Coolburst
What's Stifling the Creativity at CoolBurst?
With the competition getting hot, a beverage company must learn how to fire up its creative juices. Suzy Wetlaufer is a senior editor at HBR.
Luisa Reboredo had never been one to count her hours in the office, let alone take all the vacation days she had accumulated in her z5 years with CoolBurst, a Miami-based fruit-juice company. Now, as the newly appointed CEO, she seemed to live at work. The job exhilarated her, and she had big plans for the company's future-if she could just get performance on track first.
It took a great deal of pleading, therefore, for Reboredo's 18-year-old son, Alfonse, to get her to attend Miami's popular outdoor art festival with him one Saturday in May. She had regularly been working weekends, using the time to pore over CoolBurst's books in an effort to figure out why annual revenues were stuck at $3o million and why profits hadn't risen for four years straight.
Finally, the two struck a deal: Luisa would attend the art festival in the morning and spend the rest of the day at the office.
They arrived at 1o, and already the sun was baking the festival grounds. Alfonse, almost a full foot taller than Luisa and a basketball star at Southwest Miami High, put his arm around his mother. "Mom, this is great you’ve got to get out more often," he practically sang. "You're missing the action stuck inside that office."
Luisa sighed. Raising Alfonse by herself hadn't been easy, and now that she had reached the top of her career and could comfortably afford his college tuition, the last thing she wanted was to have the company she'd helped to build collapse beneath her. Just the thought of CoolBurst's stagnant performance suddenly made her tense. Why was it, she wondered, that CoolBurst wasn't growing anymore? For over a decade, it had been the most successful juice maker in the Southeast. Practically every school in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina had a CoolBurst vending machine in
With the competition getting hot, a beverage company must learn how to fire up its creative juices. Suzy Wetlaufer is a senior editor at HBR.
Luisa Reboredo had never been one to count her hours in the office, let alone take all the vacation days she had accumulated in her z5 years with CoolBurst, a Miami-based fruit-juice company. Now, as the newly appointed CEO, she seemed to live at work. The job exhilarated her, and she had big plans for the company's future-if she could just get performance on track first.
It took a great deal of pleading, therefore, for Reboredo's 18-year-old son, Alfonse, to get her to attend Miami's popular outdoor art festival with him one Saturday in May. She had regularly been working weekends, using the time to pore over CoolBurst's books in an effort to figure out why annual revenues were stuck at $3o million and why profits hadn't risen for four years straight.
Finally, the two struck a deal: Luisa would attend the art festival in the morning and spend the rest of the day at the office.
They arrived at 1o, and already the sun was baking the festival grounds. Alfonse, almost a full foot taller than Luisa and a basketball star at Southwest Miami High, put his arm around his mother. "Mom, this is great you’ve got to get out more often," he practically sang. "You're missing the action stuck inside that office."
Luisa sighed. Raising Alfonse by herself hadn't been easy, and now that she had reached the top of her career and could comfortably afford his college tuition, the last thing she wanted was to have the company she'd helped to build collapse beneath her. Just the thought of CoolBurst's stagnant performance suddenly made her tense. Why was it, she wondered, that CoolBurst wasn't growing anymore? For over a decade, it had been the most successful juice maker in the Southeast. Practically every school in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina had a CoolBurst vending machine in