It's a huge company, which carries all the headaches that come with such a designation. Due to the heavy focus on marketing within the company, many projects live or die based not on merit or data but how well they are marketed internally. Most decisions are made through a system of advocacy and politics-based networking, often with committees being final approvers rather than individuals; which frequently leads to a lack of accountability when things go awry.
Senior management's primary role seems to be constantly re-organizing the company, often not changing how any of the work gets done within the organization, but just the reporting lines at the top and costing methods involved; claiming huge savings for the company while moving around the ever-shifting empire borders at the top three or four levels of the company.
While the company's benefits and compensation packages have remained competitive over the years, the same cannot be said about the work environments at many of the technical centers. While corporate headquarters in downtown Cincinnati have been maintained and remodeled, many of the technical centers leave the impression of decline rather than growth through their extremely dated facilities, poor HVAC systems, power outages, expensive cafeterias with terrible food, conference rooms without network access (or sometimes even phones) and other issues that detract from the work environment experience.
Lastly, the company has heavily pursued a strategy of out-sourcing in the last ten years, which may have been over-invested in and again focuses too much on short-term gains. Due to the focus on external partnerships and out-sourcing, most internal technical personnel and knowledge is grossly under-valued. Across R&D, Engineering and IT, this type of work is to be purchased and managed, not developed. Managing these partners will only get more difficult as those experienced personnel (who had the opportunity to develop their skills before the out-sourcing push) leave the company and are replaced by managers who have no background in actually doing the work they are managing.
