百事掌门人卢英德的困惑

    卢英德厉声问道：“现在请再告诉我一遍，百事公司到底有什么问题？”

    卢英德自2006年底担任百事公司（PepsiCo）首席执行官。说这话之前，她刚刚连珠炮似地抛出一连串公司财务业绩数据。数据显示，公司业绩在增长，利润率相当高，并且通过分红和股票回购为公司股东们支付了可观的收益。因此，她不由感到疑惑，问题到底在哪里？究竟是什么原因让投资者、华尔街分析师和媒体都对她心怀不满？事到如今，很明显，她非常愤慨。

    这是一个细雨蒙蒙的早晨，卢英德乘坐公司专机从位于纽约郊区的公司总部飞行25分钟赶到位于康涅狄格州基灵利的菲多利（Frito-Lay）工厂。她半夜看完《每日脱口秀》（The Daily Show）和《科尔伯特报告》（The Colbert Report）这两档喜欢的节目后才上床睡觉，而清早四点钟就已经起床了。她说：“人们都说睡眠是上帝的恩赐。但他可从来没给过我这个天赋。”她一点也不会感到疲倦。她解释道，她如何将百事公司从一家旗下拥有百事可乐（Pepsi）、激浪（Mountain Dew）、乐事薯片（Lay’s）、多力多滋（Doritos）、奇多（Cheetos）和其他数百种食品饮料的“北美休闲产品公司”，转型为一家生产健康食品的全球企业。在这个肥胖症成为全球首要健康问题的时期，健康食品将会大受欢迎。她反复强调，做出这一重大转变是“正确的决策”。此外，公司在“转型的同时也获得了良好业绩”，她在前面已经提到过那些财务报表上成绩。尽管如此，普遍的观点依然认为卢英德和百事公司都面临着难题。

    眼下正是任何转型过程中都会遇到的最困难的时期，因为尚未获得预期收益，也没人知道到底什么时候才能达成收益目标。公司前任首席执行官史蒂夫•雷尼蒙德至今尚未公开发表过他对公司前景的看法。他说：“最近的情况让我回想起了公司历史上的几大关键时刻，大胆的领导者做出了并不太受欢迎的决策，但这些决策对定位公司的未来发展来说是非常正确的。”例如，1965年百事公司总裁唐纳德•肯德尔将百事可乐与菲多利公司合并。雷尼蒙德称：“当时没有几个人认为这是个明智的举措。除非获得实实在在的业绩，否则重大的变革很难得到人们赞赏。百事会获得实实在在的业绩的，我坚信这一点。”

    那么，评论家们是不是都在信口胡说？他们最常提起的反对卢英德的说法实际上并不靠谱。他们是这么说的：她在任期间公司股票表现很糟糕，这让公司在劲敌可口可乐公司（Coca Cola）面前蒙羞，因为后者股价大幅飙升（参见“新可口可乐”一文）。此外，她将太多的时间和金钱投入健康食品，使得自己成为克林顿全球计划（Clinton Global Initiative）的宠儿，但在现实世界里却没有消费者愿意买账，结果让公司的业务遭受影响。其实这些说法都不对。在卢英德的任期内，公司股票的股东回报率是与标准普尔500指数相符的。跟可口可乐进行比较没有意义。卢英德刚刚上任时，可口可乐公司刚刚从低迷的十年中恢复过来，而百事公司股票价值已得到充分反映。而且，并没有证据能够证明，百事对健康食品的政策倾斜对公司整体业绩造成了损害。几乎所有健康食品都是在卢英德担任首席执行官很久之前百事公司就已收购的业务，包括桂格食品（Quaker Foods）、纯果乐（Tropicana）和佳得乐（Gatorade）等。难怪卢英德会大胆质问：“到底有什么问题？”

