从可口可乐学生意经 One of my favorite parts of my job at the Gates Foundation is that I get to travel to the developing world, and I do that quite regularly. And when I meet the mothers in so many of these remote places, Im really struck by the things that we have in common. They want what we want for our children and that is for their children to grow up successful, to be healthy, and to have a successful life. But I also see lots of poverty, and its quite jarring, both in the scale and the scope of it. My first trip in India, I was in a persons home where they had dirt floors, no running water, no electricity, and thats really what I see all over the world. So in short, Im startled by all the things that they dont have. But I am surprised by one thing that they do have: Coca-Cola.Coke is everywhere. In fact, when I travel to the developing world, Coke feels ubiquitous. And so when I come back from these trips, and Im thinking about development, and Im flying home and Im thinking, Were trying to deliver condoms to people or vaccinations, you know, Cokes success kind of stops and makes you wonder: how is it that they can get Coke to these far-flung places? If they can do that, why cant governments and NGOs do the same thing? And Im not the first person to ask this question. But I think, as a community, we still have a lot to learn. Its staggering, if you think about Coca-Cola. They sell 1.5 billion servings every single day. Thats like every man, woman and child on the planet having a serving of Coke every week. So why does this matter? Well, if were going to speed up the progress and go even faster on the set of Millennium Development Goals that were set as a world, we need to learn from the innovators, and those innovators come from every single sector. I feel that, if we can understand what makes something like Coca-Cola ubiquitous, we can apply those lessons then for the public good.Cokes success is relevant, because if we can analyze it, learn from it, then we can save lives. So thats why I took a bit of time to study Coke. And I think there are really three things we can take away from Coca-Cola. They take real-time data and immediately feed it back into the product. They tap into local entrepreneurial talent, and they do incredible marketing. So lets start with the data. Now Coke has a very clear bottom line - they report to a set of shareholders, they have to turn a profit. So they take the data, and they use it to measure progress. They have this very continuous feedback loop. They learn something, they put it back into the product, they put it back into the market. They have a whole team called Knowledge and Insight. Its a lot like other consumer companies. So if youre running Namibia for Coca-Cola, and you have a 107 constituencies, you know where every can versus bottle of Sprite, Fanta or Coke was sold, whether it was a corner store, a supermarket or a pushcart. So if sales start to drop, then the person can identify the problem and address the issue. Lets contrast that for a minute to development. In development, the evaluation comes at the very end of the project. Ive sat in a lot of those meetings, and by then, it is way too late to use the data. I had somebody from an NGO once describe it to me as bowling in the dark. They said, You roll the ball, you hear some pins go down. Its dark, you cant see which one goes down until the lights come on, and then you an see your impact. Real-time data turns on the lights. So whats the second thing that Cokes good at? Theyre good at tapping into that local entrepreneurial talent. Cokes been in Africa since 1928, but most of the time they couldnt reach the distant markets, because they had a system that was a lot like in the developed world, which was a large truck rolling down the street. And in Africa, the remote places, its hard to find a good road. But Coke noticed something - they noticed that local people were taking the product, buying it in bulk and then reselling it in these hard-to-reach places. And so they took a bit of time to learn about that. And they decided in 1990 that they wanted to start training the local entrepreneurs, giving them small loans. They set them up as what they called micro-distribution centers, and those local entrepreneurs then hire sales people, who go out with bicycles and pushcarts and wheelbarrows to sell the product. There are now some 3,000 of these centers employing about 15,000 people in Africa. In Tanzania and Uganda, they represent 90 percent of Cokes sales. Lets look at the development side. What is it that governments and NGOs can learn from Coke? Governments and NGOs need to tap into that local entrepreneurial talent as well, because the locals know how to reach the very hard-to-serve places, their neighbors, and they know what motivates them to make change. I think a great example of this is Ethiopias new health extension program. The government not