(FORTUNE Magazine) – To the list of American businessmen writing books about themselves, or at least causing such books to be written, we can now add Roger Enrico, president and C.E.O. of PepsiCo Worldwide Beverages (a division of PepsiCo). Like several others in the genre, including Lee Iacocca's prodigious seller, Enrico's tale is often wonderfully instructive. Also like the others, it is not exactly a work of literature. The Other Guy Blinked: How Pepsi Won the Cola Wars, by Enrico and Jesse Kornbluth (Bantam, $17.95), is hyperbolic, cliche-ridden, and overly dependent on staccato one- line paragraphs reminiscent of tabloid prose. It is not totally believable in some details. Too many of Enrico's stories are told with a remarkable recapture of dialogue, running on for page after page, that suggests either hidden microphones at every encounter or the deft hand of a novelist. Enrico offers a somewhat Manichaean view of soft drink marketing. There is evil Coca-Cola and virtuous Pepsi, the heroic underdog. Assigning himself underdog status is a bit of a reach, since parent PepsiCo has a sales volume roughly equal to Coca-Cola's. (Both were apparently around $9 billion last year.) Enrico is candid about the advantages of underdog status: It appeals to the public and it inspires Pepsi's troops. ''Who'd choose to be Goliath?'' he asks. For most of its history, Pepsi was truly the underdog. Concocted by a pharmacist in North Carolina 12 years after the invention of Coca-Cola in 1886, Pepsi for decades had a derisory history as the No. 2 cola drink, and twice went bankrupt. During the Great Depression it was reduced to competing by offering a 12-ounce bottle for the same nickel that Coke was getting for six ounces. Every American over 50 had the Pepsi jingle -- ''Twice as much for a nickel, too'' -- drilled into his head; still, the company never had a period of extended prosperity until the postwar years. ! It first grew in a major way under Alfred Steele, then more dramatically under Donald Kendall, who became C.E.O. in 1963. Kendall is renowned for getting the first Pepsi bottling plant into the Soviet Union; he also somehow persuaded Nikita Khrushchev to hoist the drink at an American trade fair in Moscow. Probably more important to the company's development were Kendall's ideas about advertising, which focused on the ''Pepsi generation'' -- fresh- faced, eager, youthful types forever riding motorbikes and surfboards and consuming oceans of Pepsi -- a campaign that continued over 20 years. By 1977, says Enrico, Pepsi was outselling Coke in retail food stores. When our hero took over the Pepsi-Cola division in 1983, he confronted a difficult task: He had to top a huge success, which can be harder than retrieving a failure. A brash, volatile, exuberantly self-confident man, Enrico had spent his entire career in marketing, first at General Mills, then at the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo. In his new job he immediately concentrated on advertising, suspecting that new life had to be pumped into the Pepsi generation theme, and also concerned that the public had become bored with ''the Pepsi Challenge'' (commercials in which ordinary soft- drinkers were shown preferring Pepsi in taste tests). Enrico set about his task in a bold though not exactly novel way: He took up celebrity-mongering. The idea was to identify the idols of the young with a drink whose age (then 85) was never mentioned. His first big splash came when he recruited rock star Michael Jackson for the extraordinary sum of $5 million; the money bought two commercials, plus the privilege of sponsoring a tour by the star and his brothers. Getting the Jackson commercials on the air proved to be a problem beyond anything you could possibly learn in business school. Early on the singer decided he did not like the music or the scenario of the first commercial. They were changed. Then, after the spots were filmed and edited, Jackson objected to the final product, arguing perversely that he was being overexposed. It seems that the hottest pop celebrity in the country wanted his face to appear in only one close-up for four seconds and wanted only one of his famous dance ''spins'' to be seen. The commercials were re-edited, but Jackson then raised still other objections to them. At one point, after Pepsi had spent $2 million on production costs, Enrico contemplated canceling the whole project and suing Jackson for the money. Luckily the difficulties were finally overcome and the commercials were a great success. ''Not 30 days after the Jackson commercials began airing,'' writes Enrico, ''sales of Pepsi-Cola began to climb. They climbed high enough to make Pepsi by far the fastest-growing regular cola on the market in 1984.'' He fearlessly estimates that in the course of a year, 97% of the American people saw the commercials 12 times or more. From Michael Jackson, Enrico went on to Lionel Richie, another popular singer who was far less eccentric but almost as appealing to the Pepsi generation. Enrico fell on his face, however, with Geraldine Ferraro. Four months after she failed to be elected as the nation's first female Vice President, Enrico retained her for a Diet Pepsi commercial, reasoning that she was ''a living symbol of women's possibilities.'' As he anticipated, signing Ferraro brought Pepsi a lot of free publicity. A huge amount of it, unfortunately, consisted of criticisms of her for ''selling out'' to commercial interests. An even greater shock to Enrico was the deluge of protest letters occasioned by the commercial's voice-over phrase, ''the choice of a new generation.'' Pepsi management was stunned to discover that many viewers took those words to mean that the company was ''pro-choice'' -- that is, pro-abortion. A chastened Enrico yanked Ferraro off the air. The blinking referred to in the book's title was Coca-Cola's disastrous decision to change Coke's traditional formula. Enrico believes that the decision was driven by Pepsi's success -- that, implicitly, Coke was admitting Pepsi tasted better than its own product. The morning after Coca-Cola announced the new drink, Enrico published a full-page newspaper ad in the guise of a letter to his bottlers. Said the letter: ''After 87 years of going at it eyeball to eyeball, the other guy just blinked. Coca-Cola is withdrawing their product from the marketplace and is reformulating Coke to be 'more like Pepsi.' There is no question the long-term market success of Pepsi forced this move . . . Everybody knows that when something is right it doesn't need changing . . .'' It was a brilliant thrust, to be repeated endlessly in every possible context. ENRICO LEANS HARD on the idea that Pepsi has now defeated Coke in some fundamental way, but the case is a lot less clear than he says. He points proudly to an A.C. Neilsen study for February and March 1986 showing Pepsi with 18.7% of total soft-drink sales, and Classic Coke and New Coke together with 17.2% between them. That 1.5% difference, he says, represents $250 million in sales. However, the figures he cites are only for retail stores, where customers buy the bottled product. In vending machines and in restaurants, where usually only one cola drink is available, Coca-Cola still has a sizable lead. Enrico disdainfully calls this area a ''captive market.'' However, Pepsi is not so disdainful as to ignore the market, where it is still working hard to improve its share. The Other Guy Blinked is more than just a lively chronicle of the Cola wars. It is itself a salvo of sorts in those wars -- one more way of selling the American people on Pepsi over Coke. But it sometimes comes across as too hard a sell. Enrico is a bit too gleeful talking about his triumphs and deriding the enemy. He could end up creating sympathy for Goliath.