(FORTUNE Magazine) – It is nighttime in Shanghai, and by rights Doug Ivester should be in bed. He arrived here from Atlanta late last night, having spent a good part of his 51st birthday in an airplane. He was up early to christen a new bottling plant, attended meetings all day, and hosted a dinner for his Chinese bottling partners. But as the dinner ends, instead of heading upstairs, he heads out the front doors of the Ritz-Carlton and down Nanjing Road, in what has become one of his favorite pastimes--walking the streets to see for himself what is really going on out there.

This is Shanghai's main shopping artery, and on Saturday night it is still hopping. Ivester heads down the street toward the Mei Long Zheng Square, an upscale shopping mall, to see how many people have turned out for the World of Coca-Cola, a traveling multimedia exhibit where you can sample Fanta, watch videos of vintage Coke ads, and shoot hoops next to a cardboard cutout of Grant Hill. The place is jammed, and Ivester is pleased.

But not for long. Heading up the street, he ducks into a little store called Shanghai Cosmetics Club, scans the odd mix of ladies' cosmetics and household cleansers, and looks perplexed. "Why wouldn't you put Coke in here?" he asks George Chu, the Shanghai regional manager, who is at his side. At the Shanghai Children's Food Shop, a tiny, jam-packed grocery, he finds that the Coke has been stacked on the floor, behind the checkout clerk. "You have to reach for it," he says. "You have to ask for it." In the little Bai Yu Lan flower shop, amid the orchids and lilies, he points to a shelf filled with bottles and cans and quizzes the shop owner. How much do you sell in a week, Ivester wants to know. What does it cost? Which of the array of soft drinks sells the best? (Coke is No. 1; Sprite is No. 2.) That should make Ivester happy, but he frowns at a fountain machine in the corner that is turned off. The shopkeeper assumes that customers won't want cold drinks until the weather gets warmer. "Since we left the hotel," Ivester says with some frustration, "there has not been a single place to buy a cold Coca-Cola."

Now why on earth, you might wonder, does Doug Ivester feel compelled to walk the streets of Shanghai in search of Coke? Coke is, after all, in the bigger picture nearly everywhere. It has 50% of the global soft drink market. No other competitor, including Pepsi, comes even close. Coca-Cola, now 112 years old, has the brand to beat all others--last year it became the best-known foreign brand even here in China. Coke--a consumer-products company, for God's sake--continues to be a darling of Wall Street. In overall market value, it ranks No. 3 in the FORTUNE 500, surpassed only by General Electric and Microsoft. Ivester could, one would think, relax a little. Go to bed. Get a life.

But that's not Doug Ivester. Doug Ivester is the guy who for nearly two decades worked unflaggingly to provide critical support to Roberto Goizueta as he not only turned Coca-Cola around but made it into a powerhouse. If you want to know just how driven Ivester is, know that more than a decade ago he set for himself the goal of becoming the CEO and chairman of Coca-Cola. Then he committed to paper the dates by which he intended to do that. He wanted to be CEO by Nov. 1, 1996, and chairman by Nov. 1, 1998.

He was not far off. Last October he took on what has to be one of the toughest jobs in corporate America: succeeding Goizueta, who will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the great wealth builders of the 20th century. From the time Goizueta became chairman and chief executive of Coke in 1981 to the time of his death last fall from complications of lung cancer, Coca-Cola's market value had grown from $4.3 billion to $147 billion. And Goizueta himself had become an almost larger-than-life figure, not just because of his proficiency at rewarding shareholders but also because of his warm Latin charm, his funny Cuban proverbs, and his inspirational journey--the refugee from Castro's revolution who became CEO of the company that for the last two years of his tenure was corporate America's most admired.

