This beverage company saga has been flooding my feed for two days now. Honestly, I had no intention of weighing in — there are far more interesting things worth talking about with you all. But I couldn’t stand watching a sea of wrong answers online, delivered with such dead-serious confidence. It’s genuinely painful to watch.
Let me be blunt: 99.99% of what’s being said out there is pure misreading. From every angle — business, human nature, politics — all of it is wrong.
Can’t blame people, really. Most of them have never truly been wealthy, and they’ve never moved in circles of genuine second-generation power players. So naturally, they can only analyze the situation through imagination.
I don’t like to ramble. I’ll do what I always do — walk through this step by step, stream-of-consciousness style, and get to the root of both this specific incident and the broader pattern it represents.
Trust me: after reading this, you can bring this up at any dinner table with mid-to-senior-level players and hold the room. The moment you start talking, people will know you’ve actually moved in higher circles.
1
Strictly speaking, the next decade or so will be a concentrated, high-frequency period of second-generation business heirs failing at succession — en masse. Don’t just look at this one beverage company. You’re going to see dozens of colossal enterprises get absorbed by outside forces because their heirs simply weren’t strong enough to hold on.
This is actually a fascinating anomaly. Globally, ultra-large enterprises typically stay in family hands for at least two or three generations before naturally fading out through the law of the jungle. What we’re about to witness is historically unusual.
2
I know what you’re thinking. You’re assuming it’s that reason. But based on my personal experience serving as an advisor to both first-generation founders and their heirs simultaneously — it’s not what you think.
Yes, there are some politically sensitive dimensions to these situations. But the fundamental reason succession fails always comes back to the same thing: the heir simply doesn’t have what it takes to hold the position.
So the real question is: what exactly does “having what it takes” mean?
3
A lot of people assume that business strength means having sharp commercial instincts, a talent for strategy, and sophisticated management skills.
Not quite.
On this particular soil, if you want to dominate a sector and hold meaningful market share, the core of cores is one thing: you have to be ruthless (狠).
What does ruthless mean? It means: my capital may be smaller than yours. My connections may be weaker. My overall capabilities may not match yours on any single metric. None of that matters.
What matters is this: as long as I’m in this space, I will go all-in against you on every single front, with zero room for retreat and zero room for compromise.
I don’t care whose capital backs you. I don’t care whose man you are. Today, I am going to the wall with you.
One of us walks away. Not both.
4
Don’t underestimate that word — ruthless. If you’ve studied any of our domestic giants carefully, you’ll notice something: all that talk about “integrity first” and “doing good business”? That’s gold leaf the winners paste on their faces after the fighting is done.
Pick any sector leader at random. Flip through their history from ages 35 to 50 — their core offensive years — and you won’t find a single one who was a good person by conventional standards during that period.
What those decades of brutal competition produced was something else entirely: they evolved into terrifyingly formidable, bloodthirsty predators. They just don’t bare their fangs in ordinary life. They don’t let you see those cold, merciless methods.
As for Western and Japanese management frameworks, Inamori Kazuo’s philosophy, EMBA curricula — with respect, those are decorations. Window dressing. External techniques with no real load-bearing function.
5
Here’s where many second-generation heirs go wrong. Most of them were born between the 1980s and mid-1990s, and they tend to treat overseas business knowledge as gospel.
The classic mistake plays out like this:
“Mom, Dad — look! I’ve mastered this incredible fighting technique! Watch my footwork! Watch my timing and rhythm!”
Then they proceed to punch the heavy bag, fast and flashy.
Then the parents step in. One unremarkable straight punch — and the bag explodes off its chain.
No visible technique whatsoever. But look closer, and you realize: every inch of that person is saturated with decades of compacted force. Step within two meters of them and you feel the Chi field (气场) bearing down on you before they’ve moved.
6
Many people reading about this beverage company incident want to find hidden conspiracies in it.
There are none. The only “inside story” is that the heir genuinely did not possess the capabilities required for the position.
That resignation letter said everything. The whole situation came down to this: other shareholders refused to back him, which meant he couldn’t get anything done — so he walked away.
Now let me ask you: was that a resignation letter, or a letter of surrender?
First-generation founders have faced versions of this situation countless times — barbarians at the gate, internal resistance from management teams, entrenched power factions making operations impossible. You can call it whatever you want.
But you will never find a first-generation founder handing in a resignation letter over any of it.
What? You want to push me out? Fine. Then the only outcome is mutually assured destruction — scorched earth, no survivors. The one thing that will never happen is me surrendering quietly and walking away on my own terms.
Never. Never. Never.
Fight to the very end. Bleed yourself dry if you have to — as long as you’re taking the other side down with you. Teeth and fingernails if it comes to that. No retreat. That option doesn’t exist.
Consequences? Never crossed their mind.
This is the audacity. The irrational, animal force that can’t be taught.
7
Someone once asked a great question: why did the brilliant strategists of ancient times — men of extraordinary intelligence and cunning — never simply overthrow their lords and take power themselves?
Simple. Because there is exactly one thing in this world harder than strategy: the decision itself.
Decision, then strategy — the decision comes first and ranks above the strategy. That hierarchy is written into the nature of things.
This is why you’ll see people in everyday life who can talk endlessly and brilliantly about what should be done — and then, the moment it’s time to act for real, they fold. Same problem.
8
So what would it actually take to successfully take over the beverage empire?
The answer is simple to state and brutally hard to execute.
The heir would have needed to build, entirely on their own, completely independent of their parents’ shadow, their own separate power base.
And I mean truly independent — no help from the parents whatsoever. Real combat experience. Their own faction, their own loyal inner circle, carved out through actual battles.
Once that foundation exists, then — with the parents still alive to facilitate the handover — you bring your own freshly built faction to stand against the old guard of the previous generation. You fight until you reach equilibrium. Only then have you earned the right to put on the crown.
And once you have that kind of foundation, even if you wanted to quit, the factions beneath you wouldn’t let you simply walk out. You leave, and the whole ecosystem falls into chaos. You stay, and at least things are stable — everyone may have grievances, but stable beats chaotic every time.
9
I’ll leave you with a thought question. If you have a considered view, feel free to share it in the comments:
Why is it that every company with real multi-generational succession is an industrial giant — while real estate tycoons have never once considered having their children take over?
This one tests your intelligence and the depth of your knowledge. Think carefully.