Pros
Innovative, inclusive culture. You’re apart of a global forward thinking company that’s been around for 100 years, with a legacy of leading the world in advanced technologies. Considering it’s size, Panasonic does a phenomenal job hiring quality people who are smart, and have a desire for achievement. There is a sense of pride working here. The company is very loyal to its employees— the average tenure is 10.5 years. It’s a very secure, family oriented, Japanese influenced culture. There are brilliant people working in this company. The products are top notch. There is excellent engineering and innovative design that goes Into products. The most recent restructing of the business units is a great thing, but there are and will be many pains in years to come as things coalesce and take shape.
Cons
It’s a large, global organization, with 250,000+ employees. There’s bound to be bureaucratic, slow moving inefficiencies. North American is a separate business from Japan and it’s factories. This can lead to a breakdown in communication and planning and resource exchange. As with most big companies, the further up the management chain you go, the less they have any idea how the business runs or should be run. They have upper management that traverses roles between business units and divisions, often with little knowledge of the new businesses and their product, the market, or the most effective business models for organizing teams and achieving growth. As you get higher up the chain, your life becomes more numbers and less about value. It’s more about paperwork than people. Unfortunately strategy and goals are set by upper management, and the result is really ineffective strategies with mediocre results. Like shooting into the dark. I’m not sure there is a cure for this other than stronger leaders, with stronger visions, with more intimate knowledge of the business domain, and the power the make necessary changes. Lots of red tape. The company is run by accountants, not sales people. Accountants don’t know value. They only understand price. This is very bad for a company in the long run. It can cut a companies most important value propositions, and edge over the competition. There is a gap between markets and products, and how to make them fit. Marketing is very poor. Products can and often are very very good. Sales management overall is poor. They hire great people, and expect them to run a personal business and manage themselves. This only works so well. A company needs a cohesive vision and strategy, so sales, marketing, operations, planning, and product management and development are all aligned. Problem is that in a company this large, business resources are shared. This means business processes are forced upon a business unit that operates in a market or industry with vastly different requirements to compete. The result is processes that make no sense and really hinder he ability of the business to grow.
