Client Background

General Mills, with over $13 billion in sales, markets many of the most trusted consumer brands across a wide range of food categories. With the recent addition of Pillsbury's businesses the Company offers more than 30 brands that each have U.S. retail sales in excess of $100 million. These products include well-known brands such as Betty Crocker, Bisquick, Pop Secret microwave popcorn, Chex Mix, Yoplait yogurt, and Wheaties. In addition, the Pillsbury brand holds a clear leadership share of the $1.5 billion U.S. refrigerated dough category, including Pillsbury frozen breakfast pastries, Pillsbury frozen waffles, and Totino's frozen pizza and snacks. The acquisition of Pillsbury quadrupled the size of General Mills' business in the fast-growing foodservice channel and created the third largest food manufacturer in the world.

The Challenge

Pillsbury and General Mills had developed similar but separate corporate cultures as rivals who competed in the same industry and shared a hometown. With the merger, the Company needed to come together, share ideas, and begin the process of uniting cultures, products, and visions to successfully begin growth from a common, cohesive foundation. In light of the changes undergoing the newly merged company, executives quickly agreed that team building was necessary to begin the transition process. More importantly, General Mills and Pillsbury realized that they needed help to create an innovative and supportive environment that would calm employee fears and allow all departments to respond fluidly to others. They chose the Brave New Workshop's improvisational team building training to expedite the meeting of these commonly held goals.

The Brave New Workshop's Role

After thoroughly examining both cultures, the Brave New Workshop developed a customized training workshop, using tried and true improvisational exercises to help inspire innovation and begin the process of building teams within the new company. The first group to participate was the engineering department, not surprisingly one of the more introverted departments within the corporation. Much to the surprise of the participants and the facilitators, the engineers responded to the improvisational exercises with exuberance and an uncharacteristic sense of play. The success of the initial teambuilding workshop quickly led to other opportunities. The second workshop targeted the very analytical, and perhaps skeptical, high-level finance executives who responded equally enthusiastically. In fact, Jim Lawrence, CFO, bravely took the stage and improvised without fear, helping to further relax participants and reinforce the learning points, not only through momentary laughter, but with thought and idea generation processes that continued long after the workshop. In light of these initial successes, the Brave New Workshop's training partnership with General Mills has continued to flourish including additional training for a variety of departments and BNW's inclusion as part of General Mill's organizational development department approved training vendors. With a strong commitment to training, General Mills enjoys the positive impact of improvisational teambuilding as more and more departments are exposed to the workshops and others continue to practice the techniques and exercises learned from the Brave New Workshop.