Danone Case
9-608-107
REV : APRIL 1 6 , 2 0 0 8
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ANE DAMGAARD JEN SEN
Global Knowledge Management at Danone
At Danone we don’t talk about strategy, we react to the context around us. For me, it’s like a Lego box that you buy for your children. They start to play, trying to find a way to build the image on the Lego box. At the end of the day, they give up, throw out the box, and put the pieces away. The next weekend you put all the Lego pieces on the floor and then the strategy starts. They try to imagine something. Not what was on the box, but what they have in their heads. That is strategy at Danone for me: It’s Lego.
Franck Riboud, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Groupe Danone
At the Paris headquarters of consumer-goods company Groupe Danone, Franck Mougin considered his options for furthering knowledge sharing in the company. Appointed executive vice president of human resources (HR) five years earlier in May 2002, Mougin had been working to implement a concept called the Networking Attitude. The Networking Attitude was a way to share knowledge across groups in the geographically dispersed company. With employees in 120 countries,
Danone considered it strategically vital to accelerate knowledge sharing across country business units
(CBUs). As Mougin explained, “At Danone we don’t have time to reinvent the wheel. We want our time to market to be shorter than that of our competitors, who are much bigger than we are. If we cannot be big, at least we can be shrewd.” In 2006 the French company had revenues of 14 billion euros (€), compared with Swiss packaged food giant Nestlé with revenues of €60 billion, and
America’s Kraft Foods with revenues of €25 billion.
Mougin had hired Benedikt Benenati as organizational development director in April 2003 and given him responsibility for the Networking Attitude. Together they had developed
REV : APRIL 1 6 , 2 0 0 8
____________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________
ANE DAMGAARD JEN SEN
Global Knowledge Management at Danone
At Danone we don’t talk about strategy, we react to the context around us. For me, it’s like a Lego box that you buy for your children. They start to play, trying to find a way to build the image on the Lego box. At the end of the day, they give up, throw out the box, and put the pieces away. The next weekend you put all the Lego pieces on the floor and then the strategy starts. They try to imagine something. Not what was on the box, but what they have in their heads. That is strategy at Danone for me: It’s Lego.
Franck Riboud, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Groupe Danone
At the Paris headquarters of consumer-goods company Groupe Danone, Franck Mougin considered his options for furthering knowledge sharing in the company. Appointed executive vice president of human resources (HR) five years earlier in May 2002, Mougin had been working to implement a concept called the Networking Attitude. The Networking Attitude was a way to share knowledge across groups in the geographically dispersed company. With employees in 120 countries,
Danone considered it strategically vital to accelerate knowledge sharing across country business units
(CBUs). As Mougin explained, “At Danone we don’t have time to reinvent the wheel. We want our time to market to be shorter than that of our competitors, who are much bigger than we are. If we cannot be big, at least we can be shrewd.” In 2006 the French company had revenues of 14 billion euros (€), compared with Swiss packaged food giant Nestlé with revenues of €60 billion, and
America’s Kraft Foods with revenues of €25 billion.
Mougin had hired Benedikt Benenati as organizational development director in April 2003 and given him responsibility for the Networking Attitude. Together they had developed