JOHN BROCK, chief executive of Inbev, the world’s biggest brewer by volume, was given some helpful advice early in his career.

When he was working at Procter & Gamble a senior colleague once told him: “The secret in business is unbelievably simple. All you have to do is come in every week, tell me what you are going to do, then go off and do it. Then once every few weeks hit me with a positive little surprise. If you do that then one day you will be chief executive”.

The advice has paid off for Brock, 56. After Procter & Gamble, he joined Cadbury Schweppes. There he became chief operating officer and was the favourite internal candidate to succeed John Sunderland as chief executive. He missed out to an internal rival and subsequently left.

Within a short period he took the chief executive post at Interbrew, the Belgian beer giant.

This was no consolation prize. Since he joined, Brock has hauled the family-controlled brewer into the modern age, a fact that will be very visible when the group decamps to open-plan offices before the year end.

He has also identified ways to strip out €200m (£138m) of costs from the group.

But Brock’s big move has been to engineer this year’s merger of Interbrew with Brazil’s Ambev, to create a new company called Inbev.

In doing so Brock, who had only been at the company a year, has changed the brewing landscape. In volume terms — but not in terms of profitability — the enlarged company has taken the top spot from America’s Anheuser Busch.

To the millions of consumers who drink Inbev’s brands, its beers are much better known than the company. Its 200-strong brand portfolio includes its flagship Beck’s and Stella Artois, which according to Brock is taking off like wildfire in America.

Other brands include Bass, Leffe and Hoegaarden as well as Ambev’s Brahma beer, which Inbev wants to turn into an international brand, a feat most analysts describe as challenging.

Inbev’s smaller rivals SABMiller and Scottish & Newcastle are all weighing up how to respond in an environment where size really does matter on a global scale.

But they are also waiting to see how the two groups at Inbev bed down.

The merger has brought together a number of powerful people, drawing the old-style Interbrew family into a marriage with new-world Latin American money.