Panasonic reviews

NO work life balance. 24/7 connected by e-mail, texts and company supplied devices. Lots of management shift their responsibilities downward and deflect their work to others. Japanese management asks for endless reports on the same subjects over and over until they get the numbers that sorta jive with what they were looking for. Like going in circles? Since the U.S. is a major market for training a lot of their younger managers for future senior roles they are stubborn and hard headed and refuse to listen or understand when a given category, business or market changes. Like it's "our" fault. And usually never they accept blame that perhaps the PRODUCTS were the reason for the business decline or failure and not the tireless and hard working efforts of the American staff.

The con of this, of course, is that it's incredibly one-size-fits-all, and so, unless you are an engineer or come in with special training of that sort, you will be placed in one group and moved around ever few years with very little regard to your individual strengths, preferences. etc. --Because of the lifetime employment model, where each employee is expected to be there until retirement, I had the unfortunate situation of being bored out of my mind. Everyone told me the first three years are hard and it gets better after that... but I felt like I was wasting my time so I left after the first year. --I was the only Western person in the entire building of 2,000 people. What surprised me the most was that, amidst the talk of how imperative it is for the company to globalize, so few people were interested in anything I had to say, suggest, etc. --You don't get to choose where you work, or in what field. I was assigned to the sales group in the AIS company, so I moved to Yokohama, but others who started with me were in Osaka working for other companies in Panasonic. --The bureaucracy is stifling. I bet that they could eliminate half of the tasks they do and still produce the same amount. --There are so many middle-level managers who either don't feel like they can change anything or do not want to change anything. Adhering to/falling back on the rules is so commonplace, I don't really understand how innovation happens. Probably very, very slowly, and almost always top-down. --The hierarchy. Some people didn't get into the elevator if the President of the company was in it. This is very Japanese. It isn't just Panasonic, it is probably any Japanese company of this size and with this history. --Best part of all--every morning at the beginning of the work day everyone stands up and sings the group song, the only line of which is "let's get together at Panasonic." I kid you not. And then someone gets up in front of each group of people and reads the company's Basic Management Objectives, with all the employees repeating after each line. I kid you not. It is not really a con, but it serves to illustrate how much Panasonic cherishes its history and traditional practices. --I personally felt like I had no opportunity to have any ideas I had see the light of day. It made me wonder why they brought in a foreigner like myself, just to have me sit at my desk feeling useless and bored, doing the occasional translation project. Not a good place to go to feel empowered, unless you are a 50 year old man or something.