As an avid sports fan growing up in India, Kevin Tressler always paid close attention when the Olympic Games rolled around — especially to the runners who ran the 100-meter races. Now, as director of sports and entertainment marketing for the Coca-Cola Company, he’s in a race of his own: to help build the Coca-Cola brand leading up to this summer’s Beijing Olympics. And as he oversees the company’s global marketing efforts, with an emphasis on the Chinese capital, he’s reminded of his earlier days watching the Olympics.

“In India, people gathered around to talk about the games. It was like this global watercooler moment,” Tressler, 41, recalls. “This is definitely a dream come true for me.”

Tressler comes to his Olympic challenge well prepared. Educated at Delhi University’s St. Stephen’s College, he immediately gravitated toward marketing and worked for Lintas and McCann-Erickson on several accounts, including Unilever and Gillette. His work at Coca-Cola has spanned 14 years and three regions — India, the Middle East, and North America. During that time he’s learned about all aspects of the Coca-Cola Company, from bottling to brand building.

Although this is Tressler’s first time overseeing Coca-Cola’s Olympic marketing, he is continuing a decades-long tradition. “Coca-Cola has been associated with the Olympics since Amsterdam in 1928,” he notes. “That gives us a unique perspective.”

The company’s planning for Beijing began back in 2005. Such a long preparation period is necessary, Tressler says, largely because the Olympics presents branding opportunities for Coca-Cola that could last long after the torch has gone out. “If we were to treat the Olympics as just a 17-day event, we would not be able to drive everyday relevance,” Tressler says. That’s why, in creating a new message specifically for Beijing 2008, Coca-Cola decided to leverage its current tagline, “Live on the Coke side of life,” which encourages people to live positively every day, by evolving the concept into something more topical.

“We went out and spoke to consumers around the world to find out what motivates and inspires them in terms of the Olympics, what motivates them in their daily lives, what motivates them as it relates to Coke,” Tressler says. “That’s how we came up with ‘Live Olympics,’ which encourages people to live the Olympic spirit in everyday life.”

With that message in place, the company has been working to present it in as many markets as possible. In China for example, the ad team came up with the slogan Shuang qi lai, a Mandarin play on words that conveys physical and emotional uplift. And Coca-Cola is already leveraging its Olympic themes, including a role as co-sponsor of the Olympic torch relay, a six-continent jaunt that began in Beijing in March and will finish back in China’s capital for the start of the games in early August.

Tressler hopes Coca-Cola’s message will be as uplifting for consumers as attending the 2008 100-meter finals will be for him. “Our goal has always been to inspire people every day,” he says.

King of Sim City

William P. Utt’s main responsibility at KBR is keeping things real

You wouldn’t expect the chairman, president, and CEO of a $9.35 billion company to compare his job to a video game. It’d be kind of like Eli Manning saying the drive to win the Super Bowl was like winning at Madden NFL. But ask William P. “Bill” Utt about his job and he replies, “It’s the ultimate Sim City. That’s why I love this job.”

In Sim City, players run virtual cities; in real life, Utt is running KBR, a Houston-based construction and services firm that employs 50,000 people working all over the world, from Iraq and Afghanistan to places that may not be on any maps yet. And there’s nothing simulated about it.

There are, however, a host of real-world challenges that come with building natural gas facilities in the jungles of Indonesia and deep in the Sahara, to name two current KBR projects. “How do you put together civilization where none exists? That is our job,” says Utt. “When we start, there are no roads, no electricity, no offices. Nothing, really. We have to build the infrastructure before we start the project.”

When Utt, 51, took up residence in the corner office in March 2006, he had some reorganizing to do. His appointment coincided with the decision by corporate parent Halliburton to spin out KBR as a separate entity; by November of the same year, KBR was established as an independent company with a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. It is the largest contractor for the U.S. Army and the world’s largest defense services provider. Every meal served to the Army in Iraq, for instance, is dished out by KBR employees. Ditto for the Army in Afghanistan. And KBR is one of the planet’s most active oil field services companies, helping the big energy firms haul in their hydrocarbon catches.

That’s a big challenge even for a veteran like Utt, whose credentials include experience as both an engineer and a business leader. Before joining KBR, he worked for 22 years at Suez Energy North America, a diversified energy business active in both production and trading. He started at Suez right after graduating from the University of Virginia, where he earned an MBA and two degrees in mechanical engineering. Suez was a four-person business when Utt joined, and during his tenure, he helped grow the start-up into a megabusiness with $7 billion in revenues.

Ready for a new challenge, Utt was all ears when an executive recruiter contacted him about the post at KBR. He realized he couldn’t say no to the opportunity. “This is a company with a history — we operate on a mammoth global scale. But this also is a brand-new business,” says Utt, who explains that the unlikely combination drew him into the job.

One other lure: Utt is convinced that KBR is riding a powerful and transformational wave of an idea. “Companies are figuring out what they do well and what they don’t,” he says, “and they are looking for others to do the latter for them. Those are the jobs we do. That is how we will succeed.”

But don’t think any of this has gone to Utt’s head. From his own office, every time he looks outside, he gets a reality check from the Enron building. “That is certainly a reminder of the responsibilities I have to our shareholders and other KBR stakeholders,” says Utt, who in September 2007 presided over the company’s first meeting of shareholders. “Providing shareholder value is at the core of our daily work.”

Shopping for Sustainability

Wal-Mart rolls out the green carpet to build a sustainable future

Name the organization that recently announced these environmental goals: “To be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain our resources and the environment.” If you think it must be a dreamy-eyed environmental group, think again. This ultra-green pledge actually came from the country’s biggest retailer, Wal-Mart, which operates more than 4,100 stores in the United States and another 2,900 internationally.

According to Charles Zimmerman, a corporate vice president who heads up Wal-Mart’s Sustainable Buildings Network, only the U.S. government uses more electricity worldwide than Wal-Mart. Going forward, the retail giant is determined to paint itself green — not just because it’s good for the planet, but because it’s good for business too.

“Our No. 2 operating expense is energy,” says Zimmerman. (No. 1 is labor.) And every cent Wal-Mart can knock off its energy bill can go to the bottom line or cutting costs for consumers, or both.

“Everything we do, every product we select to stock in our stores, now is looked at through the lens of sustainability,” says Zimmerman. By 2012, Wal-Mart’s goal is to reduce energy consumption in existing stores by a jaw-dropping 20 percent. Another goal, targeted for 2009, is to develop a new prototype store that is 25–30 percent more efficient. Although that’s an ambitious goal for most businesses, Zimmerman is unfazed. “We will meet those objectives,” he says.

Zimmerman’s confidence is inspired in part by the Sustainable Buildings Network, a group of some 200 experts (including Wal-Mart executives and vendors, government officials, specialists from nongovernmental organizations, and more). The network meets several times a year at Wal-Mart’s Bentonville, Ark., headquarters to explore what the company needs to do to achieve its sustainability goals. Everything from installing new HVAC systems to harvesting daylight to replace lightbulbs is on the table.

While Wal-Mart is not known as a company where executives put their personalities on display, Zimmerman is plainly passionate about this work. “Our size at Wal-Mart makes the things we do so important,” he says. For example, Wal-Mart is moving to LED [light-emitting diode] lighting that will change not only lighting in parking lots, but street lighting too. Typically associated with clocks and cell phones, LEDs are highly energy efficient, but it is Wal-Mart’s prodding that has seen the technology nudged into new applications such as outdoor illumination.

Zimmerman admits the company’s sustainability efforts are provoking some different practices at Wal-Mart. “For the first time ever, we are being proactive in sharing what we are doing with our competition,” he says. Wal-Mart invites competitors to grand openings, shows them plans, and introduces them to its vendors. The first reaction is always shock, but Zimmerman sees the competition beginning to reciprocate. “Over time we hope we can break down the barriers,” he says. — Robert McGarvey