Danone - Key Issues Essay

Knowledge is considered as one of the most important and competitive resource for sustenance of the organisation (Zack, 1999). It can be compared to the strategic resource that can be used and applied in various frames of the organisation. Experienced managers in the organisations believe that company can receive strategic advantage through knowledge and not the strategies or actions implemented by competitors. Knowledge can be regarded as a strong approach that opens numerous ways of success. It is that weapon that help organisation to evaluate solutions in financial and other professional difficulties.

This initial setback with dairy products drove Danone to copy in China the alliance strategy used with great success to expand into Italy and Spain in the 1980s. Danone decided to capitalize successful local businesses rather than build its own businesses from scratch, resulting in a strong focus on joint ventures and acquisitions. Unlike most multinationals, Danone gave these acquired local businesses a great deal of autonomy. The joint ventures and acquired firms continued to sell their products under their own brands. Until late 2002, 80 per cent of Danone’s sales in China were under local brands. Furthermore, Danone let the former executives run the businesses and didn’t get involved much in daily operations. In fact, Danone functioned more like a capital investor, linking its joint ventures through capital investment rather than joint products. This expansion strategy in China worked very well. In 2001, Danone had become one of the largest food concerns in China, with $1.2 billion in sales, more than 50 plants and around 25,000 employees.14 Accounting for 9 per cent of Danone’s international sales in 2003, China became Danone’s third largest

As a trainer, teacher and assessor my roles are many and varied. As part of my day to day work I may not only deliver lessons but also carry out theory assessments, practical assessments and sometimes interviews. I may have to motivate and liaise as well as guide and assess. I will have to keep records and be a subject specialist as well as liaise internally and impart information and advice sometimes on a personal level. The first impact I play regarding my role is either interviewing possible candidates or meeting and greeting them on the first day of their course. Meeting potential apprentices/apprentices on their first day induction requires me to make a good

Knowledge management was defined as the turning of information into actionable knowledge which can be accessed by people who can apply it. Robbins (2003) gives a time perspective in his definition of knowledge management. He mentions as part of knowledge management the distribution of the right information to the right people at the right time. Lytras et al (2002) gives a definition of knowledge management which emphasises the purpose of knowledge management. In the definition creation of new capabilities, enablement for superior performance, encouraging innovation and enhancement of customer value were mentioned. For the purpose of this study the researcher summarised knowledge management as the intentional process of coordinating people, technology and systems to optimise creation and sharing of intellectual

The superior capabilities of knowledge management systems provide an opportunity for the business to engage the most effective components and recognize the importance of communication to make informed, accurate decisions (McGrath, 2001). This system can organize the company’s knowledge resources, knowledge obtaining, organizing, and applying to make a sound routine the will enforce effectiveness (Niu, 2008). The dynamic function of knowledge management to create, capture, and apply knowledge to achieve an organization’s objective will allow them to be more profitable and successful (Zucker, 1986). In addition to increasing profits, the system can be also used to reduce costs and enhance research and development (DeTienne & Jackson, 2001). With all of these advantages, it would be wasteful for a company to not employ knowledge management. As seen in the Discovery Communications, Inc. example, the company can attribute their new productivity levels and increase in ease of securing documents to the knowledge management system that put into place by Carefree Technology. Like Discovery Communications, Inc., knowledge management is so popular today because companies can collect, process and share knowledge to ignite employees ' creativity which in turn will make the business grow. Wenhong and Jianhua (2009) explained the core of knowledge management is to convert company’s knowledge resources into an increased company

Studies show there is a direct relationship between organizational culture and organizational effectiveness. To support a simple organizational structure, a knowledge management approach will be implemented. This is a managerial practice that focuses on developing a knowledge-friendly environment and can be promoted by utilizing culture-building activities. Organizational objectives are achieved by sharing and managing knowledge. Four dimensions of organizational culture contribute to knowledge management: adaptability, consistency, involvement and mission. Organizations that are adaptive, consistent in their values, engaging to employees, and embracing common missions in their cultures are more likely to probe into issues, seek methods to reduce costs, focus on the future, and be proactive in their strategies (Zheng, Yang, & McLean, 2010). These dimensions will also align with Advanced HR Solutions’ decentralized structure.

In the 1980’s business experts began to realize the root to organizational success or failure is through its culture. The culture of an organization is the belief that guides each employee in knowing what to do and what not to do and it also affect the public perception of the organization’s brand. Therefore culture is the shared social knowledge within an organization regarding the rules, norms and values (Colquitt, Lepine, & Wesson, 2012). Although, no two cultures are alike, there are components and characteristics that help business experts to define an organization’s culture.

