A company now run by bean counters who forgot Harman's core competency: great sound!
Pros
Harman has a wonderful history, some great brands, and has developed some great audio products in the past. The opportunity to produce great sounding audio products that people hear everywhere in the world is unmatched by working any other audio company in the world.
Cons
In recent years, corporate management in Stanford has become large and bloated, made up of mostly people from outside the audio industry who understand little about audio technology and the audio business. To make the non-corporate underlings more accountable they've put into place hierarchical layers of bureaucracy in all processes. As a result, decisions take forever to be made, often without valuable input from the people who know best. The slow decision process and compensation scheme means product managers are often unwilling to take risk: not exactly an environment to nurture innovation and new technology. Compensation is based on meeting unflexible targets set 1 year in advance (not long-term goals), so managers make decisions to maximize their bonuses, not always what's best for the medium-long-term health of the company and the consumer. A good example is arbitrarily moving factories/engineering to Mexico/China without adequate preparation. In the short-term, it saves money on paper, but at what cost? Time will tell whether the leaders realize what Harman's core competency is (good sounding products) and get behind it, before they destroy it.
