On 28th July 2016, Vinod Gupta School of Management IIT Kharagpur had the pleasure of hosting Mr. Sumanta Datta, Vice President, Coca-Cola India for a guest lecture. Mr. Datta holds a Masters in Marketing from Rutgers University and has previously been associated with ITC before starting his long lasting relationship with Coca-Cola.
At the very beginning of the lecture, Mr. Datta gave us some background about himself and told the students a little bit about his personal journey. He then proceeded to talk about his corporate life and emphasized on the importance of paying your dues to get where you want to be. As someone who started with a very clear goal in mind, Mr. Datta explained how he had to work in completely different departments and experience a completely different set of learnings to reach where he wanted to be, only to realize that it’s really the journey, and not just the destination, that makes it worthwhile.
Having worked in the coveted role of Brand Management for Coca-Cola, Mr. Datta soon realized that this was not his calling in life. His journey from setting out to reach his goals, to actually materializing them, made him realize that the only thing that can keep you striving for more every day is to be passionate about everything you do. He took us through a couple of brilliant stories from Coca-Cola’s history to drive home the point, that when it comes to brand management, it is really the customer who makes the soul of a brand. Having spent a lot of time in marketing and having become quite an expert at it, Mr. Datta decided to challenge himself even more and decided to move into core operations. His thought process behind this decision came from the same learning he had re-emphasized before in the lecture – “to be constructively discontent and be humble to learning”
Mr. Datta further talked about the importance of collaborations – both internal and external. In today’s times of collaborations and partnerships, he took a leaf from Coca-Cola’s history and their long lasting relationship with McDonalds to give an example of how trust is the key to a successful partnership. He spoke about the importance of empowering people within your team and building great teams that can work together towards a common goal. He further spoke about leadership and how it has changed from what it was before. Giving the example of penguin leadership, he tried to explain how important it is for a leader to ensure they always have their team’s back.
As the lecture was halfway through, Mr. Datta took the batch through Coca-Cola’s 2006-07 rebuilding campaign after the crisis from the pesticide accusation. Speaking from his own first-hand experience, he gave the students a lot of key insights into one of the biggest crisis’ in recent history and how well it was managed by Coca-Cola.
Mr. Datta ended the lecture with a quick briefing of all the key takeaways he would want the students to imbibe. As the floor was open to questions, Mr. Datta answered questions on how to be passionate in the very toughest of times and what were his biggest learnings as a leader. He further answered certain domain based questions on the impact of GST on beverage industry, new product launches and the challenges faced by a company like Coca-Cola in the case of recent factory closures.
Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur would like to thank Mr. Datta for taking time out of his busy schedule to interact with the students and for delivering such an interactive lecture that ensured that the autumn season of Vaarta’16 had a stupendous start.