Dr Pepper Snapple Group – “Great brands keep this dysfunctional boat afloat”

Pros

Amazing brands with big budgets, gets you experience you can't touch at some companies and keeps this place going in spite of itself. Nice coworkers you would want to have over for dinner, even if they aren't driven to win. If you are happy with the status quo, work/life balance is a distinct possibility (i.e. not worried about promotions or career trajectory). Location of the company is great, with great cost of living and nice schools in the area.

Cons

Senior leadership has decided lack of vision and strategic business intelligence. They fail to communicate/align on any priorities (is "Be the best beverages company in the Americas" supposed to tell me anything?), choosing rather to fly around the country on the private jet to needless social events (that the company probably sponsors only for their benefit). Strong slant toward the carbonated beverages businesses, yet there is no focus on innovation in an environment where consumers want to drink less soda. Different functions run their business in isolation of each other, primarily Sales, National Accounts, Category Management, Company Operations, Marketing. NOT a marketing or consumer led company in the CPG landscape, translating to limited, short term thinking, and only tactics with no teeth. The most intelligent and motivated functions - R&D and Marketing - have no clout in the company, leading to quick burnout and talent turnover. Sales organizations - National Accounts, Field Sales, Shopper Marketing - and the internal company bottler operations are a severe inhibitor of future growth due to an overwhelming talent, motivation, and intelligence disparity (it hurts to the core to be belittled by people who can't form complete sentences in an e-mail, nor understand the difference between English composition complexities such as "its" and "it's"). At this stage, any consumer or product led initiative would be a moot push because nobody here would be able to sell it to retailers/customers, put it on their to do list, or even understand it for that matter. This makes change or any sustainable growth next to impossible. Company leaders are painfully risk averse, and only seek to protect their small empires and current way of being. Extremely flat organization that seemingly only gets flatter - if you are driven to succeed by climbing the corporate ladder, there's nowhere to go unless you've got 20 years to burn.

Advice to Senior Management

Those ACTION behaviors that you are so fond of - it's time to start adhering to some of those yourselves. Leadership isn't something relegated to the worker minions to figure out. Talk to each other, set the direction of the company, and communicate. Lead by example. Make decisions, and set priorities. This all starts at the top.