One of the worst corporate structures for a company of this size and considering Singapore as one of the Global HQs.
Very very heavy on the middle manager roles whereby you have managers in many teams who are only managing 1 or 2 employees. This often leads to unhealthily high levels of micro-managing and oftentimes you see managers doing the work of the employees to "justify" their worth, with the lines between managers and employees blurred. Managers often have to take credit for their team's work (for self preservation) and there is also a lot of infighting amongst managers. This is also observed in other HQs around the world as well.
Due to the sheer number of middle manager roles, Danone also creates a lot of dotted reporting lines such that employees have multiple managers (to probably justify their existence), which leads to complexity an extremely dysfunctional corporate structure. Decisions also take a long time to close out. Due to the need to run up the many many chains of command and the matrix reporting structure does not help.
HQ in EU also wants too much control so there is no proper governance and structure in Asia. R&D team in EU for example are in charge of the new products that are launched in Asia??
