Diageo North America Reviews

Pros

Diageo has good benefits and pays about average. The Company is in a stable industry but is currently losing margin in the tough economy.

Cons

Very political, allot of change for the sake of change. Generally people are overworked and expected to do more with less.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to put your people in front of profits. Millions are spent on employees engagement, then as soon as the economy takes a fall, the first thing to be impacted is the employees via layoffs.

Pros

Great products that people love -- Smirnoff, Tanqueray, Guinness, Johnnie Walker, Jose Cuervo, Bailey's etc... etc...

People are willing to work with each other.

Great management-union relationship.

Cons

Difficult to set a career path.

Promotions from within not as frequent as you would like to see.

Operations can have long and unpredictable hours.

Advice to Senior Management

Offer better carreer progression planning for team members.

Focus on delivering the short term goals, but do not lose site of the long term strategy.

Pros

Quality portfolio. Always good to work for #1. Had many more resoures and tools to compete in marketplace as compared to competitors.

Cons

As with any compny that is this large. Employees are numbers and are not really treated as part of the process or family.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more open minded to what the field has to offer. Just because senor management has best titles, doesn't mean they are only people who have answers.

Pros

Great experience, however, that comes at the price of having absolutely no work-life balance.
Brands are phenomenal and the company is a stable choice in this economy.

Cons

The leadership is extremely poor in competency and only understands how to maneuver through the politics of Diageo, rather than know how to lead a team to success. Additionally, we are so top heavy when it comes to leadership that it takes an excessive amount of time to arrive at even the simplest of decisions. This happens at most companies, however, Diageo is by far the worst I have seen. It's truly astonishing.

Additionally, Diageo is extremely frugal with their investments to the point where it's detrimental to the longevity of the business with respect to mostly investment in people but also with infrastructure. Our computers are absolutely horrible, running off of Windows 2000 with PC's built for Vista is just a combination for complete failure. Supposedly they are upgrading our system to Vista - they must have received a very large discount since this was announced one day after Windows announced that they would be moving to Windows 7.

Advice to Senior Management

Take out layers of leadership and ensure alignment of goals throughout all of Diageo NA.
Ensure consistency through different functions within Diageo (ie: procurement, quality, etc).

Pros

Diageo has the strongest portfolio of brands in the beverage alcohol industry which helps them generate lots of cash for new initiatives and product support. That makes it a relatively stable place to work. Most years they pay a good annual bonus to the employees, and the salaries are among the highest in the industry.

Cons

Diageo is a really big company and like many big companies, they breed mediocrity in middle management. It's a very political organization and change is very slow. Most managers at Diageo say all the right things in dealing with their employees, but do all the wrong ones. Most managers don't respect work life balance, they don't actually coach and develop their people, and the annual planning and performance assessments are largely an exercise of requirement once or twice a year. The IT infrastructure is one of the worst in the fortune 500. Their PC operating system is windows 2000 (not a typo), the network doesn't have sufficient bandwidth, and there's absolutely no systems designed to enable work collaboration. It's been a mess since Diageo was formed, and it's only getting worse.

Advice to Senior Management

If your vision for the future fails to include "how" people will work at Diageo, then your aspirations about "what" we will accomplish will fail; like "Destination 2011".

Pros

Good pay and great benefits. Lots of opportunity to move laterally and be promoted within the organization. The workload is reasonable, I know Diageo employees will disagree with this but I rarely see people in before 7:30AM or past 5:30PM. Diageo also permits reasonable telecommuting and is open to allowing personnel to working at different office locations.

Cons

As a result of the poorly managed Seagram / Guinness merger most of the talented people fled or were let go because of petty rivalry's. Because of this sudden growth and loss of talent, Diageo was forced to promote many inexperienced personnel to Directors. For this reason you will likely work for someone who can teach you the bizarre Diageo politics but cannot coach you as to how to actually do your job effectively. You will not learn much at Diageo that will be transferable to other Companies, everyone pretty much learns from making mistakes since there are no experienced seasoned professionals to mentor employees. This lack of mentoring is further magnified because of the many lateral moves they allow the 'high performers' ( cute young women or alma mater ) to make, as a result you will likely end up working for someone who has little experience in the department role and may be much younger than you.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire some talent. If we need to develop a capability why not hire someone with that capability, instead of making people suffer through learning from mistakes.

Pros

Great, great brands - widely admired and recognized by the entire world
Constant flow of projects and changes makes it exciting and challenging for anyone.
Although you do need to manage your own career, there are some many great ways to get fantastic experience. You do well at this CPG, I think you can succeed anywhere.
Great benefits - and an open bar with weekly happy hour and food in all office locations
Bonus packages seem to deliver every year due to consistently strong company performance
Flexibility - working from home is often accepted

Cons

Prioritization is difficult; there are often so many projects/changes taking place all the time - it can be draining and demoralizing when so many things are considered top priority.
Limited resources to manage the above across all functions - which makes it difficult to get things done
People are spread out geographically - telecons are the way most of us get things done, which makes it hard to build relationships and influence results.
Because everyone is so busy, it can be hard to plan and get results in meetings even for the most organized. Tardiness to meetings is too widely accepted (in my opinion) - but that's understandble when you are often double and triple booked, back-to-back all day long.
Ambiguous, unstructured culture - i.e. not process-oriented (it's a Brand company) - which is only a con for those coming from the GE six-sigma type corporate environment

Advice to Senior Management

Need to continue to find a way to prioritize
Ivan is a fantastic CEO

Pros

Great people, high level of competency, good renumeration, and lots of opportunity for advancement. Excellent training to advance your working knowledge and skill sets.

Cons

Constant reorganization it seemed to happen every year like clock work. With change often came new management with a new agenda.

Advice to Senior Management

Great company, with great people and great brands second to none. Keep the focus and stay the course as opposed to changing every year. This way people will be loyal to the company.

Pros

people are great and the brands are fantastic. There is a usually a young and ambitious environment in the office with diverse people making it a fun place to work. The culture is performance oriented and demanding but the people and brands make it easy to work there.

Cons

Consensus driven culture make the company not agile, and there are many layers of management that need to be won over and consulted before any initiative can be pushed through. Also, sometimes preference for career progression is based on who you know versus accomplishments and potential.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more agile and action oriented

Pros

There are very few companies that provide terrific assignments, work life balance, adequate compensation, balanced comp package and fun. People grow if they want to and can switch locations, countries to gain so much experience. Workplace is fun when u sell adult beverages. There are always great get together and offsite meetings. In past few years, management has brought stability and terrific vision to grow brands, people and company. Senior management is groomed well to focus on people first and create a great people culture. All offices have full size bars and people socialize on thurdays over free drinks. If you want fun, this is the company to work for.

Cons

Big a big company brings its own challenges. The promotions come late as people never leave. Lot of money is wasted on initiatives that never deliver anything. Bureaucracy plagues a few groups. Global policies stifle innovation.

Advice to Senior Management

Decentralize global groups and fire people who waste money on initiatives that fail to deliver results