This is episode 42 of the Humanizing Growth Series, hosted by the Institute for Real Growth. The guest is Dolf van den Brink, chairman of the executive board and chief executive of Heineken. The conversation was recorded days after the company decided to stop selling its flagship brand in Russia, and that decision frames everything that follows.
His central claim is that a business never operated in a moral vacuum. For a few decades of shareholder capitalism companies pretended otherwise. What has changed is not the importance of values but the collective awareness of them. Moments like this one make the pretence impossible to sustain.
Key findings
- In the two weeks before the recording, Russia and Ukraine took about 80 percent of the chief executive’s working time.
- The Russia decision was built around 1,800 colleagues who have been with the company for more than two decades. A full exit would have ended the company’s ability to provide for them, so a small core business remains and all financial profit from Russia is ring-fenced.
- Van den Brink names the primary audience for a decision like this as the company’s own employees, not the public.
- Consumers now trust businesses more than almost any other institution, which is why the demand to take a position has grown.
- The stakeholder order is explicit: consumers, customers, and employees are the core, and shareholders are the outcome of serving them.
- The capability the company most needs to build is not technical. Curiosity is what van den Brink says must be dialed up, and insufficient curiosity is his stated first worry.
The Russia decision, and who it was made for
The company has a meaningful and sizeable operation in Russia, so leaving was not costless in human terms. Stopping sales of the Heineken brand there was the signal. Keeping a small core business was the way to keep providing for local staff, and the ring-fence was the way to show the choice was not financial.
He is candid about the pressure on that position. Inside and outside the company, people were seeing the situation in black and white. His answer is that the chief executive’s responsibility is larger and more complex than the public mood, and that the first audience for the reasoning is the workforce.
Where this sits in the marketing function
Van den Brink refuses to make this a marketing brief. Marketing has a particular sensibility for sensing the world outside, and he calls it the tip of the spear. The sensibility itself has to be far broader than one function, and he expects it of the general managers running operating companies too.
Leadership learned by giving first
The formative lesson came from advice he received before moving to the Congo: in order to receive you first need to give. Running a large front-line sales force taught him what that meant in practice. The essence of leadership is not taking but giving, and his first three tasks as a leader are all providing for the team.
The example he gives is deliberately unglamorous. The sales force’s motorcycles had broken down, so reps were paying out of their own salaries to reach customers. He committed to fixing it and it took about two years. The other formative moment was a question he put to his dying father. Asked his purpose, his father answered that it was to make the world a tiny bit better. The second half of the answer was to work hard at it, because it does not happen automatically.
Listening as a working method
He opens the conversation with a book title he likes: listening is an act of love. The distinction he draws matters more than the phrase. There is listening until someone stops speaking so you can present your answer, and there is listening that is completely detached from the outcome. Only the second kind lets a group co-create something none of them had.
He credits video meetings with one unexpected gain. They make it easier to notice who wants to speak and who holds back, which is a signal that is easily lost around a table.
Resilience comes from local autonomy
The company is present with breweries, activities, and people in 80 countries, and local management teams hold full autonomy over their businesses. Keeping decision-making and profit responsibility close to local consumers and customers is what van den Brink credits for the company’s resilience through the pandemic.
He names the cost of that model too. When decision-making is that local, the network effects go unused and a good idea travels slowly. The transformation program is meant to keep local autonomy and ownership while building connective tissue horizontally rather than through hierarchy.
Curiosity, and the disease of success
The company’s historic model of sending young talent somewhere difficult and seeing who swam produced resilient leaders. Van den Brink judges it too rough to build capability at scale, so the intent now is deliberate upskilling. Above any specific skill, though, sits curiosity, and its absence is what worries him most.
The obstacle is the company’s own success. Strong mental models and long-held pride crowd out curiosity. He describes fighting complacency as a key task of leadership, and calls complacency very human and a big company disease.
Taking a stand without preaching
Van den Brink declines the activist chief executive role, and says so plainly. When Black Lives Matter erupted he took a clear position inside the company and deliberately did not take it outside. The company purpose he cites, the joy of true togetherness, is his reason. A point worth making should be made in an inclusive way rather than a polarizing one.
He gives a failure as evidence. A commercial celebrating the return of nightlife tied that return to being vaccinated. However much he agreed with the point, the work read as judgmental and polarizing, it backfired, and the company pulled it.
The counter-example is a campaign on domestic violence run by a masculine beer brand in Mexico, where the problem is worse than the global average. He was against it at first. The team persisted, and it worked because they had spent time with the front-line organizations. An alcohol brand usually accused of being part of the problem became part of the solution because the commercial took a stand.
He draws a general rule for marketers from it. Advertising trades on the stereotypes of a society, and a brand can sometimes shift one to a healthier place instead of merely exploiting it. Brands can move awareness and knowledge, feeling and attitudes, and actual behavior. He also treats inclusion as commercial necessity: marketing to a much more diverse consumer base is a matter of business survival, not only the right thing to do.
Scope and limitations
This is a live conversation recorded days after the Russia decision, and it is one executive’s account of his own company. The reasoning is stated, not audited. Van den Brink presents the Russia outcome as a balance he believes is right, while acknowledging that many people inside and outside the company saw only a binary choice.
He is explicit that the stance he takes is his company’s and not a general rule. The choice not to campaign publicly rests on a purpose about bringing people together, and he does not offer it as advice to others. His closing call to action is correspondingly modest: be curious, and give before you receive.
The source is an automatic caption track of speech, so it carries no speaker labels and no reliable punctuation. Names of people, places, and brands are frequently mistranscribed in it. Quotations here are transcription of spoken words rather than written text.
Source
This page summarises HGS #42: Dolf van den Brink (CEO, Heineken) shares his learning, challenges and future ambitions, by Institute for Real Growth.