Pros
There are no rules. Senior managers are either so self-absorbed or distracted by the maneuverings of their peers, that if you’re even slightly savvy at writing annual goals, you can essentially do what you want around here. Therefore, if you have a particular interest within your field, there’s usually an artful way of emphasizing activities related to that interest as part of your reward structure. Benefits are quite good, including gratis, summer Fridays, bonus, equity, etc. But base pay tends to be all over the spectrum. There are junior people who have (significantly) higher salaries than more senior people, even within the same work groups. This is often the result of pay curves for long-time employees being rather stunted compared to outsiders who are frequently offered higher salaries in order to recruit them. Also, if you are an outsider with consulting experience and Ivy League pedigree, this place will be your playground. People will assume you’re full of rainbows and brilliance. And if you have mastery of PowerPoint, you’re well on your way to the C-suite. Overall, the people here are pleasant to work with. Problems with personalities usually only arise in the context of defining turf, hoarding credit for successes, and deflecting blame – so it’s typical stuff. But most folks are fine over drinks. This is the kind of job where you can set fairly simple goals to achieve an average rating year-on-year and bide your time towards retirement.
Cons
This is not a great place to learn. There are rare gems within the organization that have particular areas of expertise. But if you’re looking for a challenging career where you’ll have a manager who can really develop you, this ain’t that gig. Most managers don’t know much about management, and there are few tools available to help them to improve. And even if a manager has strong managerial skills, the organization is so dysfunctional that such skills are not of much value. For example, if a manager in a particular brand or function creates a process improvement, there is no infrastructure to institutionalize the process improvement. Every manager operates within his or her domain independently. Incentives across groups appear to entirely diverge. And junior employees frequently report to managers who don’t understand the jobs of their subordinates. While this does enable relative freedom and autonomy on the part of the junior person, it corrupts the rewards system and eliminates opportunities to learn and grow. As a company, we create strategy documents with painstaking time and effort. But after they are presented, they simply go in a drawer and are occasionally mentioned in passing throughout the year. Furthermore, we call the documents “strategies”, but they’re not. If you pointed your finger at random at any employee, and asked them what the top 3 priorities are for the company or department, they would either freeze or spit out a slew of inactionable corporate jargon. We simply don’t know what we’re doing.
