Free Dethroning the King by Julie MacIntosh Page B

presenting the material but even the younger staffers who cowered in chairs along the wall.
    â€œMy mom always used to tell me this—the guy never asked a question that he didn’t know the answer to already,” said Walter C. “Buddy” Reisinger Jr., a former Anheuser-Busch staffer whose mother married into the extended Busch family. “But if he asked you a question, he really wants to know what you think, and you have 120 percent of that guy’s attention. While he is talking to you, you own him. He is so focused.”
    â€œIf you saw any A-B presentation slide, it’d have 4,000 numbers jammed on it,” Reisinger said. “It violates every PowerPoint presentation rule. You could have 300 numbers on this thing, and he would say ‘Uh, that cost per barrel for Bud Light at the Cartersville plant . . . Jimmy, didn’t you show me something last week that was a tenth of a cent off?’ It’s frightening. He could do that time after time on anything, anywhere, and you’re just trying to survive. The guy was ‘on’ 24 -7.”
    That sort of atmosphere, where The Third’s commanding knowledge of the business piqued the jangling nerves of his staffers, clearly led some of them to trip up. There was nothing to fear in making a mistake, The Third preached. Making the same mistake twice, however, was another story. His patience for underperformance usually didn’t stretch that far.
    He formed a policy committee of 9 or 10 top executives within the company, which was later expanded into the strategy committee, and governed discussions using the Socratic method. Staffers were required to present and back up their own views on key issues, and were often formally pitted against each other in staged “dialectics,” with one team devoting weeks to preparing a “pro” view while the other evaluated the “cons.”
    â€œHe’s demanding,” said one former strategy committee member. “He asked a lot of questions, he was intense, focused. Anybody who told you it wasn’t a little intimidating every time they got up would be lying to you. And anybody who told you they got used to it would be lying to you. But at a point, you look forward to it because of the intensity and the challenge.”
    That challenge wasn’t always overcome. The Third’s rebukes were harsh and, occasionally, career-ending. He fired plenty of staffers over the years. Most left the company or, if they worked for an ad agency, were assigned by their bosses to other accounts or regional offices. “If you didn’t do your work well, there was somebody else in line who could take your place. They had a lot of bench strength,” said an executive who climbed to Anheuser’s uppermost ranks.
    The Third’s legion of subordinates busted their tails every day to earn his respect, putting in exhausting workweeks and traveling for long stretches away from their families. These were salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners—people who tended to marry their high school sweethearts—and The Third demanded sacrifice. But he was compelling enough to get it.
    â€œMr. Busch is just a great leader; he was a guy you’d do anything for,” one top executive said. “And if he patted you on the back, you felt like you could go for six more months because that’s how much we all loved him and admired him. But he’s not a man who gives love back. That was the tough part.”
    Helpful Anheuser ladder-climbers passed on certain pieces of advice to their less-experienced colleagues. Of utmost importance was that they knew their area of expertise inside and out, since it was a capital offense for a staffer to come up blank in front of August III on a subject he should understand. If that did happen, it was far better to tell him you’d return quickly with an answer rather than bluffing through a response. The Third’s bullshit detector was