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Adami was brewing for a fight the minute he arrived at Miller more than a year ago. At the company's sprawling brick complex on a hillside above downtown Milwaukee, he encountered a complacent, top-heavy organization that seemed to have lost any sense of urgency. Some industry observers thought Miller and the No. 3 player, Coors, should merge to provide a stronger challenge to Anheuser-Busch. (Today the betting is that Coors may have to align with one of the multinationals or perhaps Canada's troubled Molson brewery, which is embroiled in a family succession battle.) For a brief moment early on, when he was living out of a suitcase at the Hyatt, says Adami, he was "looking out the window over the snowy streets and thinking, How did I ever get into this situation?"
Soon enough, however, he set to work refocusing on the company's three core brands (Miller Lite, Miller Genuine Draft and the long-dormant Miller High Life). He increased the company's ad budget 50% and reformed what he once dubbed the Socialist Republic of Miller by getting rid of some 200 executives and implementing strict, performance-based metrics to judge those who managed to avoid the ax. Just as crucially, he set about improving relations with the independent distributors--many of whom ship both Miller and Coors from the breweries to the retailers, unlike Budweiser's primarily exclusive distributors--who had felt ignored by the old regime at Miller. With Adami hitting the road to press the flesh and rolling out marketing plans tailored to each of Miller's top 33 U.S. markets, the distributors' perspective has changed. "The [sales reps] come in weekly and sit down with us to put together a plan," says Brock Anderson, owner of Bonbright Distributors in Dayton, Ohio.
Despite the plaudits Miller's advertising has won, Adami's real talent lies in execution. Several months after he arrived, Adami dropped several of Miller's flavored malt beverages, sold off one brewery and added 200 new positions in sales and marketing. Around the industry he is known as a methodical thinker and cost cutter who asks lots of questions--the kind of executive who can tell you the production rates of every Miller plant, broken down by line and by shift, and will immediately dispatch help to markets he believes are underperforming. "Norman is a great field general," is how his boss, SABMiller CEO Graham Mackay, puts it. And though Adami can come across as blunt, his colleagues say he eventually gains the fierce loyalty of his employees. "For the first year, you'll curse the day he arrived. But by the second year, you'll notice how much has changed," says Mitch Ramsay, SAB's communications manager for Africa and Asia, who worked with Adami in the late 1980s.
Given his background at South Africa's entrenched, virtual monopoly brewer, Adami knows how hard it is to unseat the top dog. "We certainly haven't declared victory," says Adami, adding that his reclamation project, especially around the still flagging Miller Genuine Draft brand, has only begun. But if he can sustain the momentum, and Miller can become more of a legitimate contender, then Adami will really have reason to celebrate--and not just to rally the troops--by tossing back a cold one in one big gulp.
--Reported by David Thigpen/Milwaukee and Simon Robinson/Johannesburg