General Mills Redesigns Organizational Structure
General Mills, Inc. is restructuring its organization to better align with new growth objectives, the company announced. Jeffrey L. Harmening, chairman and chief executive officer, discussed recent changes to the leadership team during a virtual presentation at the BMO Capital Markets Farm to Market Conference.
Dana M. McNabb will step into the newly created role of chief strategy and growth officer. She currently leads the company’s Europe and Australia segment, and she will be responsible for key growth capabilities and strategic initiatives, Harmening said.
Sean Walker, who currently leads the company’s Asia and Latin America segment, will add Europe and Australia to his responsibilities and will lead both segments going forward.
John R. Church, currently supply chain officer, will transition to a new role as chief transformation and enterprise services officer. In this role, he will be responsible for leading enterprise transformation initiatives while managing the company’s global shared service function.
Paul Gallagher, who currently leads the North America supply chain for General Mills, will join the leadership team as chief supply chain officer.
“With those changes already announced, we are now going through the exercise of redesigning our structure through the rest of the organization,” Harmening said. “To be clear, this is not simply a cost-cutting exercise. The goal of this initiative is to free up resources from parts of our organization and redeploy them into more growth-facing areas, such as digital and data and technology, e-commerce and strategic revenue management and other capabilities that are critical to our future success.”
The organizational changes are part of the company’s Accelerate strategy, which it launched internally more than a year ago and unveiled to the investment community in February at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York virtual conference. Early efforts have translated into year-to-date market share gains in the company’s five global platforms of cereal, pet food, ice cream, snack bars and Mexican Food, Harmening said.