Black & Decker Reviews

Pros

Good for polishing your resume, good brand to associate with a marketing backgound.

Cons

The senior leadership is out of touch with the marketplace and drinking the kool aid. Have to be a part of the "club" if you're looking to advance your career. you will only get somewhere within the company if you work in the Lake Forest office and know the right people. If you're good at politics and don't mind that being the method for advancement you would do well with this organization. If you want to be reward for good work, keep looking elsewhere as it rarely happens here.

Advice to Senior Management

Learn the market, taking someone's word for it and actually understanding it are two different things.

Pros

A good company to have on your resume and allows you to learn a lot in a short period at time due to the large number of different tools they create.

Cons

The pay is bad and they tend to over work the employees. The company has many managers but not many people to do the real work. The company has layed off people every year that I have worked with the company even when we had record breaking years. Project groups are very small and they expect projects to be completed in the same amount of time as other projects that had twice as many people.

Advice to Senior Management

The company needs to let people go that are not good workers instead of pushing them from group to group till you can get rid of them on a layoff.

Pros

Good work life balance, good benefits, friendly co-workers.

Cons

Definite gender discrimination, opportunities for advancement are highly dependent on who you end up working for. Company tends to overhire during good times and then go through several rounds of layoffs, salary freezes, etc. during bad times. No documentation of processes so everyone has to find information as if things had never been done before.

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce some of the middle management levels- too many layers. Increase communication and communicate to all staff at once. Do not filter information down the ranks.

Pros

Very young, driven staff who are mostly a lot of fun. It is a well-known brand and it is agreat to have such a resepcted name on your resume. Of course, getting quick access to all the power tools and other products we make is a great perk, especially when you need to do some projects around the house and garden and have everything you need at your disposal.
  Great training is provided early in your career (sales skills, negotiations, financial training, power tools product knowledge), but that training decreases after the first few years in sales or marketing.

Very autonomous- great place for go-getters!

Cons

Very much full of tight cliques. If you aren't "in" with the right people, your promotion opportunities are limited. There is not a great deal of openess to new ideas, and while we often start out with big ideas, we are a very risk-averse company, which means that we end up taking the path of least resistance. We talk about "swinging for the fences," but often chicken out no any big media spend or aggressive new projects.

The pay is okay, supposedly near the high end of the hardware industry, though it is definitely lacking relative to other consumer products companies.

Advice to Senior Management

Need change! Seriously, give us a stronger vision to help us determine how we will win in the marketplace, strategically diversify our business portfolio and channels of distribution.

Would also be nice to have senior management show a more public view to both the employees and the business community as a whole. It is very inspriing to see your CEO on the cover of Fortune or Forbes, talking about the strategic options that lie ahead. We just don't see that with current management.

Pros

Black & Decker offers some opportunities to advance in the work place if you have the right credentials and know the right people to advance within the organization. Black & Decker has it's own type of university to help those understand the philosophy of the company.

Cons

There isn't a lot of communication between departments and the direction of he company is confusing. Black & Decker Corporate does not understand the mfg sector of its business and makes decisions based on that belief.

Advice to Senior Management

You are only as good as the people who put you in that position

Pros

free parking, grounds are beautifully maintained, low level employees very cohesive

Cons

salary structure-many veteran employees have side jobs because they no longer can live on their salary

Advice to Senior Management

The sr.mgmt directives are watered down or ignored by the time they reach director and sr. mgr level. Too many layers means the good old boys spend all their time staging appearances to appease sr.mgmt. Great fear in making these statements after seeing reprisals suffered by others.

Pros

Decent, although not industry leading, benefits. Great employee discounts. There is opportunity for career advancement, however, the top is thick with a good ol' boys network. The future for the company is going to be heavily international so new division positions are a strong possibility. People who are willing to live off-shore for a period may find advantages in their career progression.

Cons

Top down management & HR red-tape rules regardless of the circumstance. Very frugal company to the extreme especially after the housing market collapse. The cost of living is fast out-pacing the company's willingness to adjust wages appropriately.

Advice to Senior Management

One word: Morale

Pros

You can learn a multitude of business software, which are being implemented without any purpose or direction. Whether these softwares are giving any ROI to Black & Decker Dubai is a really a question.

If you are in Sales come and join Black & Decker Dubai, there is absolutely no pressure for Sales guys to perform, even if lesser known and new competitors are eating away market share.

Have you heard of any Marketing team who does not even know what Brand Management is ? Then come and join here and sit back and enjoy while your bank account ticks every month.

This is a company who has been in the Middle East for the past 30 years, well entrenched business model, but does nothing to leverage the market position and knowledge.

Cons

You will get promoted at Black & Decker Dubai,if you know some key persons in Black & Decker Europe. No merits or performance are counted, only the proximity to key persons sitting at the top are attributes needed.

For eg., a SAP analyst from Black & Decker Europe can be a Regional Operations Manager - Supply Chain Dubai, since he know the VP Supply Chain who was also an IT guy. There are other talented people who have toiled hard, but they are being overlooked in other departments too.

Here each department is working as islands and know one knows what is happening. There is no sales plan, absolutely no marketing plan, no leadership and direction in the supply chain. The company is running somehow in autopilot only because UAE and the Middle Eastern market is booming with construction activities with billions invested each year.

Advice to Senior Management

They are dead pans sitting at the top who does not know what is happening at the bottom. The Black & Decker Europe Leadership is hopeless and they does not have any clear sense of direction and vision.