By comparison, Ivester--to a world that didn't know him well--seemed an obscure understudy. He is an accountant by training, an introvert by nature. He worked systematically to obtain the breadth needed to be a modern chief executive--getting media coaching and spending three years' worth of Saturdays, six hours at a shot, being tutored in marketing. He is a straight arrow, constantly exhorting his executives to "do the right thing"; yet he is fascinated with Las Vegas, which he visits once a year, gambling some and people watching a lot. He is an odd mix of Protestant work ethic and New Age motivational technique. He is big on discipline, which to him means: Be where you're supposed to be. Dress the part (he is opposed to casual Fridays). Return phone calls promptly (employees know never to get too far afield of their office voice mail, even on weekends). Still, when directing his troops, he asks them to set "aspirations" (like stretch targets). He is a capitalist missionary who believes in teaching the world not to sing but to sell--Coke, preferably. That's a byproduct of a Southern Baptist, rural Georgia upbringing that he's never totally left behind.

And it would be a big mistake to underestimate him. He is the man who crushed and then ripped apart a Coke can in a speech to bottlers in order to make a point. (He says he meant to convey the force of the newly consolidated bottling system, but one audience member thought he meant to say, Don't stand in our way.) He is, in fact, the man who has continued and accelerated that difficult, sometimes messy consolidation process at a breathtaking rate and on an astounding scale. It is not that Ivester is a brute so much as a relentless force--he is married but has no children, and he works seven days a week and nearly all the time. "Ivester has been proving himself for the past 20 years at a variety of jobs," says Herbert A. Allen, CEO and managing director of Allen & Co., and a board member since 1982. "Everything he's touched has improved dramatically. Whatever target he sets, he hits."

And he's tough, which is a good thing because it's not the easiest time to be taking over at Coke. The company's underlying business is very solid. But Coca-Cola's bottom line, usually the picture of nice, steady, predictable earnings growth, is being ravaged by the strong dollar. Weak foreign currencies are playing havoc with the dazzling 15% to 20% earnings-per-share gains Coke likes to report. Analysts are predicting that because of currency problems (and some gains last year) per-share growth this year will be about flat. But is Ivester flinching? No. He has said repeatedly he sees no reason whatsoever to change the course he helped to set. "Look," he says bluntly, "if our shareholder base said, 'We want to manage this business for the short-term results,' I could do it. I know how all the levers work, and I could generate so much cash I could make everybody's head spin. As long as you know I could do that, I don't need to. We won't take any short-term actions that are reactionary in nature. We won't change our fundamental course. We are not managing for the next quarter."

And as his recent tour of Shanghai shows, he's not wasting a lot of time worrying about it. If Goizueta was a man obsessed with the success of Coca-Cola, Ivester is even more so. If Goizueta will go down in history as the quintessential late-20th-century CEO, Ivester may give us a glimpse of the 21st-century CEO, who marshals data and manages people in a way no pre-Information Age executive ever did or could. He is among the first of a new generation of CEOs to take over from the handful of charismatic business leaders who defined corporate ingenuity in the latter part of this century--the Andy Groves, the Jack Welches, the Roberto Goizuetas--and he is already redrawing the map.

Hierarchy is out--it slows everything down; he communicates freely with people at all levels. The conventional desk job is also out. Ivester prefers that employees think of themselves as knowledge workers--their office is the information they carry around with them, supported by technology that allows them to work anywhere. This really matters when your business is as far-flung as Coke's, which gets 80% of its profit from overseas. Three years ago Ivester hired a chief learning officer, Judith A. Rosenblum, to figure out how to institutionalize the sharing of experiences and outcomes, country to country, executive to executive, and how to turn Coke into a "learning organization." Ivester is even down on old-fashioned notions of time--namely, the time it takes to get a job done. He has played with all sorts of ways to avoid doing things sequentially, pushing instead for what he calls "viral growth." Say you want to open 200 sales offices in China, which he does. Don't open first one and then the next. Use each new office to help open several more--pyramidlike.

