The problem with publishing a book boasting about your business model and acumen is that it can very easily come back to bite you in the arse - as BrewDog founder James Watt has just discovered.
It turns out that - according to a coruscating open letter published online by collective of disgruntled ex-employees calling themselves Punks With Purpose - the secret of his success was vacuous PR stunts, "a cult of personality", a "culture of fear" and especially a toxic working environment in which the mantra is "Growth, at all costs" - those costs including the wellbeing of those laughably referred to as the "team". At least we now know what the subtitle of his book - "Break All The Rules The BrewDog Way" - really means.
To anyone who's been a reasonably close observer of the business over the past few years, this won't come as much of a surprise.
BrewDog like to style themselves as plucky upstarts taking on the alcohol industry's equivalent of The Man (the Portman Group) - whom they once characterised as "a gloomy gaggle of killjoy jobsworths, funded by navel-gazing international drinks giants" - in a David v Goliath-type battle.
Initially, at least, I'll admit they had me fooled. But then came growing suspicion of Watt's attitude towards corporate expansion, followed by BrewDog's attempts to claim copyright infringement over others' use of the word "punk", the aggressive bully-boy tactics of what the letter refers to as their "notoriously trigger-happy legal team", and recurrent reports of intellectual theft (job interviewees invited to pitch ideas that are subsequently used without payment). This is also a business for which "fiercely and defiantly independent" apparently means flogging a hefty chunk of the company to a private equity firm.
Personally speaking, it's the tedious self-mythologising and extraordinary hypocrisy that sticks in the throat the most. As the authors of the open letter put it, "for as long as any one of us can remember, we have never seen anything that has made us feel like BrewDog has lived the values it purports to uphold".
An ostensibly chastened Watt has responded by posting a contrite message on Twitter, claiming "Our focus now is not on contradicting or contesting the details of that letter, but to listen, learn and act". Which would be all fine and well, if he hadn't initially responded in typically bullish fashion last night and his "people team" (presumably that's HR, to you and me) hadn't, ahem, invited current staff to sign a counter-letter effectively gaslighting the signatories of the original publication. Saying one thing and doing quite the opposite - true to form, at least.
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