Coca-Cola is one of those companies that provides superb lessons for business and a great story. What's more this is a good book on the subject, and one we'd highly recommend - so might seem a little odd to suggest that it's a disappointment. The reason is that it could have been so much better.

The worst feature is the way Constance Hays leaps back and forth in time, going over the same ground several times to trace the picture through the history of different key executives. It gives both a disrupted timeline, and significant repetition. Authors are often encouraged not to use a strict chronological approach because it can appear "boring" - the trouble is, as this book demonstrates, to abandon the timeline can mean pain for the reader.

There's also a sense that Hays is overawed by the whole aura of Coca-Cola. She wallows in its greatness, never once reminding us, as Steve Jobs told John Sculley when luring him from Pepsi to become CEO of Apple "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?"

There's also some evidence of parochialism. When saying that Pepsi was struggling in the 1990s, Hays comments that their potato chip business was booming - "there were no potato chip wars to speak of," she says, "Frito already owned that market." This is a bit naive, bearing in mind the fact that unlike Coke/Pepsi, the brand is hardly known outside the US. Equally, there is no study of the impact of supermarket own brand colas on sales of Coke, even though in some countries these have made big inroads into the market.