Building A Legacy: Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken Interviewed by Pattie Sellers I Fortune

Make at that moment. I know people talk about the funeral thing. I think it was a few days later, and we were sitting in bed actually together, and this question came like, listen, we have to make a decision sooner rather than later. Are we going to show up and get more involved and go to Amsterdam and get to know more people, or are we going to just say thank you very much, write a Christmas card every year and say thank you for the dividend, and get on with it? And there was actually not a question in our mind. I think we'd slightly done a bit of an ostrich. Michel was also on a board, on a supervisory board, so very much informed, but it's quite different when suddenly it was not just my father. My father had not been, they didn't call it CEO at the time, but for 10 years, and there had been a very successful CEO, Carol Fierstein, who did amazingly, and he was going to retire. Coincidentally, we had a very successful chairman of the supervisory board, and he was retiring because of age, and then my father died. And my father was a bit of a mythical figure, and I think that even though he was maybe not doing the day-to-day, he was still the controlling shareholder, and he was still in that office next to the head office where people went and came to talk to him when big decisions had to be made, and he still had a veto, and he still had that power in the holding company. But there was a bit of a vacuum suddenly, and it was like, who are these people in London? We've never seen this woman much. Yes, she's been visiting the brewery here and there with Daddy, but what does she do? And who is this husband? And there was a big feeling of uncertainty, and we felt that not so much in the beginning, but as we started going back, we felt a lot of people coming to us and asking questions. So becoming a guardian of the family business was one issue.

Initially it meant just listen and learn. It was not go in there guns blazing, here I am to make decisions. It was go listen, get a feel. I knew the top brass in the company because we'd have biannual meetings. My father would let me sit in with the top guys and listen to their strategy talks. I'd be quiet in the corner. But I needed to know what was going on below those 10 to 12 people, maybe even 8 to 10, and feel, particularly at that slightly uncertain time, just get a feel for it and listen and learn and sit in meetings and see where are the real problems, what's going on beneath the big figures that I get to see on a piece of paper, what's really brewing under there. Also a lot of personal relations, a lot of internal struggles which you don't know unless you, and this, sure.

We started traveling around the world. Well, not just like that. It started with our CEO asking us to come with us, maybe nice to meet another brewing family. Brewers are families, and only actually quite recently has all this enormous consolidation taken place. So when there's a negotiation, it's very often family to family, and the CEO quite liked bringing us along to see if we could build a relationship of trust between various families, and also to see our operations and to make people understand that, yes, the king is dead in some ways, the big man you all thought, even if you didn't, but my father being this person that people would tell me they'd met him and I know they didn't, but it was like that person out there, but just in their heads. And I think, yeah, I don't know how we really did it, but I certainly can say that I am a very shy and retiring person. As a child I was appalling, I wouldn't look up, I'd be like that. And I think what my husband did for me, if it was the big thing he did, is give me confidence. And why I needed a man for that, really annoying, but it did help me. I don't crave attention, I don't crave the limelight, I never have and I still don't. And he said, you've got a responsibility, you've got to do it, you've got to do it. And so I got over it basically.

What I find interesting is it really opens your whole idea of what the world is like. We're selling a product to human beings, they consume it, so it's a very personal thing. You are going to find out who is your customer, what do they earn, where do they live, what do they like to do, what do they not like to do, what's their taste like, what do they do in their free time, do they like to go to a concert, do they like to sit at home or watch a DVD? It's no longer DVDs now, sounds very old fashioned for you tech lot, but it was an education. Everywhere we went to a country, we got an education on the country and on the people there, and it changes, it's a moving target, and super interesting.

Well, I think we have to do things our way. We're not going to be able to compete head-to-head with someone who is four times larger, or a little bit more than four times larger than we are. But we are a different type of company. We concentrate, we're very global, and we went very global very early, so we have great experience in how to be in the most unbelievable countries where I think other people might find it difficult to operate. I think we also have a culture in our company which is very strong and very special, and even though it has grown and we have, like you said, the company has expanded enormously, we've managed, I believe, to keep something very special going there. And we concentrate on our premium brands, we concentrate on really looking at our customer and seeing what do they want, innovate, create new, even new drinks. We have 240 brands, Heineken is our flagship one, but there's many others. And we try to look ahead and try to create what our customers are going to want in the future, and serve them well and respect them, and try to be there, be a little bit different, a little bit more creative maybe.