At Ivester-era Coke, business planning is no longer an annual ritual but a continual discussion--sometimes via voice mail--among top executives. Technology is not just nice; it's crucial. Huge volumes of information don't intimidate Ivester; he insists that they are necessary for "real-time" decision-making. A CEO on a pedestal is definitely out; a CEO as platoon leader is in. With past-generation executives, the style was more "don't bring me your problems, bring me your solutions," says Tim Haas, senior vice president and head of Latin America. "Doug thrives on finding the solutions." In a world this complicated and fast-moving, a CEO can't afford to sit in the executive suite and guess, Ivester says. He believes that many of America's executives "are getting terribly isolated."

Of course, this can sound a lot like micromanaging, and it is impossible to know how it will all come out. Will he be as adept at crisis management as Goizueta, who managed to shape a vision for a new Coca-Cola out of the debacle of New Coke? Will he be as wise as his predecessor in picking an utterly complementary No. 2? (Goizueta's president and COO was the extroverted, globetrotting Don Keough; Ivester is reluctant to make an early choice.) Will he be able to manage effectively the dual role required of the Coke CEO--aggressive general pushing the troops and smooth diplomat advancing Coke's interest in 200 countries?

Ivester is the son of factory workers from a tiny Georgia mill town on the eastern edge of Gainesville. He was raised on Mill Street in New Holland, a stone's throw from the local Milliken textile plant where his father, Howard "Buck" Ivester, worked a variety of jobs while he was growing up. When Doug was in high school, his mother, Ada Mae, went to work at a small motors factory. His parents were children of the Depression, he recalls, "strong savers, very strong religious values," and had very high expectations for their only son. If he got an A, his father would say, "They give A-pluses, don't they?" On Sundays, Ivester played the organ at the Pleasant Union Baptist Church. His mother, he says, "desperately wanted me to be a minister of music. But I had no talent for it," he insists. "It's pure discipline."

From the time he was 8 years old, he worked after school--cutting grass, doing construction work, raising chickens. He attended North Hall High School, where kids tended to come from either factory families or farm families. There wasn't much time for extracurricular activities or team sports. After school and on weekends, Ivester worked 35 hours a week (he can still reel off his schedule) at a nearby Kroger bagging groceries, a job he didn't like much because he would get wet and cold carrying the bags outside when it rained. When his boss refused to let him move to a job working the cash register, Ivester volunteered to do it on his days off, for nothing, to learn the skill. For four months he did that, working seven days a week, until his boss relented.

As a kid, he remembers seeing the opening of Disneyland on television and thinking, "I'll never get to go there." He says, "I might have been motivated out of fear that there were things I wouldn't get to do." Just as Goizueta had been profoundly influenced by the sudden confiscation of his family's wealth by Fidel Castro--the concept of ownership and his responsibility to shareholders became paramount--so too was Ivester shaped by his childhood. He has a belief in plowing through barriers, in imagining opportunities even when there don't appear to be any. "One thing I learned in Gainesville was to never let my memories be greater than my dreams," he says.

Ivester went on to the University of Georgia in Athens, 48 miles from home but what seemed a world away at the time. He majored in accounting and then got a job with Ernst & Whinney, where eventually he headed up Coke's audit team. Along the way, he eloped with his high school sweetheart, Victoria Kay Grindle. He joined Coke in 1979 as assistant controller and soon became the executive assistant to John Collings, the chief financial officer who would become a trusted adviser to a green and uncertain new president, Roberto Goizueta. In 1981, Collings died of a heart attack. Four years later, Ivester became Coca-Cola's chief financial officer at the tender age of 37.

The events landed him in the heart of the action at a critical time: Goizueta and Don Keough were trying to straighten out a soft drink company that had badly lost its way, and much of what they had to do in the 1980s was financial reengineering--right up Ivester's alley. Ivester provided a dazzling array of creative financial solutions to their problems. There is a lot of tension now over who should get credit for Coke's big acts during the '80s. Ivester won't touch the subject, possibly because he feels he deserves more of it. But here's what happened in the 1986 creation of Coca-Cola Enterprises, which put Ivester on the map. The idea was mostly Keough's; he had long been seeking a way to force consolidation of Coke's many small bottlers. The opportunity came when two independent bottlers came up for sale; Keough advocated taking them public. Ivester followed up, and with his team acquired the two billion-dollar bottlers, merged them with some Coke holdings, then took the whole thing public in what, at the time, was one of the largest initial public offerings ever. Normally, the job would have taken three years. Ivester got it done in 99 days--one day ahead of his goal.