Knowledge is defined as “an understanding and one that gains knowledge through experience, reasoning, intuition and learning” (Cong, & Pandya, 2003, p. 2). Individuals can inflate their knowledge when they share their knowledge with others, and when knowledge is combined with other people’s knowledge they will begin to build new knowledge. It is also considered as a mixture of values, experience, background information, grounded intuition and authority insight that offers a framework and environment for integrating and gauging new information and experiences. It “is applied in the minds of knowers and in organizations, where it is often embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organizational routines, processes, practices and norms” (Cong, & Pandya, 2003, p. 2).

In order to create knowledge a frim must enable five knowledge creation practices throughout the entire organization. The first enabler is the clear knowledge vision of its ‘learn local, act global’ strategy which delivers a specific goal or direction that employees must push towards. The second enabler, allows for further enrichment of the vision, as Toyota facilitates communication among employees to inhibit a strong sharing culture. The third enabler pin points on knowledge activists, or Japanese employees that are sent from the headquarters to overlook operations happening overseas directly. The fourth enabler allows for the strengthening of relationships among the stakeholders, which they believe will also facilitate knowledge sharing especially with suppliers. The final enabler considers the issue of knowledge distribution on the global scale. But as Toyota’s vision states, the company expects to use the best local knowledge and distribute it globally. Together, the enablers work together and play an important role for the knowledge creation and growth of Toyota Motor Corporation as a

The problem for this dissertation study test the challenges associated with creating, capturing and sharing knowledge. Doda (2017) describes this method as knowledge management. This method uses a critical goal of improving learning and performance in an organizational framework. Knowledge management as theory and a model was improved by Dalkir in 2005 (Atieh & Somayeh, 2017).

With the benefit of hindsight, it is apparent that in the knowledge era, creating and leveraging knowledge is the business of business. By all available measures, the stock market is already providing handsome rewards to companies that successfully leverage their knowledge--a phenomenon that will almost surely grow in significance as knowledge-based organizations increase in size and number. A number of firms are anticipating this and looking to knowledge management to enhance, measure, and manage the knowledge of their employees and organizations more effectively.

There is the need for the organisation to acquire knowledge from outside environment and build its knowledge base and also contribute by sharing knowledge with its business partners; these constitute the seventh and eight step. Finally, as the organisation continues in its learning process, there is the need to build an organisational memory so that learning can be constantly upgraded and to avoid loss. This is also consistent with the seminal work by Huber (1991) who elaborates four constructs linked to organisational learning-knowledge acquisition (the process by which knowledge is obtained), information distribution (process by which information from different sources is shared and thereby leads to new information or understanding), information interpretation (process by which information that has been distributed is commonly understood) and organisation memory (means by which knowledge is stored for future use).

A web-enabled platform was introduced, which was integrated with group-work, whereby the specially-trained ‘coach’ of the group could relay feedback and advice to participants. Bajer, the specialist who came in to aid the process, noted that after 100 days new behaviours and new ways of doing things had formed, with new language coming with this. Employee engagement, measured each year, was at an all-time high. The message that was taken from this was ‘it is possible to change the culture of an organisation... no matter how challenging it might seem at the start’ (Losada and Bajer, 2010). Similar success can be seen with NUMMI, a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota, outlined by John Shook (2010). What was seen here mainly affected the chronically under-performing Fremont plant of GM, but did have significant effects across the company. Previously there had been a culture upon which management had no control over. Quality had been known to be sabotaged and absenteeism often reached 20%; more than anything the culture was ‘anti-General Motors’. However, after the majority of workers were sent to Japan for training and then the adoption of not only Toyota’s stop-the-line production system1, as well as some of their key principles, a mutual trust was formed and the culture was reformed. Toyota’s ‘Respect for People’ tenet (Shook, 2010) summarised the vast change that had

Danone’s success is largely attributed to the knowledge and abilities of its employees. The sharing and retaining of this knowledge is extremely important in ensuring the long-term effectiveness of Danone. The Networking attitude initiative was launched at a Danone conference in the fall of 2002 as a means of circulating good practices and enabling the sharing of knowledge across groups in the geographically dispersed company (Edmonson et al, 2008, p. 1-8). Several tools have been developed as part of the initiative, most notably knowledge “marketplaces”, a “who’s who” internal directory system and sharing networks (Edmonson et al, 2008, p. 1). From 2004 to 2007, Danone employees shared almost 640 good practices with colleagues and overall, the Networking attitude initiative has made practical information accessible to about 5000 of the more than 9000 Danone managers around the world. The initiative has incurred very little cost and was seen highly successful by 86% of general managers according to an internal survey (Edmonson et al, 2008, p. 1).

DANONE is one of the largest multinational companies in the food and beverage industry. By the end of 2016, counting from the consolidated companies to the sub-divisions in more than 130 countries, DANONE has 99,187 people as full-time employees (Danone, 2016). Base on the geographical area, majority of the employees, they work in European countries