Well, I don't know if it's leadership style. It's very much the board I sit on is a board which consists of a holding company board, and the holding company controls through a 51% shareholder holding approximately the Heineken shares. They're both listed companies, but it is very much, it's very rare that I've, it's maybe two or three times in the last 15 years that I've actually, and the SAB one was one where I actually had the power or wanted the power to say no, and we don't do that lightheartedly. We realize we have 75% outside shareholders. I do feel that I'm not there with my 25% waving a flag and saying I can do exactly what I want. That's not the way we work. But this was, we think that we would have disappeared and lost in quite a short period of time what makes us special had we done that. Yes, you can make a quick buck, but that was not what we were about. And my leadership is not really a leadership as such. It is, I feel a little bit as a guardian, as you called it. I see this as an asset that I inherit, but don't quite see it as mine. I see it as my responsibility to keep it healthy and keep it growing and passing it on to the next generation. This little story, the reason I'm here is because my great-grandfather started this business. He had one son, my grandfather. My father was in the end the only boy, and I'm an only child, so this is how I ended up here. If we'd have a lot, my children have no aunts and uncles. My husband is an only child as well. So I now have these five children, so my next responsibility is to hand this on to those who are interested and qualified and capable, and I'm in the process of doing that and figuring out how that's going to go. But me as a leader, I'm more, I feel a little bit like mother hen.

Well, I think what I've learned is initially when I had lots of tiny little children and didn't give it a lot of thought, I thought well we'll just see which ones show that they want to, and then if they want to, can they, and if they can, then they have to do this and that, and to do this, and not really thinking of how this would actually practically work out. And then I think we learned through the fact that we had to say goodbye to a CEO. We thought well what if that's my son or my daughter, what if his sisters and brothers don't think he or she is doing well, how do you do this within a family, is this really a good idea? Now everybody makes mistakes, and I'm sure my CEO will say he's made some mistakes in his life, and then there's a newspaper article and then it's gone. If it's my daughter or my son who make a mistake, I think you wouldn't hear the end of it. And I think that for us as a family, we can do more good for this company from an ownership side, not from a management side. I think we have to know the business and we have to be involved, we have to make decisions on people who are going to run the thing, because I think that's crucial. I think people are all and everything. And I believe that we can do it better from a position. At the moment, my father's era was different, it was a small company, it had to grow, there was room for an entrepreneur in. Now we're so big, we're so regulated, we're so looked at from the outside, that I think we can do better from the sidelines, and we can do better by helping the company grow a different way, but not sitting in the chairman or in the CEO seat personally.

And your son Alexander has been on the board for the last, what, three years maybe, and your daughter Louisa just joined the board now. The next two children who are ready, your twins who are ready to turn 30, they have, as I recall from the story three years ago, they have more sort of arts and photography interest. Is that? I have a musician and I have a sculptress. Fantastic. They're not really that keen. The youngest one is your son, your youngest son is interested. So I'm lucky, I have three, maybe could have been none, so I have three who are very interested. And for the moment, I'm in the process of working on how to structure this and how a future will be decided in the next year or two. And it's a moving target again. Maybe one will say, you know, I don't want to do this, I want to start a hospital in Kinshasa, I don't know, could happen. No, and so you have to keep a little bit of flexibility in this. But my idea is that they would do what I'm doing, and how we do it is something we're very close to figuring out.

I don't want to rule beyond the grave. I think there's some point a parent should let go, and even maybe before that. I think that you can say that, yeah, it's hard for me to explain. It's I grew up with it so much, having my name on signs in the street and things was not always pleasant, but you get teased a lot. The children have not grown up with that, but beginning to feel, and they feel very attached to it, but they haven't had their name stuck exactly the same way on that. In fact, my eldest son might be thinking of saving the name. I'm the last one with it, so we'll see if that will happen. But it's, yes, I ask me the question again, I've lost it.

Well, my father I think was very happy to have me join in doing things, but he was a sort of character, and it didn't just apply to me, but most people around him, kind of he wanted more disciples around him than independent thinking, I think, right? And I find that quite difficult because I did know how to stand up to him, and I thought maybe this could be a problem, maybe we just not do that for the personal relationship. And I think it's these things change. Life's different now, life has changed.