Dethroning the King by Julie MacIntosh Page A

University of Arizona for two years in the early 1960s but never graduated, earning a brewmaster certificate instead from the Siebel Institute of Technology, a brewing school in Chicago. Understanding the world of business, at least as it was lived outside his beer-subsidized life, didn’t rank high on The Third’s list at the time.
    That all changed with shocking rapidity once he reached his mid-20s. A few years after his start at the company’s bottom rung, August III flipped an internal switch so abruptly that it made personal reinvention look easy. He threw himself with vigor into a rigid self-tutoring program and covered every aspect of Anheuser-Busch’s business, from marketing down to systems operations.
    Such conversions became a habit for male Busch heirs over the years: Gussie’s youth had been a wild one, and The Fourth would later handily improve upon his father’s and grandfather’s playboy reputations. “Up through their mid-20s they’re just wilder than hell, whether it’s fast cars, fast women or, with August III, fast planes. They’re out of control,” said William Finnie, a former executive who worked for the company for 26 years, in reference to the Busch men. “Then, sometime in their late 20s, they take all of that energy and find out that business is just as much fun as this other stuff. So they throw all of their energy into the company with incredible results.”
    August III’s self-propelled reformation in the mid-1960s was by far the family’s sharpest, and it proved to be an early indication of the sheer force of his will and his competitive drive. From that point on, it was all work. Edward Vogel, who had been a company vice president at that time, said The Third had an “inferiority complex” because of his spotty academic record. Yet August III quickly began to prove that his sponge-like brain and unrelenting work ethic more than offset his lack of formal education. If anything, he became too hard-nosed and assertive for many of his colleagues’ tastes.

    The Third realized not long after starting work at Anheuser-Busch that it was due for modernization. He started advocating for change in a way that would later prove ironic when his own management style and perspective grew dated. Despite pushback from Gussie, August III started recruiting staffers from the top handful of U.S. business schools—the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School—to steer Anheuser-Busch into a more modern age. If Anheuser was going to knock off its competitors, it needed more intellectual fire-power than Gussie’s legions of old-school beer salesmen and brewers could offer. The Third’s move to recruit a bunch of underlings also yielded a longer-term benefit. He surrounded himself with a cadre of loyalists—he dubbed the MBAs his “eaters”—who owed him their wealth and success. Those eaters rose through the ranks behind him, racking up hundreds of thousands of stock options as they went.
    â€œAugust does not have a college degree, and he was up against not only Gussie but also all of the board,” said Bill Finnie, who was a member of that group. “He really had to be good, and he knew he needed people that could help him look good.”
    Gussie, who espoused more of a “finger in the wind” corporate strategy, made no secret of his disdain for his son’s growing ranks of MBAs. He didn’t appreciate being told that the loyal staffers he had hired—many of them old-line beer salesmen and brewmasters with little business education—were outdated and insufficient. Still, the MBAs’ computer models were saving the company money and pin-pointing the best ways to expand. So while relationships between the old and new camps were rocky at points, Gussie grudgingly allowed