Leak the Offer to Shame the Board

“Everything pointed to the fact that AB’s board, dominated by the Third and the Fourth, would do little to get a deal with InBev done. It would disrupt their luxurious status quo and expose years of management inefficiencies to the world. An alternative course of action was to approach the board, but make it public by “leaking” copies to the press, and in the process creating an environment where it would be embarrassing not to seriously consider the offer, which was AB’s board of directors’ fiduciary duty in the first place. InBev ended up using just such a course of action.”

“Dethroning the King: They had never been known for cost-consciousness. For decades, the aviation-loving Busch men and other staffers had hopscotched around the country on the company’s own fleet of sleek, leather-outfitted Dassault Falcon corporate jets. It got to the point for a while where even the wives of strategic committee members hadn’t flown commercial in years.”