Danone

Danone
Global Knowledge Management at DANONE
Case Summary
The company carrying the name Danone was founded in 1919 by the Greek doctor Isaac Carasso in Spain. Groupe Danone is a world market leader in fresh diary product and also owned many bottled water brands. The company has been successful in knowledge management through all level of business. The company created ways of transferring andsharing knowledge throughout the company and between employees from around the world as the company has implemented a concept called the “Networking Attitude”.
Managing Knowledge for Competitive Advantage
As a globe company, Donone had to face many challenges, such as: making information to employees around the world; a tension between top-down approach and local autonomy; the role of IT inmanaging knowledge.
Local Markets
Synergies bring more disadvantages than advantages to a group. Because headquarters can only suggest options to local managers-decision maker, but cannot impose conditions.
Decentralization is very important to Danone’s strategy. It led Danone to have differentiation competency, intimate to consumers and allowed Danone to move faster than its competitors becausetheir frontline manager can execute quickly.
The Human Connection
Instead of using traditional knowledge management that uses technology, uploading files, building databases, which was not the best way, Danone decided to look at behavioral patterns and more at interactions between people.
The Networking Attitude
In 2002 The Networking Attitude was launched as a new way of communication to enableand encourage staffs in different work sites to share knowledge and good practices in the enterprise.
MAKE IT YOURS
As employee’s commitment is very important, several social tools were designed to make people enjoy the activity and see how knowledge exchange can benefit them. Such social tools include
Marketplace - Marketplace is a two-hour activity held during other meetings scheduled bythe target group. Event’s theme is set up to build loosened-up environment with costumes, role-playing and lively music.
Message-in-a-bottle - In this activity encouraged bottom-up approach by bringing takers to a small group of givers who were willing to give them solutions and good practices and they would take their turns to be takers. As it is important that people should feel free to ask forhelps, there was no observation.
T-shirts - T-shirts session is held when the team doesn’t have enough time for longer activity. Participants write good suggestions on the front of their T-shirts and write down their problems on the back. And then they all gather in a group in a learning session.
FOLLOW-UP
Follow-up measures are organized after marketplaces and message-in-a-bottle sessions tohelp employees adopt good practices to improve their performance. Danone had many tools used to enhance good outcomes.
• WHO’S WHO - All the employees have their own profile page, they can take part in sharing information of their interesting topics. And when having problems, they can search for some good solutions and people in the area where they need help.
• COMMUNITIES (NETWORKS) - Thesenetworks were established to make sure that employees still keep sharing their knowledge even without marketplaces. Within a network, there were 10-15 members with a leader. Members posted questions and useful information to keep the network alive and they met up once in 6-18 months.
Assessing Networking Activities
• The takers will give checks (1 – 7) to buy the idea, reflecting the performanceobjective of the givers
• Sending an e-mail to ask employees participating in the program
• It can be measured by financial statement and KPI
• Many workforces require IT to manage the global knowledge especially in R&D
• Some demand rewards because NA may not be the objectives for someone
• Workload is the main obstacle to find more burden like NA
Extending the Networking Attitude...