GREENE KING, the brewer behind Abbot Ale and Old Speckled Hen, is one of those companies that conjures up images of tradition and wholesomeness: of hearty men of Suffolk cheerfully crafting fine English ales to a centuries-old recipe in a handsome old brewery.

It is definitely not the sort of company that one associates with marketing slogans such as “lifestyle demographics” or modern corporate speak such as “flat-line management” and “cultural change programme”.

Yet, these are all phrases taken from a recent corporate presentation in which Greene King, far from its image of a cuddly regional brewer, outlines a bold strategy for maintaining its position as one of the FTSE 250’s strongest companies.

It is probably no coincidence that Greene King’s sharper strategic and operational focus has coincided with the arrival on the board four years ago of Rooney Anand, whose previous experience was in consumer goods with companies such as Sara Lee Corporation and United Biscuits.

Last week Mr Anand, who had previously been running Greene King’s brewing division, took the helm as group chief executive. Meanwhile, Tim Bridge, a member of the King family and chief executive for the past 11 years, has now moved up to non-executive chairman.

In many ways, the combination of the dyed-in-the-wool family brewer and a thrusting young executive with a background in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) mirrors what is happening within the company as a whole: the mixing of old ways with new.

Mr Anand says his strategy is to blend the best of the company’s tradition and heritage with an innovative framework. “The external perception of Greene King belies a progressive, modern approach, although we won’t adopt things just for the sake of it,” he says. The melding of old and new in the pursuit of best practice has also been evident after last year’s £654 million acquisition of the Laurel Pub Company’s 432 neighbourhood pubs, once part of Whitbread.

Normally, such a deal would be expected to result in the majority of the target company’s senior executives being jettisoned within a few weeks of completion in the pursuit of cost savings. While £6 million of “synergies” have indeed been identified, many Laurel managers have taken key positions in the enlarged business.

The integration of Laurel, which in true FMCG style has been given a tagline, “Best of Both Worlds”, has seen Greene King adopt Laurel’s operational control system and it now plans to introduce it across its own managed pub estate. Meanwhile, Greene King’s labour-scheduling system is being introduced across Laurel.

“Integration is not about throwing the Greene King manual at people,” says Mr Anand. “We’re mindful of not being so prescriptive that we end up destroying value. Laurel was a professional pub retailing business and both teams are learning from each other.”

But there are some things that don’t change, in particular its strategy of running a brewery alongside tenanted and managed pub estates. This three-pronged approach, long since abandoned by the UK’s big national brewers, is known as vertical integration.

However, Mr Anand says such terminology is out of date, harking back to a time when the big brewers developed pub estates simply as a conduit for selling their beers. “We have three divisions operating independently of each other but horizontally integrated.”

During Mr Anand’s time as managing director of the brewing division, the proportion of Greene King ales sold outside its own pub estate has continued to increase, reaching 78 per cent against about 65 per cent five years ago. Sales efforts have increasingly been focused on the so-called free trade.

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