Should Groupon CEO swig beer at work?

With all of the company's recent troubles, maybe the boss needs to grow up.

By Kim Peterson Apr 26, 2012 3:32PM

Groupon's (GRPN) CEO chugs beer while telling his employees that the company needs to grow up. No, we're not making this up.

Andrew Mason, all of 31 years old, drank beer in a town hall meeting with employees Wednesday. He set the daily-deal site's agenda for the next six months, according to The Wall Street Journal.

It's not unusual for a tech company boss to swig beer. But during the workday, and during a town hall meeting to talk about corporate priorities? At one point, the Journal reports, his voice broke and Mason said, "Sorry, too much beer." It's all a little much, in fact.

On top of it all, the Journal secretly found a way to watch the closed-door meeting via webcast. It's the latest embarrassment for a company that has run into numerous troubles over the last year.

Groupon shares were down more than 2% Thursday to $11.99.

In Groupon's defense, the meeting was one of several informal town halls where everyone is allowed to drink beer.

I don't mean to be prude about drinking beer, but here's the thing: Groupon is desperate to convince shareholders and customers that it is a worthwhile investment. That it is professional. That it's not being run by juveniles. That it has a plan to improve and fix its problems.

Will this unplanned peek into the company's culture and strategy help?

Marketing guru Frank Reed asks the million-dollar question: "If you are looking to right a ship that is supposedly worth billions of dollars, would this report from The Wall Street Journal instill confidence that this will get better?"

Groupon still doesn't make a profit, despite generating $1.6 billion in sales last year.

If everything was going well at Groupon, the behavior might be overlooked, Reed notes. "I know that in today's anti-corporate world it may be cool to drink beer at your work place and party a bit, but that doesn't make it smart," he adds.

Groupon had to restate its revenue last month, and saw its stock plunge as investors turned skeptical. It reported a "material weakness" in financial controls and less fourth-quarter revenue than it originally stated.

Henry Blodget of Business Insider says the beer-drinking episode reflects a system-wide problem at the company.

"If you were a crew member on a ship and the captain called a ship-wide meeting to tell everyone they needed to grow up -- and delivered the message while swigging beer -- you would understand that the problem came right from the top," he writes.

Here are more details from the meeting, according to the Journal:

Mason described the company as "still this toddler in a grown man's body in many ways."

Mason said the financial restatement was "the latest in a string of just us making an example of how bad we are at being a public company. We have to get good at this."

He said Groupon needs to slow down and focus on fewer projects. The company should be looking at quality and control, he said, and "not taking stupid risks."