A Pinch of This and a Dash of That

How do you combine two packaged-food companies, both with well-known household brand names, and make it work? That’s the challenge managers at General Mills faced when it acquired Pillsbury. The company’s chief learning officer, Kevin Wilde, said, "Let’s get the best out of both of our marketing organizations. And let’s not stop there." So they decided to identify, share, and integrate the best practices from both companies. And employee teams played a major role in how the company proceeded.

An intensive training program called "Brand Champions" was created and launched. The program was designed not just for marketing specialists, but for all employees from different functional areas who worked on particular brands. These cross-functional teams attended the in-house training together as a unified group. According to one of the program developers, Beth Gunderson, specific benefits of including these teams soon became evident. "A person from human resources, for instance, would ask a provocative question precisely because she wasn’t a marketer. And you’d see the look on the marketers’ faces: Whoa, I never thought of that." It helped employees understand and appreciate different perspectives.

Another benefit of including people from different functions was improved communication throughout the company. People were no longer griping about what other functional areas were doing. Employees began to understand how the other functional areas worked and how each area’s contribution was important to the overall success of the company.

The training program has been so successful that now General Mills’ production plants have asked for a mini-version of the course. "They want to understand the language marketers speak and why things are done as they are." Oh . . . and one other example of how successful the program has been. Betty Crocker is well known for packaged cake mixes, but less so for cookie mixes. Inspired by input from the group, the cookie-mix team decided to go after scratch bakers. (These are people who bake from scratch rather than from a boxed mix. As one person said, they were "taking on grandma.") The cookie mixes were reformulated and now the brand owns 90 percent of the dry cookie mix category.

Responding to the Case

1. What barriers were there to communication between the employees of General Mills and Pillsbury?

2. Although not a "different language" per se, how might the language of the functional areas within the organization have interfered with communication?

3. How did the employee roles from the combined organizations impact the communication process?

4. As a supervisor, what suggestions would you offer to improve the communication between groups?