Winning Hearts at Beam Suntory
ACQUISITION INTEGRATION MEETING
When Beam became Beam Suntory, the leadership gathering was designed from the inside out — not just to share the strategy moving forward , but to provide leaders with powerful connective experiences that illustrated how the combined organization would benefit from all of their combined expertise.
CLIENT
Beam Suntory
FOCUS
Meeting and Event Experiences
AUDIENCE
Top 100 Senior leaders across Beam Suntory
FORMAT
A week-long in-person experience with small-team and full-group formats
When a must-have meeting can't afford to fall flat
THE CHALLENGE
When Suntory, the iconic Japanese spirits company, acquired Beam and created one of the world's premier spirits companies, they made a bold promise: Beam would remain an independent, North American-based organization. It was a promise made in good faith. But promises don't automatically translate into trust.
As the newly combined Beam Suntory moved into its first full year of operation, a quiet anxiety was spreading through the ranks of senior leadership. Two very different corporate cultures — one deeply American, entrepreneurial, and relationship-driven; the other rooted in Japanese traditions of precision, long-term thinking, and hierarchy — were now expected to function as one. The seams were showing.
And the clock was ticking.
Beam Suntory's Head of HR, Paula Erickson engaged In Focus to design and produce a critical all-hands leadership gathering. For many companies, that would be cause for relief. For Paula, it was a source of deep concern. The fear wasn't that leaders would leave before the bonuses. It was that they would leave after. That the checks would clear, the goodwill would evaporate, and a carefully assembled leadership team would scatter — not out of malice, but out of uncertainty, disconnection, and the simple human instinct to seek familiar ground.
Paula engaged In Focusto design and produce a critical all-hands leadership gathering. The ask was clear and urgent: design an experience that would recapture hearts and minds. That could make 100 of the most capable leaders in the spirits industry choose Beam Suntory — not because of a bonus, but because they believed in where the company was going and who they were going there with.
THE APPROACH: MEETING AND EVENT EXPERIENCES
A hands‑on innovation lab for real business challenges
In Focus approached this the way we approach every high-stakes moment: by designing the story, emotional journey, and ways people connect so the time and travel actually make an impact.
Listening First
In Focus doesn’t begin with a program. We begin with a question: what is actually going on here? The Define Stage is a structured discovery process designed to surface the real story before a single agenda item is drafted. We interviewed the CEO and CHRO first, then conducted candid, anonymous interviews with a broad cross-section of attending leaders. No filters. No corporate framing. Just honest conversation.
What came back was striking. Leaders weren’t disengaged because they didn’t believe in Beam Suntory’s potential — many were genuinely excited about what the combined company could become. What was missing was a sense of ownership in that future. A feeling that their voices mattered, and that the culture they had helped build at Beam would be honored, not erased.
Everything we heard was synthesized into a Define Brief — a rich, quote-forward document filled with the actual words of the people who would be in the room. Candid. Unfiltered. Human. It served two distinct purposes. First, a leadership mirror for the CEO and CHRO — real voices, free from the softening that happens as feedback travels up through organizational layers. This wasn’t a survey summary. It was a direct transmission of what people were actually thinking and feeling. Second, the design blueprint for the entire experience. Every decision about structure, content, and format was rooted in what we had heard. The result wasn’t a generic leadership offsite — it was a highly bespoke plan built around the specific anxieties, aspirations, and needs of this particular group of people, at this particular moment in their organization’s history.
Connection Before Content
Rather than opening with 100 people in a ballroom facing a stage, we divided attendees into small teams — cross-functional, cross-company, and cross-geography. Beam veterans alongside new Suntory colleagues. Marketers alongside finance leaders. Americans alongside international voices. These weren’t breakout groups. They were the primary community each leader would belong to throughout the week. Teams were introduced by email before anyone arrived. Upon arrival, each small team gathered in its own informal setting. Every participant had prepared the same simple thing: a six-word story. A single sentence that captured something true about who they were. In the act of distilling yourself to six words — and then hearing the six words of the person beside you — something opens up. Guards come down. Curiosity takes over. By the time the small teams walked together into the main room — arriving not as isolated individuals but as groups already in conversation — the atmosphere was unmistakably different from what it would have been if everyone had simply walked in alone.
A week built for participation, not passive attendance
Every element throughout the week was designed so every leader was an active participant, not an audience member.
Graphic recording artists worked live throughout the meeting, capturing dialogue in hand-drawn illustration incorporated daily into the stage backdrop — a visual record that showed leaders in real time that what they were saying was being heard and valued. The room itself became a reflection of the conversation.
A fireside chat with the CEO opened direct, unscripted dialogue about what was on people’s minds. The questions had teeth. The answers had to match.
Guest speakers brought outside perspectives that reframed the challenges Beam Suntory was facing. Not as obstacles, but as opportunities for growth.
A Mystery Basket Cocktail Challenge put the small teams to work creating an original cocktail from a mystery basket of ingredients and legacy spirits, featured at the opening night event with judging and friendly competition. For a company built on spirits, a perfect (and tasty) metaphor.
A drum circle closed the week. Each leader was given a drum. What began as hesitant, uncoordinated sound, gradually became something unified and powerful. The metaphor was visceral: each of us brings our own distinct sound, and when we play together — when we actually listen and find the shared rhythm — the result is something none of us could create alone. For a group that had spent the week working through questions of identity, belonging, and shared purpose, it didn’t land as a corporate exercise. It landed as a shared experience.
Strengthening connection and momentum — not just delivering slides
WHAT MADE THIS WORK
The Define Brief gave leadership an unfiltered mirror and gave In Focus the blueprint to build something bespoke, not generic.
Small teams created belonging before the main program began. Leaders arrived already in conversation, which changed the entire atmosphere.
The six-word story exercise opened people up in a way no standard icebreaker could. Simplicity created the conditions for real connection.
Senior leadership was present and participatory throughout as fellow stakeholders in the conversation.
Every format — from the cocktail challenge to the drum circle — was chosen to make the meeting’s themes felt, not just heard.
A leadership team that chose to stay
RESULT
Turnover following the March bonus distribution was significantly lower than anticipated.
Leaders who had been quietly exploring the market chose to stay and to lead.
CEO Matt Shattock described the week as the watershed moment that turned the tides in a positive direction.
A group that arrived reserved and skeptical left with a shared story, a clearer collective identity, and a renewed commitment to building something worth staying for.
From our participants:
"The bonus kept them in their seats. The experience made them want to stay."
— Paula Erickson, Head of HR, Beam Suntory
Beam Suntory didn’t need a meeting. They needed a turning point. The Define Stage gave leadership the truth. The design gave that truth somewhere to go. And the experience gave 100 leaders a reason to believe — not because of a bonus, but because of what they felt and built together in that room.
That’s the work In Focus does.
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