By the late 1980s, Ivester had endeared himself to Goizueta, who had been testing him for a long time. (The first time he had ever been inside Coca-Cola's boardroom was when Goizueta sent him in to sell the board on the acquisition of Columbia Pictures in 1982.) And he had proved himself to Keough, who was determined to put him through the paces, telling him, "Doug, you are very comfortable as chief financial officer of this company. It will be a tragedy if you retire as the chief financial officer of this company." What followed was a crash course in line management. In a year in Europe, Ivester made quick work of a recalcitrant French bottler, reclaiming that country's Coke business in an uncharacteristically noisy brawl. When the Berlin Wall fell, he pushed into Eastern Europe, persuading Goizueta to take a huge risk on local currency in order to be first.

But his performance was even more noteworthy when he returned to the U.S. in 1990 as president of Coca-Cola USA. Like so much of the rest of the beleaguered consumer-products industry, Coke had come to believe that the U.S. market was mature. "I think there was a belief that we could only grow at 2% to 3%, and it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy," recalls Charley Frenette, Coke's chief marketing officer. But if Ivester had accepted conventional wisdom, he never would have gotten out of Gainesville. He rolled up his sleeves and began challenging assumptions. "I asked people to get into a helicopter and mentally rise up above where they were and change their perspective of how they looked at things," he says. "Do you remember in Dead Poets Society, when Robin Williams gets all of his students to stand on their desks and says, 'Look how different the world looks from up here'? Well, there's real truth in that."

He and his team walked through stores and walked down streets, identifying all the little nooks and crannies--the hairdressers and laundromats--where Coke couldn't be found. Coke had become too focused on supermarkets, recalls Frenette, and had let up on vending machines and all those odd little places one finds a Coke these days. One Saturday morning Ivester drove from Atlanta to Rome, Ga., with a video crew, identifying all the missed opportunities along the way, to make his point. Coke needed to get more micro.

By the time Ivester was done, Coke and its bottlers had installed thousands of new vending machines, coolers, and fountains. Ivester had brought back Coke's marketing star of the '80s, Sergio Zyman. By 1994, Coke USA's unit volume was growing at a 7% clip, and Ivester had shown the world that there is no such thing as a mature market. In the process he had created a model that would later work in all sorts of markets--Shanghai; Nairobi, Kenya; Barranquilla, Colombia.

Goizueta's death propelled Ivester onto center stage and into circumstances that would have been daunting for any rookie CEO. Goizueta's eulogies and obituaries were glowing. He had been revered, and he was badly missed. Ivester paid a personal visit to each Coke board member. He also retrieved and read all the press clippings that had been written about his predecessor during Goizueta's first six months as CEO. He did it "for perspective," he says. "The definition of where the company was going then was pretty cloudy," Ivester says. He concluded that "I'd take my press coverage any day." After that, he put all comparisons aside. "I am not competing with his image. He was a unique person at a unique point in the company's history. It is not something I need to spend a lot of time thinking about."

Nor has he. Since October he has set about doing things his way. For starters, he doesn't believe in an office. He has one, of course--the one Goizueta had, which looks pretty much the same, except for his own personal touches: an Andy Warhol painting of Teddy Roosevelt above his desk, a piece of the Berlin Wall, and a gift or memento from each of his past bosses. But Ivester has spent nearly a third of the past six months on the road, visiting eight countries. "Whenever I take one of these trips, I get great clarity," he says. "A lot of people need command central. What we are trying to do is to make the person command central, so that your office is not a place with a desk and a telephone. Your office is the intellectual capital you carry with you and the technology that supports it."

