"All of our social problems arise out of doing the wrong things righter," said the late Russell Ackoff, as quoted by Stephen Miller in a Wall Street Journal remembrance (11/11/09). "The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter! If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better!" That may sound like it comes from the Dr. Seuss school of business management, but it's the kind of thinking that helped Anheuser-Busch "achieve national dominance."

For A-B, it turned out, the wrong thing was to increase advertising budgets or try to improve the taste of its beer. Mr. Ackoff determined that neither of these initiatives increased sales. So, his advice was to keep the ad budget flat, and pass the savings along to consumers, "making Budweiser inexpensive compared with local brands." A-B followed this strategy from 1961 to 1976, during which time it quadrupled sales.

Indeed, over the 30 years the company worked with Mr. Ackoff, its "market share grew to more than 40 percent from seven percent." A-B gratefully funded a business graduate center at Wharton (link) in Mr. Ackoff's name, where "he trained generations of management graduate students in an unconventional program that," as he put it, had "no curriculum, no classes, no examinations, no admission requirements -- only exit requirements." He attributed his holistic perspective to his training as an architect, and eschewed the term "guru" in favor of "teacher," his idea being that he was simply "helping his clients design their own solutions."