Word: brabeck
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...sales are likely to increase by between 2 and 5% - short of its target of 6 to 8%, but still not bad in the current economy. While Nestlé, which manufactures, among other brands, Cailler and KitKat, is not releasing figures until the end of April, company chairman Peter Brabeck recently told Swiss newsmagazine Weltwoche that even amid a slacking consumer goods sector, chocolate sales are on the rise. "Now that people don't have a new television or a new car," he noted, "they eat a bit more chocolate...
...Even business has got into the act. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, head of Nestlé , the world's largest food and drink company, said the enormous biofuel subsidies being proffered by Brussels and Washington are "morally unacceptable and irresponsible." And environmental groups, which championed biofuels just a few years ago, have warned that they might even be worse than fossil fuels. "Biofuels are no green panacea," says Adrian Bebb, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth. "They can damage the climate and wreck rainforests. The public is being conned if it thinks they are a green solution...
...issue Brabeck is explaining a lot these days is the big data project he has put in place. Dubbed GLOBE, an acronym for global business excellence, it involves as many as 2,000 people worldwide working to define and standardize everything the company does. Switzerland, Singapore and Peru were the first to switch to the new data system last November, and they found they were able to eliminate a mass of duplications and redundancies in their systems--for example, tens of thousands of customers who were listed several times in databases, alongside vendors who had gone out of business. Among...
...Brabeck wants Nestle's management structure to pay less attention to national boundaries, and he has begun to get his way. Nestle's water business is now run as a global operation out of Paris, and its eye-care business was spun off as a separate company, Alcon, with its own stock-market listing. Nestle's most futuristic business, an attempt to develop nutritional supplements that enhance beauty, is being pursued as a joint venture with L'Oreal. But Nestle's national organizations still manufacture much of what they sell locally, controlling the chocolate, milk and most other products they...
...values tradition? "We don't have a choice," says Weller, Nestle's U.S. head. Consumer taste is so fickle, and the businesses Nestle is in are consolidating so fast that "we can't get to the next level without changing." Still, to get everyone to buy into the idea, Brabeck characteristically has set up a working group of national managers, including Weller, to figure out how to make the changes work in practice. That's another lesson the mountains taught him. "You learn very early on that you're better off working in a team," Brabeck says...