Harley-Davidson, Inc. reviews

A long time ago, magazines wrote articles about this being one of the top 100 employers to work for. Well let me tell you after the 100th Anniversary, and Elton John singing to Bikers - it all changed. The company is ran in a vicious cycle. If you can survive good for you, and everyman for himself. There were many good employees that were hurt by things management did to them. People who counted the minutes until they could retire and never look back. The danger came if you could not manage your Director or VP well. Sure there were some unique managers from Honda that needed to be building weedwhackers instead of motorcycles. It would not be a place I would want to see my friends wind up. One guy in finance called me a while back and had been working 20 hour days to get a project out. Asked me if I could hire him to get him out of there, unfortunately I couldn't help. The sad thing is that he needed to do that to make his manager look good for the guys up top. Did I forget to mention that bonus were once part of your salary, and they disappeared too.

It is both psychologically and emotionally unhealthy environment. Harley’s systems and processes are incredibly archaic, incompatible with legacy systems and amount to an enormous patchwork of systems that do not communicate with one another. Its inconceivable that a company that is perceived to be so great from the outside is so dysfunctional on the inside. The true life experience at Harley doesn't remotely come close to the story told in business school case studies. Departments operate in silos frequently duplicating efforts and spinning their wheels because no one works together on projects - big or small. Each project is riddled with personalities, politicking and backstabbing and at the end of the day, leadership (and I use the term loosely) lacks the capacity to make decisions and are therefore ineffective.