there will be different systems in different countries. every country needs a solution, but it will not be the same everywhere. there are places where it is reasonably advanced in europe to more formally economies where the collection happens. there will be different solutions and everyone will have to work with ngos, other industrial companies and governments have put in place -- it is absolutely doable. i think that is what is exciting. david: we are very conscious of it in the united states, but what about other places like china? aware ofey are more

the problem, which is at the leading edge. we need to do more there. recognize in a lot of these countries, there is some informal collection system already going on across a wide range of waste. create is theo circular economy. we need to create value for that. mexico, forin example. eagle that my than 10 years, it was less than 10% of the plastic that was recycled. now, it is 60%. no market. no one wanted to buy it. we went into the marketplace and toght the plastic, invested recycle that and reuse it in our bottles, so i think it is a chinas and other parts of the world on how to create value out of the plastic and get it used. david: you laid out a bold vision for your company called total beverage. it's even beyond diet coke. [laughter] david: what is driving that? is that to get away a bit from sugar drinks?

ares: actually, we following the consumer. when you look at what is happening around the world, as the world is urbanizing, as people have got more disposable income, they are spending more money on a range of things, including beverages. but what is important within the growing market of beverages is they got more choice. different people want different things. if we really want to be able to serve the customer, serve the consumer, we have to follow them and get into more categories. coat is likely to remain the heart and soul of the company. it is the biggest trend, but we are. we need to offer consumers what they want all day long. we have to offer choice. that will guide us forward. it goes back to where we started. if we pay a lot of attention to what the consumer wants, they will take us to where the business needs to grow. it ends up in growth for the business. consume about

eight ounces of the beverage per day. coca-cola i was told is about .5 ounces. what is your goal? how much of the market share of total beverage can you really take globally? james: i do not think there is an end of history moment where we reach the obama. what we -- nirvvanana. it is a competitive marketplace. we have competitors doing a lot of exciting things. we are focused on can we generator growing business system?

value. whether it be the economics of the people in the value chain like the customer or even society with initiatives like the packaging one, which i think don't on our heritage of creating such shared value in the world. 10 years ago or so, we set ourselves and objective of being water neutral by 2020 and we achieved it a few years early, so we returned to the environment all the water we used, which gives us confidence that we can achieve this packaging objective. we get business growth and doing it in the right way for society. david: thanks very much. terrific. thank you so much. it was really fun. james: thank you. ♪

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that's how xfinity makes tv... simple. easy. awesome. >> rush out of west point, he led a platoon of 22 young soldiers. now, he leads employees at a company worth over $350 billion. johnson & johnson, ceo alex gorsky took the helm when the iconic image of j&j was a bit tarnished and made changes to get the company back on track while making the biggest acquisition in the companies history and managing the transition to obamacare. after donald trump was elected president, he sat beside him helping to represent a growing health care industry that already accounts for