State as Business School Case Study -- Citizen Coors by Dan Baum

Brew it and they will come: Adolph Coors was a master beer maker and an astute businessman who regarded quality and its consistency as the pillars of his brewing company in Golden, Colorado. These traits and strict discipline imposed on his sons, created a family-run business that was paternalistic and self-sufficient. Fiercely independent and rooted in their beliefs of self-determination and tradition, the next two generations perpetuated those ideals to create a successful, regional business -- innovative engineering-wise and ahead of its contemporaries in vertically integrating its operations into energy needs, conservation and packaging. Having survived both the Great Depression and Prohibition, Coors felt invincible.

But modern threats pursued their philosophies ... unions, boycotts, pollution, governmental regulation ... a barrage of "attacks" that they fought against well into the fourth generation of citizens Coors.

Baum's book is much more balanced that the blurb back cover reviews suggest, particularly the one from the Chicago Tribune that sums the story as an example of cultural change that left inflexible, insular companies teetering. To quote Baum, "The characteristics that differentiated Coors from Anheuser-Busch -- that made them all so proud to be a part of Coors -- were small-scale attention to quality, identification with the West, and disdain for the hollow showmanship of advertising. All that was slipping away. The Adolph Coors Company was on its way to becoming Anheuser-Busch -- if it was lucky. If it wasn't, it was on its way to disappearing."

When an outsider finally is selected to run the company, the Coors perceive a new kind of invasion, no longer one of Visigoths, but one by the Frito Banditos. The beer going national and becoming yet another well-marketed and advertised commodity, Coors mutates into a changeling -- created by Wharton MBAs and (m)ad-men who transform the profit line and keep the company in business, However, with its eccentricities sacrificed to Mammon. It is the equivalent of niching Duncan Hines from Pillsbury cake frosting. It is no longer, "if I brew it they will come," but "tell me what you want to buy and I'll pretend what I make is what you think you need."

Avoiding the similarly undifferentiated, mass-produced, mass-consumed interstate highway system, I drove old Route 93 instead of I25 and I70 from suburbs south of Denver to Boulder several times last spring. The scenery is spectacular, the road hugging the front line. The sign to Golden is unobtrusive, and from 93, there is no vista of a near-by big industry; however, neither are there signs of a rushing pristine mountain creek feeding the bottling line. I never turned off; not being a big beer drinker, friends say that if Coors made wine, I would have. The place evokes a rugged self-sufficiency and a selective, limited interdependence among the sparse population. The newly constructed rows of condominiums are a 21st Century's intrusion which look ill-prepared to handle and thrive in the rigors of the geography and climate.

Reading Citizen Coors continues themes found in two other of our states: Meet You in Hell about Carnegie as a titan of 19th Century industry in Pennsylvania, and American Lightning about labor-management tensions in Los Angeles in more recent decades. The Coors are portrayed as austere fundamentalists, unlike the gilded age exhibitionism and self-promoting largesse of Carnegie and Frick; they are baffled yet uncompromising by workforce agitation and consumer manipulation. Their ultimate concessions come across as having been demanded as extortion and not as parity.

Tracing a family and its livelihood across generations in one location is almost as interesting in Colorado as in TC Boyle's Worlds End rendering of interconnected families in the Hudson Valley. What's missing is a sense of what Golden and Colorado were like before they was marked by the Coors. Published in 2000, it does not reference the pendulum swing to micro-breweries and also predates the locavore cause celebre. Maybe the genetic predispositions of Adolph the first have skipped a couple of generations and can flourish anew.