As the pre-eminent general in the cola wars, Coca-Cola CEO Roberto C. Goizueta was the ultimate brand loyalist. His devotion to Coke made him wealthy and enriched his shareholders, as well as the city of Atlanta. But his loyalty to a somewhat obscure brand, True cigarettes, made him more susceptible to the lung cancer that killed him last week at age 65, ending Goizueta's remarkable stewardship of the world's biggest brand. Goizueta's illness was diagnosed in September, and the company expressed optimism about his return as he continued to work from his hospital room. But following chemotherapy and radiation treatment, Goizueta fell gravely ill with a throat infection and fever and never recovered. In his lifetime, Roberto Goizueta was as synonymous with Coke as its contour bottle. At his death, he was a byword beyond his corporation: the poster boy for shareholder value, a paragon for Wall Street.
Born into a wealthy Cuban family, he was raised in privilege and schooled at Yale. He began his career in 1954 as a chemist at the company in Havana. That life changed abruptly after he fled Fidel Castro's Cuba in 1961, an event he called the most significant in his life. He and his wife got out with a suitcase and 100 shares of Coca-Cola, which he never sold. He rejoined the company in Florida and progressed through the ranks. By 1974, as head of Coke's labs, he was one of only two top chemists allowed to memorize the soda's secret formula.
Goizueta's anonymity ended after he became a protege of another Coke legend, former CEO Robert W. Woodruff, who became increasingly impressed by the intensity and integrity of the man from Havana. With Woodruff's influence, Goizueta was tapped in 1981 to run the Atlanta-based company. At the time Coke was an omnipresent but floundering symbol of American business and culture. Subsequently, Goizueta became one of the most highly regarded of all CEOs, having turned one of the world's most nonessential consumer products into a money spinner with annual sales of $18.5 billion. "No one loved the Coca-Cola company more than Roberto," said Berkshire HathawayCEO Warren Buffett, a Coke board member. "He was a great leader and a great gentleman."
Goizueta's unyielding, unquenchable resolve to increase shareholder value became the dominant management theme of the 1990s. His strategy: if a business doesn't add value, say goodbye. "I know something very simple," Goizueta told FORTUNE in 1995, "and that is: the way to become richer is you borrow money at a certain rate and invest it at a higher rate and pocket the difference. So we went very methodically over much of our business."
And it turned out that nothing added value more than the magic cola itself. He boosted Coke by stripping it down to its trademark. When he took over, Coke had flat growth and unprofitable businesses--ranging from shrimp farming to wine--that were draining the company's cash, not to mention a serious Pepsi challenge. On his watch, Coke's stock-market value rose from $4 billion to some $150 billion. Goizueta himself became a billionaire through his Coke stockholdings.