Next Coke CEO is a son of privilege with a feel for average consumers.

Kent speaks at the opening of a Coke plant in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1993. Five years later he left Coke, but he returned in 2005.

Coke Chairman & CEO Neville Isdell, left, and Muhtar Kent, right, soon-to-be CEO, at Coke headquarters.

Muhtar Kent will take the reins of Coke on July 1

By ROBERT W. GEE

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 06/22/08

ISTANBUL — He is a son of privilege, educated at elite private schools in Turkey and universities in England. He is named after his great uncle, Turkey's first ambassador to Washington. His father was also an ambassador who never appeared in public without a necktie, carried a walking stick and collected Greek antiquities.

Yet Muhtar Kent's gift is his ability to connect with ordinary people around the world who are consumers of the product he has been peddling for most of his adult life: Coca-Cola.

When he takes over July 1 as chief executive officer of Coke, he will bring considerable experience overseas to the world's largest soft drink maker, which relies heavily on foreign sales to drive its profits and growth.

Friends and former colleagues in Turkey describe him as a diplomat and an internationalist, perfectly suited for Coke's global reach. He speaks fluent English, Turkish, French and Italian, and he prefers to spend downtime on business trips abroad trolling convenience stores and supermarkets to survey local reaction to Coke products.

"He was really able to understand the local culture and was relevant to the local culture," said Michael O'Neill, who worked with Kent in the early 1990s, when he was president of Coke's east-central Europe division and oversaw the soft drink's expansion into former Soviet bloc nations.

"Coke needed a pioneering spirit to go into these countries," O'Neill said. "Muhtar was a pioneer."

Kent, 55, was born in New York, the only child of the Turkish consul general there, and was raised in Thailand, India and Iran while his father served in those countries as ambassador.

He is gregarious, and at 6 feet 1 inch a commanding presence at board meetings and dinner parties.

"I call him bulldozer," said Tuncay Ozilhan, chairman of the Anadolu Group and Kent's boss from 1999 to 2005 when Kent headed Turkey-based Efes Beverage Group, which owns Coca-Cola and beer operations from Eastern Europe to Central Asia.

"He pushes the market. He pushes the consumer," Ozilhan said. "He's very stubborn. He never stopped pushing."

Kent began his career at Coke in 1978 in Atlanta. After rising through the corporate ranks mostly in Europe, he left in 1998 to become president and chief executive officer of Efes.

When Coke was courting Kent to return, Ozilhan said he gave his blessing only after outgoing CEO E. Neville Isdell assured him in confidence that Kent would eventually be considered for the company's top position.

Under Kent's leadership, Efes expanded far outside Turkey, experiencing triple-digit revenue growth during his tenure.

"He's very hardworking. There is no time limit. From 6, 7 o'clock [in the morning] until 10, 11 at night. All the time. It's unbelievable," Ozilhan said.

The work ethic and self-discipline were imprinted on Kent as a child.

Kent's father, Necdet Kent, was a strict disciplinarian who once prevailed upon the Shah of Iran to shut down a motorcycle shop next to the Turkish Embassy because young Muhtar, who was a teenager at the time, was sneaking off to ride motorcycles there.

The next day, the motorcycle shop was a vacant lot, said Muhtar's second cousin, Serif Kaynar, a confidant of Necdet Kent.

Kent showed flashes of natural leadership as a young man during summer vacations, when he would organize elaborate soirees, delegating groups responsible for decorations or food, said Guler Sabanci, now head of her family's industrial and financial conglomerate.

He is still remembered for a marathon party that started at his parents' home in the upscale Tarabya district of Istanbul and continued with a sunrise cruise in the Sea of Marmara, ending with swimming and barbecue in the afternoon.

Like his father, Kent keeps a fastidious appearance. While studying for a master's in business at London City University, his shirts were pressed and his polished shoes neatly arranged in his closet, said Kaynar, who was his roommate. He was not the best student, Kaynar said, but he sometimes studied until 4 a.m., and he also kept an active social life, known as "the darling boy of the British girls."

"He was an interesting person that people wanted to be associated with," Kaynar said. "He stood out. Part of it was his background. Part of it was his character."

To teach him fiscal discipline, his parents gave him an allowance of 60 British pounds a month — worth about $100 at the time — which was so modest he often lived off spaghetti for the last 10 days of the month, Kaynar said.

After graduating, Kaynar and Kent took a vacation to California in the summer of 1977. They rented a car and drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco, staying in inexpensive motels along the way, Kaynar said.

It was then that Kent decided he wanted to start a career in the United States.

"He said, 'America: If it makes sense, people do it,' " Kaynar said. "It was an open society. [There were] more horizons, more opportunities."

Kent is married and has a son and a daughter. The youngest, son Cem, will enroll at Columbia University in New York this fall.

When he's not working, Kent enjoys fast cars — he owns a mid-1980s Porsche 911 — and once took Ozilhan on a joy ride in Florence, Italy, in a borrowed Ferrari that prompted his then-boss to ask to get out of the car before Kent slowed down, Ozilhan said. He is also a follower of Formula One auto racing and helped bring a Formula One race to Istanbul.

During his ascent through the beverage world, Kent has remained modest and can make fun of himself as easily as others, his friends said.

"Muhtar has never changed his attitude to anybody. It's the same old Muhtar," said Rahmi Koc, scion of the wealthiest family in Turkey, who has known Kent since he was a boy.

"Just out of the blue he calls and chats for half an hour," said Halil Eralp, a former classmate at the British International School in Istanbul. "He's very interested in people. Not doing it in a professional way, but in a natural way."

This interest has led to an unlikely friendship with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of some 300 million Orthodox Christians. Kent, who is a secular Muslim, donated a portion of his father's library last year to a restored Greek Orthodox chapel in Turkey.

Kent's father, who died in 2002, is best remembered for saving dozens of Turkish Jews while he was serving as consul general in Marseille, France, during World War II.

"I always admired his low profile and his simplicity and his spirituality, if I may say," Bartholomew said in an interview in his office at the Church of St. George in Istanbul. "He's a humble man in spite of his great achievements.

"It seems this humanitarian approach of his father, this avoiding of discrimination of non-Muslims is a tradition of the family," Bartholomew said.

If his personal style is simple, though, his business focus is unrelenting.

On business trips while he worked for Efes, Kent was known to stalk shoppers in the beer aisle of supermarkets, and if they didn't buy the Efes-owned brand, he would offer one or two bottles for free and ask them to promise to switch if they liked the Efes brand better. He did the same in bars, Ozilhan said.

He showed a penchant early in his career for hands-on marketing during a business trip to Morocco. Exiting a restaurant, a beggar approached him and asked if he could spare any money to buy a Coke.

"His eyes became wide," said Kaynar, who was with him. "He took out a $10 bill and he said, 'Buy a case of Coke.' "

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