Pros
I am continually surprised by all the positive reviews about working at Tesoro; but there is also the potential that it's better in the field than it is in San Antonio. The pay is good, the facilities are nice, there are a lot a smart, friendly people and hard workers who have been acquired from lots of different organizations. The company is profitable and the business model is sound. Some of the leaders run their areas well. In general, as a business, Tesoro has a lot going for it.
Cons
However, culture eats strategy for breakfast. While there are positive pockets, generally Tesoro is about as dysfunctional as it gets (in my years of living different corporate cultures). Senior leadership seems severely out of touch with the day-to-day or else, they just don't care. Either way it comes down to not caring enough, because while we are spending money and burning effort on renaming/rebranding the company and there is a lot of "rah rah" and bling, there is severe attrition associated with the schedule-driven, burn-out machine that is our poorly run ERP implementation; there are acquisition integrations in a changing system and uncertain organizational environment; and there are constant (every 3 months or so) reorganizations, especially within the CFO organization. Key positions of leadership are occupied by clueless, quickly promoted yes-men with previous connections to the C suite. Empire building is constant, and the deck gets shuffled so often that even a consistent empire would be preferable to the constant positioning. Women are not well-represented or respected in leadership. Large initiatives are launched, declared successful and then disbanded with no evidence that any process ever really changed (no scorecards, no accountability). Worker bees are completely expendable, whether they have 1 or 18 years worth of knowledge. Within certain cabals, dissent is not tolerated. The solution to what to do about the employee survey was not to do another one (people have told me they lie on the survey because, in the past, it has not truly been anonymous and they're not sure it is now).