So Coca-Cola increasingly is staffed with guys like James Chestnut, senior vice president and Coke's chief financial officer, and a product of the talent development system Ivester has institutionalized. Chestnut was the chief accountant in the U.K. when Ivester sent him on a wild career ride--first to South Africa, then to the Philippines, then to Atlanta, then to Japan as chief financial officer, then back to the U.S. "We can't run this company by managing the U.S., Japan, China as if they were all islands," Chestnut says. "We need to build skills, share knowledge."

Which is possible because of a technology revolution inside Coke over the past 15 years, driven almost single-handedly by Ivester. Goizueta barely liked to talk on the telephone, preferring to communicate face to face or through handwritten notes. But Ivester insisted the company be wired globally, and now he runs the place by two-minute voice mails. It is a voice-mail culture, and employees know to listen up. "I learned to check my voice mail on weekends and to check it at 11 o'clock before I went to bed," says one former Coke manager. He remembers dialing in just before Christmas and feeling his heart race at the sound of Ivester's voice; it turned out to be a divisionwide voice mail recapping the year's performance. It's one of Ivester's key methods for disseminating important news--it is how he told Coke's employees of Goizueta's death in October. And it is how he keeps in daily touch, across time zones, with his six operating officers.

But voice mail isn't the half of it. As a new Coke recruit, Ivester couldn't understand why it took 2 1/2 months to collect the financial results from Coke's far-flung operations. He collapsed the process to five days, then forced a redesign of as many other sources of information inside the Coke system as possible. Today, Coke marketers in much of the U.S. can know how a particular package of a particular brand did in a particular outlet two days ago, which allows them to detect and respond quickly to Pepsi's pricing moves. They will be able to closely track usage of the Coke Cards, the 55 million cards that can be used for discounts and deals on everything from popcorn to theme parks, to tell about brand preferences, buying patterns and attitudes of the teenagers they are aimed at. Coke has used the near-instantaneous information it gets on Olympics ratings and audience makeup to make new television ads in the space of a day. "The place is terrific on information. A machine," says board member Warren Buffett.

All of which leads to some rather unorthodox, if effective, marketing. Coke's advertising, real time as it might be, is frequently panned by the trade press. DIET COKE ACHIEVES MAXIMUM ANNOYANCE read an Advertising Age headline recently. USA Today ranked Coke's Super Bowl ads dead last. "Where Coke has been strongest in the last seven years has been the ABC's of soda, not the complex issue of consumer manipulation," says Bill Katz, president of BBDO, one of Pepsi's agencies. "Coke has gotten so it considers advertising as part of a larger strategy, which is ubiquity. But after a while, ubiquity becomes wallpaper, and wallpaper can get dull." If Ivester is bothered by all this, he isn't letting on. "What we're trying to do are things that connect with consumers," he says, "and the way we read the data, our bonds are just getting stronger and stronger." Advertising, he says, is a very small part of a big marketing picture, which includes the signs at the ballpark, the Spencerian script, billboards, contour bottles, philanthropic efforts, and the 27 personal letters he wrote back to schoolchildren last week.

He is constantly after his subordinates to be on the alert on all possible fronts. Jack Stahl, senior vice president and president of Coke's North America Group, says he gets six or seven notes from Ivester a day, often attached to something Ivester has read. Recently one of them was an article from a furniture magazine that ranked the 12 best places to eat in High Point, N.C. Attached was a note from Ivester: "What's our availability in these 12 restaurants?"

Stahl knows the question isn't meant to be rhetorical. In what bemused executives call Ivester's "lock-solid follow-up system," there is usually a little date in the corner of such communiques, by which he expects a reply. If he doesn't hear from you, you'll most certainly hear from him.

