1. Recently Bud Light ended up with a black eye and controversy on its hands with a beer label with the tag line 'The perfect beer for removing 'no' from your vocabulary for the night.'
Despite using possibly one of the worst ideas ever, (especially in light of recent high profile cases of domestic violence such as Ray Rice in the NFL) what was potentially even more startling was the fact that this label was green lit only after going through 5 approvals inside Anheuser-Busch including marketing, legal, corporate social responsibility division and an advertising code committee.
At Corporate Bravery we talk often about the role that hierarchy and internal compliance teams have on creating fear in corporate decision making and this is a classic example. Even when pressed on how it decided against a recall their response was that the bottles didn't 'pose a health or public-safety concern'. The response shows that the culture isn't strong enough to allow individuals to use their best judgement and instead it is easier to hide behind protocol and layers of bureaucracy.
The article goes on to mention how AB InBev 'spread the blame' first to its advertisers BBDO for writing the label and then to the US Alcohol Tobacco Tax & Trade Bureau. The latter is laughable since the government agency can't possibly regulate stupidity.
2. In the lead-up to the NFL Draft I ran across an interesting take on how teams draft quarterbacks that is an interesting corollary to what often-times happens in our business organizations.
