Please consider the following material and answer a single question ON BLACKBOARD. You may NOT use notes, texts, or any outside material for this exam. you will have one hour.

Coca Cola: Additional Material*

Following a series of gaffes, Ivester retired early at the Board of Directors' (BOD) request. In settling the matter of succession, the BOD explicitly realized that gaining control over "the news" about Coca Cola would require policy-level decision-making. Comments during BOD meetings ranged over a series of weighty topics:

• "It's hard to keep secrets about Coke's strategic projects, particularly where technology is concerned. Coca Cola's CEO will always be seen as a rock-star! Coca Cola will always seek out innovative technologies."
• "It is unwise to muzzle or silence our senior managers, particularly our Chief Executive Officer. To do so would be to restrict their decision-making authority and leadership mandate. It's also politically dangerous to those who work for the CEO."
• "Training all of our employees to say and do the right things in public would be time consuming, expensive, and would prove to be a continuous, never-ending effort."
• Pepsi-Cola has been gaining on us, and if they can narrow the gap between us in market share, their momentum could overtake us."
• "We're losing our direction here! we need to refocus on..." [recording garbled, no transcript possible]
• "The press will carve us up like turkeys if our spokespersons appear overly-scripted or constrained by us."

In light of the BOD's concerns, it has ordered you, the new CEO, to draft policy for it to ratify. Upon ratification, you policy would bind Coca Cola's entire globals organization (more than 60,000 people) to specific actions. The purpose of this policy will be to prevent incidents like this one, and to address public concerns should one happen in the future. By the way, many of the BOD members, like you, have been around Coca Cola for a long time.

Using only case material that you've read, the above supplement, and our class discussions, please answer the following question:

What policy or policies would you recommend the company adopt? Please be VERY specific with your recommendations, giving details and clear reasons. Remember, you are now the CEO.

Please feel encouraged to OUTLINE or BULLET-POINT your answer, rather than write it out completely. It is NOT necessary to address the above comments individually.

* Additional facts presented here are fictitious, and are presented only for the purpose of examining student thought process