Great Place to Learn, Great Place to Retire (if you can stay employed)
Pros
Emerson has great processes and strong, stable leadership. It has great training infrastructure for its leaders, including very effective mandatory training for first-line managers and 360 reviews for directors and above. The company focus on profitability assures that the company at least is viable going concern and will be around for the indefinite future. The company has a fantastic retirement plan if you don't get laid off before you can build it up. For those who join now, there is a profit sharing contribution to your retirement. The older folks get a pension.
Cons
It's incredibly difficult to cull out poor performers - especially at the individual contributor level, but when profitability of a business unit is an issue, a layoff can ensue that takes out a whole swath of people - both good and bad. The culture tends to breed a lot of cliques and factions - both inside the various business units and especially between them. There are mandates to the business units to collaborate more effectively but for the most part these mandates are only given lip service. Each BU and Line of Business has its own P&L - to which incentive pay is based - and *everyone* is short staffed. Hence there is significant disincentive to collaborate if there is no way for both BU's to heavily monetize the opportunity. The company has a strategy to move into MRO & Energy services enabled by enterprise software. This strategy permeates the business with teams in every platform (Climate, Process, IA, etc) trying to execute it. Unfortunately, the company is not a true software development company - it is a component manufacturer with firmware development for the electronics it sells. Software development - especially enterprise software development - is an enigma to senior leadership. Therefore, while the software-enabled service strategy conceptually seems like a great idea, it has been extremely problematic to monetize. Many of the issues lie with the execution, but quite frankly the initial strategy was flawed as well. I'm not sure if there have been adjustments since 2013. Finally - the place is a case study in unfunded mandates. I heard "we need to do more with less" so many times that it ceased to have any meaning. There are process groups that expect compliance with certain process changes but the funding for the QA and project management heads to implement the changes is never there..