Philip van munching biography of barack

Nov. 26, 2010 — -- Philip Van Munching from Darien, Conn., is a finalist in the Dear GMA Advice Guru Contest. Read his application below!

Essay

Why am I the perfect GMA advice guru? It comes down to what I am and what I'm not. What I am is a New York Times bestselling author of advice books. What I am is the guy that an awful lot of folks come to for advice. I've been an author, a teacher, an executive, a friend, a son, a husband and a father and in all these roles, I've taken pride in my ability to really listen, and then to give thoughtful, well-reasoned and loving advice, even when that advice is maybe not what someone wants to hear. I've counseled friends through work stuff, social stuff, child-raising stuff and every stage of relationships, from how to gauge the interest of the person they just started dating to how to put their ex-husband in the rearview and find a way to look forward, again. Here's what I'm not: I'm not a doctor. I think what's made my advice books so successful is that I don't use five-dollar words; I try very hard to make sure that what I have to say is colloquial, straightforward and unpretentious. And I guess it's working: the compliment I've gotten most often on my books is that reading them is like having a conversation with a friend. That's a pretty great thing to hear, and along with the obvious qualifications you're looking for, like ease on-camera (check!) and an ability to write compelling stuff for the GMA website (check!), I think my accessibility is what makes me most qualified to be the GMA advice guru.

What's the best advice you have ever given? What was the result?

When my daughter's boyfriend was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma last year -- at all of 17 years old, can you imagine? -- I noticed that she was going sleepless…and feeling helpless. I sat her

Leo Van Munching, Jr., who guided Heineken’s decades-long dominance in the US imported beer market, died February 14th after a long illness. The Darien resident was 89.

Born in 1926 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Leo and his family immigrated to the United States upon the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. His late father, Leo, Sr., came as a representative of the Heineken brewery and eventually established the independent Van Munching & Company as the sole US importer of Heineken brands.

Leo served as a ‘Seabee’ in the 35th Special Naval Construction Battalion on Oahu, Hawaii from 1944 to 1946. Upon discharge from the Navy, he enrolled in the University of Maryland on the G.I. Bill, earning a degree from the College of Business and Management in 1950.

He then went to work for Van Munching & Company, establishing regional offices in major markets around the country and developing both the brand imagery and the distribution network that led to Heineken’s preeminence in the expanding imported beer segment. He married Margaret (Peggy) Pratt in 1953, and moved his quickly growing family to Chicago and Los Angeles before settling in Connecticut, where he took over as president of Van Munching & Company. He remained in that role until his retirement in 1993.

During his time with Van Munching & Company, no other brand approached Heineken’s position as the largest-selling imported beer. After cajoling the Heineken Brewery to create a low-calorie version of its Amstel brand, Leo guided Amstel Light to the top sales spot in the imported light beer segment.

In recognition of his outstanding contributions and personal dedication to US-Netherlands trade relations, and his promotion of goodwill for the Netherlands in the United States, the Dutch government honored him with The Order of Orange-Nassau in 1982. Six years later, the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce in the US also recognized his role in the expansion of trade between the t

In his memoir of a life spent selling Heineken for his family’s eponymous importer, Philip Van Munching describes the challenge of hiring brand managers from beyond the industry. “The one candidate who impressed me suggested her first order of business if she got the job would be a self-education on the various legal restrictions placed upon beer marketing,” he writes in 1997’s “Beer Blast.” “The other two lacked not only the first’s MBA, but also failed to give any indication to me that they recognized any differences between different packaged goods. This worried me because one was currently working for a cigarette manufacturer and the other was working on dish soap.”

If everything you knew about the beer business came from LinkedIn, you could be forgiven for wondering what Van Munching’s concern was. After all, to the casual observer (then, and especially now), packaged beer looks a lot like the other shelf-stable stuff sold alongside it at the supermarket. Soda, candy bars, mayonnaise… you name it. But this elides trickier realities that challenge the category. It’s more closely tied to specialized agricultural outputs than much of the mass-market consumer packaged goods (CPG) market. The national toothpaste supply does not rise and fall on harvest yields; the national beer supply, to varying extents, kinda does.

We discussed this just a couple weeks ago with regard to the American brewing industry’s reliance on Canadian barley, access to which was then being threatened by the Trump administration’s currently suspended 25 percent tariff on our neighbors to the north. Today, I want to highlight an inverse agricultural problem: one happening stateside due not to the scarcity of a key crop, but its surplus. That’s right, folks. For the first time in my two and a half years helming Hop Take, I’m actually writing a column about hops.

The LinkedIn-friendly version