So far Ivester is managing to stay on top of it all. In fact, he says he doesn't want a No. 2 right now. Coca-Cola under Ivester is a flat-topped affair, with Ivester in the big job, then 14 senior vice presidents (including his six operating heads), and nobody in between. Says Ivester: "There is no need to pick a No. 2 right now. I've got six operating executives performing very, very well and who are very motivated in their relationship with me. If I tried to put somebody between me and the six, it wouldn't be a very good job." This could be viewed less charitably as a sign that he's unwilling to share the limelight. Zyman resigned recently, and Ivester made no attempt to keep him. Doug Daft, a former math teacher who is senior vice president and president of the Middle and Far East Group, is seen to be Ivester's closest adviser, but at age 55 is hardly a long-term succession candidate. Neville Isdell, one of Coke's most seasoned operators, was recently dispatched to Europe to head up a new bottler.

Ivester has pushed the global consolidation of the company's bottlers faster even than some board members thought possible. It's a delicate business. As some competitors like to point out, the Ivester-era Coke runs the risk of appearing too aggressive. Exclusive contracts in the soft drink industry are nothing new. But lately, Coke and Pepsi have been more aggressively pursuing them not just in restaurant chains but in places like schools and convenience stores, competitors say. And they complain that the contracts are squeezing them out. (Pepsi says customers have plenty of choices. As for Coke, it says that the contracts are proper and that customers choose its products because they're popular.) In any case, "Coke is the No. 1 icon in the world; it has to be a good corporate citizen," says Leenie Ruben, marketing consultant for Cadbury Schweppes. "They are not in a situation where they can create shareholder value by being a bully."

On his recent trip to China, Ivester goes out of his way to convey just how good a global citizen Coke really is. China is an important market, for obvious reasons--Coke's eighth-largest market and one of its stars. The company needs continued cooperation from a Chinese government that is in transition and that has lately been nudging Coke to allow it a bigger stake in some of the bottling ventures.

There is a lot of ceremony to this part of his job, and Ivester appears to take to it less naturally than to the other parts. Greeting the mayor of Shanghai--in a breathtakingly formal meeting room, with walls adorned by ornate wood carvings and carved chairs that look like small thrones--Ivester says, "Nice place you have here."

In a formal chat with the mayor, Ivester delivers Coke's message: We want to be good guests in China. We want to help the economy. Each Coca-Cola job creates ten more jobs to support it. In the days to come, in meeting after meeting, Ivester will deliver the same message to Chinese officials. We want to help China. We want to help your schools. Frequently, he will invite them to come to Atlanta. Sometimes he talks sports.

But he seems to have a lot more fun in the trenches with his troops. "Did you understand the relevance of the egg?" he asks several days after his night tour of Nanjing Road. "We are competing against that egg." He is referring to a woman running a kiosk who was selling very few soft drinks and lots and lots of tea eggs--eggs marinated in tea and soy sauce that sell on the street like hot dogs in New York and that have much lower margins than Coke. "We have to get in there and show that lady that she will make more money selling Coke than selling eggs."

By the time he leaves China for his next stop, Taiwan, it doesn't matter much that Ivester isn't the natural statesman that Goizueta was. By the end of his meetings, he has delivered his message: explaining what Coke needs to be able to operate successfully. And he had gotten back the message, "We love Coke; we want to stay in this business," he says. He says he has succeeded in "calming the waters."

There's no telling now just what kind of legacy Ivester will leave at Coke. But it's hard to argue with his track record. I asked him at one point whether he had written down somewhere his goals for the company, just as he wrote down so long ago his goal of becoming CEO. He demurred, saying, "I'm not real sure I'd be willing to share that. I'm not sure I want to read about that. It gives away too much." In other words, of course he has written down his goals for the company. Pressed further, he said, "My goal is on the cover of the annual report."

The cover of this year's annual report refers to a major milestone the company reached last quarter: selling a billion drinks a day, which amounts to 2% of all the world's daily beverage consumption. The cover has 48 Coke bottles on it, representing the 48 billion beverages consumed in the world in one day. One of the bottles is colored red, for Coke's share. Ivester says his goal is for two of the Coke bottles to be red--to double worldwide consumption.

So, Doug, have you written down a deadline? "It won't take us another 112 years" is all he will say.