Is the company right to be worried about what Mary Davis writes or says, or is the board of directors exaggerating the potential harm to Whitewater of her discussing these issues?

WHEN MARY DAVIS, ASSOCIATE VICE PRESident for plant management at Whitewater Brewing Company, wrote an article for a large metropolitan newspaper in her state, she hadn’t realized where it would lead. At first she was thrilled to see her words published. Then she was just worried about keeping her job.
It all started when her husband, Bob, who was working on his MBA, talked her into taking an evening class with him.
She did and, to her surprise, really got into the course, spending most of her weekends that semester working on her term project—a study of wine and beer marketing. Among other things her essay discussed those respectable wine companies like E. & J. Gallo (the nation’s largest) that market cheap, fortified wines such as Thunderbird and Night Train Express.
With an alcohol content 50 percent greater and a price far less than regular wine, these screw-top wines are seldom advertised and rarely seen outside poor neighborhoods, but they represent a multimillion dollar industry. Skid-row winos are their major consumers, a fact that evidently embarrasses Gallo, because it doesn’t even put its company name on the label.