THE MAN WHO KNEW THE FORMULA: ROBERTO C. GOIZUETA (1931-1997)

As the pre-eminent general in the cola wars, Coca-Cola CEO Roberto C. Goizueta was the ultimate brand loyalist. His devotion to Coke made him wealthy and enriched his shareholders, as well as the city of Atlanta. But his loyalty to a somewhat obscure brand, True cigarettes, made him more susceptible to the lung cancer that killed him last week at age 65, ending Goizueta’s remarkable stewardship of the world’s biggest brand. Goizueta’s illness was diagnosed in September, and the company expressed optimism about his return as he continued to work from his hospital room. But following chemotherapy and radiation treatment, Goizueta fell gravely ill with a throat infection and fever and never recovered. In his lifetime, Roberto Goizueta was as synonymous with Coke as its contour bottle. At his death, he was a byword beyond his corporation: the poster boy for shareholder value, a paragon for Wall Street.

Born into a wealthy Cuban family, he was raised in privilege and schooled at Yale. He began his career in 1954 as a chemist at the company in Havana. That life changed abruptly after he fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1961, an event he called the most significant in his life. He and his wife got out with a suitcase and 100 shares of Coca-Cola, which he never sold. He rejoined the company in Florida and progressed through the ranks. By 1974, as head of Coke’s labs, he was one of only two top chemists allowed to memorize the soda’s secret formula.

Goizueta’s anonymity ended after he became a protege of another Coke legend, former CEO Robert W. Woodruff, who became increasingly impressed by the intensity and integrity of the man from Havana. With Woodruff’s influence, Goizueta was tapped in 1981 to run the Atlanta-based company. At the time Coke was an omnipresent but floundering symbol of American business and culture. Subsequently, Goizueta became one of the most highly regarded of all CEOs, having turned one of the world’s most nonessential consumer products into a money spinner with annual sales of $18.5 billion. “No one loved the Coca-Cola company more than Roberto,” said Berkshire HathawayCEO Warren Buffett, a Coke board member. “He was a great leader and a great gentleman.”

Goizueta’s unyielding, unquenchable resolve to increase shareholder value became the dominant management theme of the 1990s. His strategy: if a business doesn’t add value, say goodbye. “I know something very simple,” Goizueta told FORTUNE in 1995, “and that is: the way to become richer is you borrow money at a certain rate and invest it at a higher rate and pocket the difference. So we went very methodically over much of our business.”

And it turned out that nothing added value more than the magic cola itself. He boosted Coke by stripping it down to its trademark. When he took over, Coke had flat growth and unprofitable businesses–ranging from shrimp farming to wine–that were draining the company’s cash, not to mention a serious Pepsi challenge. On his watch, Coke’s stock-market value rose from $4 billion to some $150 billion. Goizueta himself became a billionaire through his Coke stockholdings.

Even Goizueta’s mistakes were beauties: the disastrous new Coke, which nevertheless paved the way for a sales surge in “classic” Coke, and the purchase of Columbia Pictures, which he unloaded on Sony for a healthy profit. Says analyst Martin Romm of Credit Suisse First Boston: “He did more in 16 years than most people could hope to do in a millennium.”

During Goizueta’s tenure, Coke won the cola wars going away. In the $54 billion carbonated-beverage business, Coke owns 43% of the domestic market, to Pepsi’s 31%. Coke has captured 48% of the world market, while Pepsi lags with 22%, estimates Beverage Digest. Goizueta, a globalist, has pushed sales hard outside the U.S. Coke gets 71% of its revenue abroad, while Pepsi generates more than 70% in the U.S. Last year PepsiCo’s sales rose 5%, to $31.6 billion, but its earnings fell 28%, to $1.1 billion. Hindered by a strong dollar, which hurts foreign sales, Coke’s revenues rose only 3% in 1996, to $18.5 billion. But earnings rose almost 17%, to $3.5 billion.

Coke has played kick the can with the big “Project Blue” global campaign that Pepsi launched last year, grabbing Pepsi strongholds like Russia and India. Goizueta orchestrated one of the cola war’s most outrageous raids–buying half of Pepsi’s Venezuelan bottler and grabbing a dominant market share almost overnight. “The conclusion is obvious,” he told TIME shortly afterward. “Our system has terrific momentum.”

That momentum is likely to continue under Goizueta’s probable successor, M. Douglas Ivester, 50, the company president, who is expected to be named CEO this week. It is a notable achievement that Goizueta built a management team that can absorb his loss. “They really have a depth of management,” says Jennifer Solomon, an analyst at Salomon Brothers. “I would be much more concerned if this issue arose at some other companies.” Ivester has virtually run Coke’s operations since being appointed president three years ago, which allowed the cerebral Goizueta to manage the big picture.

Under Ivester’s direction, Coke is pouring on the investment to attain its goal of gulping 50% of the U.S. market by 2001. The plan is to make this conspicuous brand ubiquitous by putting a Coke vending machine or retail point within arm’s length of every consumer. Those market-share points are going to become harder to swallow, though. Coke and Pepsi lay out about $2 billion annually in soft-drink promotion worldwide, and spent an ugly summer in a nonstop price war. Moreover, Pepsi has its own formidable general in Roger Enrico, as well as a new game plan. Enrico recently spun off Pepsi’s capital-consuming restaurant division to focus on businesses that add more value: Frito-Lay snack foods and Pepsi. Sound familiar? Pepsi can now open another front in the cola wars–probably in the fountain business, where it has been weak. “Pepsi has not been that strong of a competitor [in this segment]. Coke has pretty much had a free run, and that’s about to change,” says Gary Hemphill, vice president of Beverage Marketing Corp., a beverage-consulting firm.

Still, in the third quarter Coke posted a strong 11% increase in case sales worldwide. It’s more evidence of Goizueta’s remarkable record as cola’s greatest warrior. “It’s all right if people want to worry about me,” Goizueta told Ivester with his typical directness after he was first hospitalized. “But they shouldn’t worry about the company, because it’s in better shape than it’s ever been.”

–Reported by Greg Fulton/Atlanta and Valerie Marchant and Aixa M. Pascual/New York