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Guest Essay

By Anson Frericks

Mr. Frericks is a founder of Strive Asset Management.

I still remember the day I realized Anheuser-Busch InBev was no longer the company I thought it was.

I had crunched the numbers and believed the company could make millions of dollars if we agreed to distribute canned coffees made by Black Rifle Coffee Company. I knew Black Rifle’s pro-military and pro-law-enforcement messaging could ruffle some progressive feathers — the company vowed to hire 10,000 veterans after Starbucks announced it would hire 10,000 refugees — but I also knew many of our drinkers shared those values and had grown fed up with the way Starbucks and other coffee companies seemed to cater to coastal, latte-loving elites.

The proposal was rejected. It was early 2022, two years after the George Floyd protests, and I was told that being associated with Black Rifle was too politically provocative, especially in progressive circles.

I should have seen it coming. Many corporations were flexing their credentials in the growing diversity, equity and inclusion movement. But for me, the incident was a particularly telling example of what was going wrong with Anheuser-Busch — and an early sign that too many American corporations had forgotten who their customers were.

To be clear, I believe that an employee base that has a diversity of thought — which is naturally associated with a diversity of ethnicities and backgrounds — is good for business. Different employees can better solve existing problems or identify new opportunities. But the massive corporate embrace of D.E.I. was always destined to fail, in large part because the movement was never well defined to begin with.

In 2019, I learned about the concept of D.E.I. at a meeting in Chicago from Frances Frei, a professor at Harvard Business School. I had no issue with what she described. Anheuser-Busch’s work force had become more diverse over the past decade, and I had watched employees of many backgrounds be given opportunities to grow based on their talents and contributions. If D.E.I. was about continuing this trajectory — being authentic to company culture and mission, listening and responding to customer needs and deploying logical processes — there was nothing to object to.

Unfortunately, the D.E.I. policies that followed at Anheuser-Busch were none of the above. In 2021 the company started using online dashboards that gave managers a breakdown of their employee base by demographic characteristics.

Then the company created

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