Another heavyweight in consumer goods, Diageo, has entered a state of churn. CEO Debra Crew exited last week in a “mutual agreement”—a phrase that barely disguised the inevitability of her departure. It wasn’t a shock, but a slow unraveling: a tenure marked more by erosion than evolution.
Leadership is often a hostage of timing. Crew’s two-year stint was defined as much by strategic drift as by the lingering shadow of her predecessor’s legacy. She rose to the top in June 2023 following the sudden death of Sir Ivan Menezes—who had built Diageo’s fortunes on “premiumization,” a strategy that padded margins during the pandemic’s home-drinking boom. That success, however, ossified into institutional bloat.
Her term began with a bruising profit warning in November 2023. A nosedive in Latin America—blamed on distributor overstocking—exposed a startling disconnect from ground-level dynamics. Crew’s attempts to localize the crisis at a capital markets day rang hollow. The Times later described the company’s consumer blind spot as having “the whiff of incompetence.”
By early 2024, Diageo’s valuation had halved from its pandemic highs. CFO Lavanya Chandrashekar resigned in May. Months earlier, Crew had abandoned the company’s 5–7% medium-term growth target, citing tariff uncertainty and posting a 0.6% sales decline. Chair Javier Ferrán—long a patient steward—stepped down soon after. His departure, followed by the arrival of Sir John Manzoni, left Diageo’s leadership in flux just as the ship was listing and she had asked the board to quell speculation about her job.
Perhaps Crew was less a culprit than a proxy. Every leader is bound by the winds of their season. Spirits makers now face a hostile cocktail: Gen Z’s waning interest in alcohol, the rise of weight-loss drugs, and renewed risk of tariff whiplash. Pernod Ricard and Rémy Cointreau have suffered even steeper stock slides.
This episode offers another case study in how leadership narratives flatten complexity. Good times are hailed as proof of executive brilliance; bad times, as evidence of personal failure. The truth is messier: prosperity often arises from external tailwinds—technological shifts, market cycles, latent consumer trends—already in motion. Leaders rarely engineer them. They inherit them.
The trouble with leadership is that it is most praised—or punished—when least responsible. Strategic decisions marinate across fiscal years. Today’s success often echoes yesterday’s bets, while macroeconomic forces—unpredictable, impersonal, indifferent—reshape the field faster than any executive can pivot. Yet our mythology demands heroism. We cast leaders as masterminds of triumph or scapegoats for collapse, forgetting that most simply ride the wave.
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