General Electric

Some of the people are just brilliant and experts in their fields.

Everyone works pretty collaboratively (except for between a tier 2 business, see below).

The work can be pretty fulfilling depending on what you're working on.

They have permissive leave, which is great to take advantage of the summer and skiing in the winter.

No raises in 2 years for the entire business is unsustainable, along with very little acknowledgement by management that it is a problem.

Leadership communication is poor. Imagine your favorite politician ducking a debate question, and you have what it looks like when upper leadership answers a question in an "all-hands" meeting.

There are many legacy systems that can be extremely hampering to innovation and positive change.

Organizational change seems to come in waves, where we swing from one mode of operation and then back to the next every time upper management changes every 12-18 months. This erodes standard ways of doing work and causes people to fall back on informal channels to get work done, which falls apart completely when someone leaves or changes roles.

A specific issue is aligning a tier 2 business that is owned by GE but operates as if it's independent. Their goals seem completely divorced from the GE units they operate with, leading to lost opportunities for GE as a whole.

Measure management based on the outcome of changes made in all previous GE roles to discourage the cycle of:

1. Get management role
2. Completely change operational rhythm
3. Hop to horizontal or diagonal management role after 12-18 months.

Sometimes it feels as if we are pursuing perfection at the cost of being able to attain average.