If you want to build a ship,” runs the quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery at the beginning of David Butler’s new book about Coca-Cola, “don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

The maritime analogy seems to end there. It doesn’t appear to be related to “Catch the Wave.” the slogan company used for New Coke in 1986. Instead, “Design to Grow” attempts to combat the old law of the sea that scale and agility are uneasy corporate shipfellows.

Maybe if the journey takes 129 years, as it has at Coke, these two apparently contrasting ambitions make room for each other. Indeed, Butler, Coca-Cola’s vice-president of innovation and entrepreneurship, argues that the US soft drinks giant “designed for scale for over 100 years but is designing for agility these days”.

Butler says Coke wasn’t shipshape when he joined in 2004 with a mandate of helping the company “develop a vision, strategy and approach to ensure it was getting the most value out of design”.

Despite owning some of the best-known drinks brands in the world, it “didn’t have a consistent approach to the way it designed,” which created “many little disconnects” across the way in which people experienced its brands, from packaging to communications to retail.

“All these little disconnects were starting to make the company’s brands feel old and outdated when compared with other fast-moving customer brands like Apple and Nike,” he writes. “As a company, Coca-Cola was designing at massive scale but a lot of the things weren’t connected to each other. That made it very difficult to drive the company’s growth strategy. The way Coca-Cola was actually designing was actually working against its own interests.