Is the Bud Light Disaster a Turning Point?

Bud Light beer cans sit on a table in right field during the Baltimore Orioles and Toronto Blue Jays game at Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Md., on Sept. 19, 2019. (Rob Carr/Getty Images)

Commentary

There’s still no word of apology from Anheuser-Busch over their despicable ad campaign for Bud Light that featured a preposterous man mimicking women and somehow achieving notoriety within woke cultural circles. This has promoted a massive boycott not only of this beer but all beers made by the company, and a real opportunity for competitors.

Instead of clarifying what the heck went down there, Anheuser-Busch has instead released a very fancy ad on Twitter that celebrates true patriotic values and features actual dudes (even white ones) doing things like shaking hands and hanging out on porches. The presumption is that consumers are dumb as rocks and have no memory of a mere 48 hours.

The creator of the offending ad campaign was VP of marketing. Her name is Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, who apparently had no interest in actually marketing beer to regular people. In her bubble of influence, only extreme deference to the latest cosplay antics of gender dysphoriacs sells.

She somehow got the job due to her class and educational credentials: Groton boarding school, to Harvard, to Wharton, to internships, and straight to the top of the corporate ladder. So yes, isolated only begins to describe the problem, whereas the whole point of real-world marketing is to discern the minds of consumers.

Word is that no one at the top of the company knew anything about the transgender ad campaign, though Heinersheid claims she only did it to “evolve” and “elevate” the brand. The problem that led to this profound error speaks to a very strange class isolation that people in her position have, one that nearly destroyed the country and the world as lockdown orders emanated from the top echelons of society where concern for the working classes actually harmed by these policies never figured into pandemic planning.

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It also speaks to a serious problem in U.S. corporate culture today. It is overly bureaucratized, riddled by ruling-class tokenism, hobbled by bogus management schemes, and wildly puffed up with people like Heinerscheid who pull in half a million dollars per year but have never actually proven their worth to the company. In her case, the company today would gladly have paid her salary provided she did nothing at all.

How did things go so awry in American corporate culture? The economics of the market stopped being a source of discipline. After 2008, when the Fed ran zero interest rates for 12 years and then doubled down on them for lockdowns and following. As a result of the distortions, there seemed to be no limits to the amount of personnel that the largest corporations could hire at the top.

And there seemed to be no limits on the vision either. It was precisely in these years when woke theory took over.

(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)

There are early indications that the grave reaction to the Bud Light campaign could represent a genuine turning point for corporate America. But to fix matters, they are going to have to do much more than merely decline to hire Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesperson.

Here are five common corporate practices that need to end immediately.

1. The 360 performance review. The 360 review is one of those things that works in theory but in practice turns to a form of private-sector Stalinism. The idea is that your colleagues get to rate you and your performance, dishing out praise and offering steps for improvement. It’s always anonymous and therefore supposedly more honest.

In practice, it’s a disaster. The worst employees are given a chance to kvetch about excellent employees, and say every manner of lie without consequence. The anonymity encourages not truth but pettiness. And given that there really is no anonymity, someone knows, and that’s usually the manager who curates the comments. They can include or exclude as they want, giving rotten mid-level people huge power over anyone who would replace them. The 360 run for two years can boil an entire company in a cesspool of jealousy, vindictiveness, back-stabbing, and conspiracy.

If your manager or CEO suggests these types of reviews, I strongly recommend that you quit immediately. Better to be homeless and unemployed than imprisoned in an Orwellian nightmare of plots, schemes, blackmail, and duplicity.

2. The hiring of outside consultants. It’s so common that when problems crop up, the idiot at the top decides to bring in some outside company to solve them. Often the contract goes to a friend of a friend or cousin or paramour. They charge an arm and a leg. They arrive with leather notebooks, interview everyone, plan big meetings and sessions, issue some dopey plan for reorganization, and leave the bill on the table as they exit.

It is a massive waste of time for the staff, which takes another month or two to recover from the stupidity. Mostly doing this is a huge insult to the actual workers who know exactly what is wrong. More often than not, the real problem in the company is precisely the knuckleheads who hired the consultants. But the upper management is the one thing that outside consultants never change. It’s the hand that feeds them.

3. Endless meetings. With today’s real-time communications at all levels of a company, meetings are almost completely unnecessary. It’s even hard to know a use case for them at all. And yet I know companies and workers who mostly do meetings all day. It’s appalling. Meetings are a chance for losers to pretend to know stuff and when great employees who know their stuff and thus resent the meeting shrink into the background. The only people who benefit from them are peacockers and showboaters.

4. Hiring the Ivy. A generation of corporate leaders came to believe that the more prestige the education, the more wisdom the graduate brings. It’s utter rot these days. Chances are that most graduates of prestige schools have never worked a day in their lives and so know nothing tested by reality. They do not know the work ethic. They are likely to be ill-educated on fundamental matters and socialized only in their political instincts for navigating their own tribe. They are also cynical and stopped trying after their first few weeks in schools. This of course is what doomed Bud Light but the problem is everywhere in the corporate world today.

5. The cultivation of corporate culture. Jobs were just jobs at some point in history but gradually through the decades, the corporate culture took on traits more associated with extended families, faith communities, and other groups that strive to be cohesive and bonded. It’s a huge illusion and error. Jobs are really just jobs, as everyone discovers once they leave the company: no one remembers and no one cares. So let’s please dispense with all the foolery of birthday parties, holiday gatherings, weekend retreats and so on. It’s all pointless and is actually injurious to the whole job of selling stuff and making money.

All of these failings have gotten out of control in the 21st century. It appears that now we are starting to see a correction taking place but there is much to go, among which is to jettison corporatespeak which is wholly insufferable.

As examples, if anyone starts going on about “work/life balance,” know for sure that this is code for being lazy. And if someone starts invoking “best practices,” know that this is code for the status quo. If someone starts talking about “circling back,” it’s gibberish.

If you work for a normal company where none of these seem present, cling to that job and feel happy about it. You are very lucky.

One final suggestion: use software for your “human resources” department rather than known people with full-time roles. These “conflict resolution” departments in corporations are breeding grounds for the creation of morale-killing conflicts and disputes.

In short, to survive in the new world of economic reality, U.S. companies need to get back to doing old-fashioned commercial business. That means having a CEO who is more than a poster boy and this person needs to be surrounded by people who have moved up through the ranks of the company.

Are you listening, Anheuser-Busch?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.