YOU CAN EXPORT A GREAT CULTURE ACROSS WIDELY DIVERGENT INDUSTRIES AND GEOGRAPHIES. The truly remarkable thing is how the Dream-People-Culture model carried from investment banking and finance into beer, from Brazil to all of Latin America, then to Europe and the United States, and now expanding all over the world. For Lemann, Telles and Sicupira, culture is not in support of strategy; culture is strategy. The three partners have always held to their core values and distinctive culture, while continually growing into new industries, expanding across geographies, and pointing towards ever bigger goals – a beautiful example of the underlying dynamic, “Preserve the Core and Stimulate Progress” exemplified by any enduring great company. There is a corollary to this lesson: you can “predict the future by geography.” In the early days of the company, the three founders looked from Brazil to the United States, saw what was already working; then, instead of simply waiting for that to happen in Brazil, they would act aggressively to import the best United States practices, and do so early.The excerpt above also reminded me of what Christopher Begg wrote in his Q3 letter:
"The only moat that is not fleeting, and conversely the only moat that is truly enduring, is culture."..................
Related previous post: “Dream, People, Culture”: Carlos Brito, CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev