Joanna Price grew up on a farm in Australia and now runs one of the broadest corporate affairs mandates in global business. As Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Heineken, she oversees government affairs, public policy, sustainable development and global communications under one roof, a structure she insisted on before she'd even accept the job. Before Heineken, she spent twenty years at Coca-Cola, where a stint in strategy and research turned into a corporate affairs career. In this conversation, Joanna traces the arc from Kellogg to Coca-Cola to Heineken, and from Hong Kong to Shanghai to Atlanta to Amsterdam, and explains why she never went back to a pure strategy role once she saw how much closer to the business corporate affairs actually sits. We talk about the paper she wrote over a Christmas break, titled simply "Plastic is the Next Sugar," which became the seed of Coca-Cola's World Without Waste commitment, the industry's first public pledge to collect and recycle a bottle or can for every one sold by 2030. She walks through why she was willing to make that commitment public despite the risk of being held to it, and what it taught her about mobilizing an entire industry rather than trying to solve a systemic problem alone. For Joanna, having government affairs, sustainability and communications together isn't an org chart preference, it's what allows a company to connect narrative, policy and action into something coherent, rather than a set of disconnected functions saying different things to different audiences. That coherence, she argues, is what actually builds credibility, inside the boardroom and outside it. Joanna is candid about parts of the job that rarely get discussed: what it costs to walk into a new company without the network you spent twenty years building, and how she rebuilt credibility from zero within months of joining Heineken. She talks about leading through what she calls "the grey," the fact that corporate affairs rarely gets the clean feedback loops that sales or marketing get, and why she believes the function's real job is not just making problems disappear but shaping a company's direction before problems arise. Her phrase for it: building the fire department before the fire. We also spend time on Heineken's approach to responsible drinking and the deliberate normalization of zero-alcohol beer, and on why a strategy that works in one country can collapse the moment you try to copy and paste it into another. Joanna is direct about the tension of representing an alcohol company: rather than avoiding the conversation, she argues the job is to be part of it, transparently, and to earn the right to operate in every community Heineken serves. On artificial intelligence, Joanna gives a refreshingly specific answer: her function's actual AI capability sits around a three out of ten, but curiosity and experimentation are closer to a nine. Toward the end, we talk about board service, mentorship, why she considers curiosity a discipline rather than a personality trait, and a leadership lesson she took from watching a manager rewrite her work line by line rather than teach her to improve it herself. Her advice for people earlier in their careers: stretch yourself toward whatever scares you, because that is where the growth happens. This episode moves from an Australian farm to global boardrooms, from a memo written over a holiday break to an industry-wide sustainability pledge, and from questions of judgment and grey zones to the concrete choices behind how a global brand talks about alcohol, moderation and trust. If you enjoyed this conversation, follow https://thereputationroom.com/ on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube, and share it with your network. If you have feedback, we would love to hear it.
