Sam Adams brewer Jim Koch on consulting, ‘Hamilton’ and his own revolution

Relevant section:

Q: You didn’t set out to be this. You flirted with the idea of being an environmental lawyer, then joined Boston Consulting.

A: One of my first clients was International Paper, and they had 5 1/2 million acres of timberlands. The new CEO brought us in and said: “Are we managing this right? It’s our biggest asset.” Long story short, they weren’t.

Q: You found a way to up their company’s yield while simultaneously preserving old growth in national forests, which — unlike national parks — aren’t protected by the Department of the Interior but managed by the Department of Agriculture, which you say had viewed them as tree farms.

A: These agricultural practices then became the norm in the forest products industry. So now there’s no argument about farming national forests because they don’t need the wood. By doing that, I and the other people who helped me did way more than I ever could as a lawyer, way more than the Sierra Club had done to protect national forests. What that taught me is, wow, business can actually create an enormous amount of good by doing smart things.

Q: I imagine it was lucrative, too.

A: I worked in all these basic manufacturing businesses, foundries, steel mills, paper mills, plastics, chemicals, big capital-intensive, process-oriented stuff.

Jack Welch was my client at General Electric before he became the icon, back when he was Neutron Jack. They called him Neutron Jack because the people would all be gone but the buildings stayed. GE had just way too much overhead, all these layers.

Q: Were those kinds of cuts your idea?

A: No, that was Jack.

Q: Is that sort of thing why you left?

A: It was the career progression, the way it is at any firm. You start by doing the work and the work I liked. Then you get promoted to managing a group of people doing the work but you’re also still very involved in it, and I liked that. But six years in, the next promotion was to being a vice president, where you’re doing much more selling and you’re managing managers. That was my future, and I didn’t want to manage a consultancy. So I got off the train.

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