In spite of the years since I've worked at this company, I still find myself quite passionate about it - and not in a good way.
This company combines the mindset typical of southern Indiana with the wages typical of southern Indiana and (generally) an inflated sense of self-worth.
There's lots of company politics, and it's easy to hide behind red tape. It's far easier to stay in management's good graces when doing the bare minimum than when trying to do even a little more. If you do more, why isn't everyone else? And if your boss doesn't try to get a comparable amount of work out of others, they'll get in trouble too. It doesn't help that Cummins generally seems to think that employee seniority and ability are proportional, if not one and the same. If some young upstart does better, well, the only possibility is that they are cheating in one way or another. Probably wrecked quality that day, or cut the lifetime of the equipment in half by abusing it.
Paraphrasing the author of "Exponential Organizations", if you make waves in an organization then its immune system is likely to attack you. Cummins has a strong immune system. It has many employees who are convinced they are brilliant, and if you're making the life of someone brilliant difficult, then you must be wrong... right? They'll do all they can to marginalize you and get you out of the organization. Perhaps by giving you the responsibility to fix a high-profile problem, and encouraging you to make bold promises, but sabotaging you by ensuring you do not have the authority to go along with that responsibility. Or perhaps by becoming concerned about your flagrant policy violations and ensuring that HR is aware of how damaging they are to morale... regardless of how trivial the transgression might actually be or how many outstanding employees do the same.
There are lots of "good ol boys" at Cummins, and HR and management are firmly on their side. Upper-level management seem to be nice people, but they refuse to believe how much difference there is between what they expect to happen and what is actually done by those under them.
Cummins policies often use language that may sound good but makes them broad and very difficult to live up to. Numerous positions have job descriptions that are practically impossible to fulfill without violating one policy or another. Faced with the choice between standing up for what they think is right or sensible, and what will keep them employed, most Cummins employees gave up on standing up for things long ago.
If you look at a Cummins job posting, you'll find you have to read through a fair amount of non-job-related text before you get to the meat of what the job _could_ entail. Expect to have to wade through at least that much nonsense day-to-day. And notice that I said could: the duties are padded with a lot of stuff that probably sounds quite interesting... but the chances of you actually doing much of what's described are very slim. Someone in the department who has seniority will take the easy and interesting parts. You'll get what's left.
I'm half-convinced that the lower levels of management could be replaced by randomly-selected prison inmates, with no negative effects. Not that inmates would make good managers, but that almost all managers who stick around Cummins are exceptionally poor managers. I once witnessed a manager tell some of his team that he knew their kids (who worked in the same facility) and if they didn't work enough overtime their kids would dissappear. Not funny. Even less funny for those whom he'd told about his first four jobs and how he was fired from them. One for lying, one for stealing, and two for picking fights with his boss. Not someone you want to hear joking about violence.
You'd hope this guy was an exception and that all other managers were far better. Unfortunately, he didn't seem to be substantially below average. The team's faith in HR to do the right thing was such that nobody reported his threats.
