The Brown-Forman Way

For more than a century and a half, the Kentucky whiskey giant behind Woodford Reserve, Old Forester and many other spirits brands has prospered by matching tradition with foresight

- JACK BETTRIDGE, DANNY ALEXANDER

Campbell Brown, the fifth-generation chairman of the board of Brown-Forman, is surveying his office in the otherwise modern Louisville headquarters of his family-controlled company, the maker of such storied Bourbon as Woodford Reserve, the official Bourbon of the 150th Kentucky Derby. This room is the opposite of modern, decorated with wood repurposed from a dining room where executives used to eat. The rug used to sit in his grandfather’s office. “And that’s my grandfather’s desk,” he says. “It’s the only office I think that kind of looks like you should be smoking a cigar.”

The nearby office of the president and CEO, Lawson Whiting, has a very different look. There’s a photo of the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards, one of the many he has collected of celebrities drinking another of the company’s spirits brands, Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey.

The contrast encapsulates the personality of BrownForman, a 154-year-old American institution that continues to thrive by melding the values of a family-run concern with agile business practices that have helped it adapt. Here, the steady hand of the Brown family—which Forbes magazine listed as worth more than $16 billion— guides a diverse group of nearly 6,000 employees that span the globe and keep the company evolving.