McAfee – “Stable, consistent, sales-driven”

Pros

McAfee is good to its best employees and does its best to help them blossom. It provides job stability in a difficult environment. Sometimes it acts as a start-up, while other times it behaves as a large corporation, usually to good effect. You'll find pockets of innovation and interesting thinking throughout the organization.

Cons

McAfee tends to jump from deal to deal, so focus suffers. Sales appears unfamiliar with the word "no". McAfee runs very lean, and while there are brilliant and capable people on many teams, it is often slow to remove dead weight, so the stars do a lot of heavy lifting. In some divisions, politics can be rife. Acquisitions have almost completely replaced internal innovation.

Advice to Senior Management

- Rewarding a salesperson because he or she signed a deal is fine. But what about the people who overcame the roadblocks on behalf of the salesperson? What about the people who toiled behind the scenes to get the product launched? Not to mention the people who spend months optimizing those deals. There's too little recognition and rewards outside of Sales.
 - The constant hiring freezes have taught middle managers that it's not worth dropping a mediocre employee, because the open headcount will likely be frozen before a solid replacement will be found. Hence, there's a sizable population of below average employees. These, in turn, sap the best and brightest of passion and energy. The outcome is predictable, if unnecessary.