    看问题更深入的评论家指出，百事公司确实面临严峻挑战，这些挑战已对公司造成了损害。资本收益率大跌，也就是投资者对公司投入总资金的经济收益百分比，这一比值非常重要。公司旗下最有价值的若干品牌，比如，百事可乐和多力多滋都已经丧失了优势或者市场份额，甚至两者都已经不保。在这个行业里，只有以新产品来取悦消费者才能生存。但百事公司的创新能力较弱。公司推出了新口味产品如樱桃香草味的百事可乐，但没有哪种产品比得上可口可乐公司的拳头产品零度可乐（Coke Zero）及其夺人眼球的瓶罐外观设计。基本执行是将正确的产品以正确的量投入正确的店铺，百事公司在这一点上做得不够。维持百事产品在零售商店面的覆盖率也有麻烦。此外，日常管理费用激增使得公司的效率和生产力都低于应有的水平。

    本文节选自将于6月11日出版的《财富》杂志，阅读英文全文请点击此处。

    译者：李玫晓/汪皓

    "Now tell me again -- what exactly is the issue with this company?" Indra Nooyi asks with an edge to her voice.

    She has just rattled off a list of statistics describing the financial performance of PepsiCo (PEP), the company she has run since late 2006. They show that it has been growing, earning high profit margins, and paying respectable returns to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks. So, she wonders, what's the problem? Why on earth has she been taking such an infernal amount of heat from investors, Wall Street analysts, and the media? For she has been, and she clearly resents it.

    It's a drizzly morning, and Nooyi is aboard a company plane for the 25-minute flight from headquarters in suburban New York City to a Frito-Lay plant in Killingly, Conn. She has been up since 4 a.m., having gone to bed at midnight after watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, which she loves. "They say sleep is a gift that God gives you," she observes. "That's one gift I was never given." Definitely not fatigued, she explains how she's been transforming PepsiCo from "a North American fun-for-you company" -- maker of Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Lay's potato chips, Doritos, Cheetos, and hundreds of other foods and drinks -- into a global enterprise with a product line that can prosper in a world where obesity is fast becoming the No. 1 health problem. Making that profound shift, she says repeatedly, is "the right thing" to do. What's more, the company has been "performing while transforming," delivering those financial results she cites. Yet for all that, the conventional wisdom is that she and PepsiCo are in trouble.

    This is the hardest time in any transformation, when the returns haven't arrived and no one knows when or if they will. "The recent past reminds me of pivotal moments in our history when bold leaders made decisions that weren't popular but were the right decisions to position the company for the future," says Steve Reinemund, Nooyi's predecessor as CEO, who until now hasn't spoken publicly about the company's prospects. An example was president Donald Kendall's combining Pepsi-Cola with Frito-Lay in 1965. "Few people saw that as smart," Reinemund says. "Major change is never applauded until your numbers prove it. And they will. I'm confident they will."

    Are the critics nuts? The most widely repeated case against Nooyi is in fact off-base. It goes like this: The stock has tanked on her watch, shaming PepsiCo in comparison with the eternal enemy, Coca-Cola (KO), which has soared (see "The New Coke"). And she has torpedoed the company's performance by committing far too much time and money to healthy products that make a CEO the darling of the Clinton Global Initiative but that real-world consumers don't want to buy. None of that is true. The stock's total return to shareholders has exactly matched the S&P 500 (SPX) over her tenure. The Coke comparison is invalid; when Nooyi got her job, Coke was just starting to recover from a dismal decade, while PepsiCo stock was richly valued. There's no evidence that a greater focus on good-for-you products -- nearly all of which are in Quaker Foods, Tropicana, and Gatorade, businesses PepsiCo bought long before Nooyi became CEO -- has damaged overall performance. So, as Nooyi defiantly asks, "What's the issue?"

    Critics who have looked deeper point out that PepsiCo does face significant challenges that have hurt the company. Its all-important return on capital -- economic profit as a percentage of all the money that investors have put into the company -- has plunged. Several of its most valuable brands, such as Pepsi and Doritos, have lost strength or market share, or both. In an industry that survives by exciting consumers with new products, innovation has been weak; the company has introduced flavor tweaks such as Cherry Vanilla Pepsi, for example, but nothing to match Coke's hugely successful Coke Zero and attention-grabbing bottle and can designs. Basic execution -- getting the right products into the right stores in the right quantities all the time -- has been subpar; the company has had trouble holding its share of retailers' floor space. Overhead has ballooned, leaving the company less efficient and productive than it needs to be.