Gibson Guitar Reviews

Pros

Good people overall, great heritage, great brands and potentially great product without interference by CEO.

Cons

Truly evil CEO with absolutely no business sense or ability to empower the talented employees who only want to make the company successful. If you go to work there you will either lose your sanity or be fired quickly. There are dozens of job openings now due to repeat firings of key execs who only seem to last a few months. There is no continuity or ability to get things running and the environment is toxic. The CEO is highly abusive and micromanages every detail running the business into the ground. The joke of it is that he is actually being honored soon by the Ant-Defamation League at an event in NYC later this year. If they only knew the lack of respect he has for the people who work for him, his customers and his vendors and the unethical way he approaches everything and how is killing the company and the brand. It will be interesting to see if he is still CEO when this event happens in November. He somehow gets involved in charity work and pulls the wool over people's eyes only to stroke his huge ego, but the artists have wisened up and think he is a joke. Well, the banks are about to shut you down Henry and force you out! The company will be a better place when you are history.

Advice to Senior Management

Remove the CEO before it is too late to recover. Trust your people to do their jobs. Gibson can be great again but bold action is required at the top..

Pros

Reknown name as maker of famous instruments.

Cons

The company stifles any glimmer of employee morale through constant micro management. The quality and direction of the products is suffering, the reputation of the company is falling.

Advice to Senior Management

Take some training courses and learn how to interact with and manage people.

Pros

Pay, making the coolest product in the world, the people are great. Wouldnt be worth working there if not for the people.

Cons

Leadership, CEO seems to hate everyone around him. People at the top are treated terribly, then fired without warning. Entire company makes all decisions based on fear of what Henry will think, say, or do.

Advice to Senior Management

Pray, hang in there, hope for a change. Cover your butts, be prepared to devote ALL your time and energy to this place.

Pros

Donut Fridays and the 12 month severance!!

Cons

The whole experience was horrid! Not a place that I would recommend to anybody, unless they needed a short term assignment. HJ and DB have left their mark in Nashville and it is not a good one. New executives take the blame for HJ's and his trusted side kick RM's constant lack of poor decisions.

Advice to Senior Management

Hey HJ, Karma is a b*tch ain't it....You deserve what you get!!

Pros

Incredibly well recognized brand name.

Cons

Terribly abusive CEO who is impossible to make happy because he is not in his right mind. Pays enormous salaries to people who aren't necessarily deserving of them and pays very little to others who have worked at the company for years and years.

Everyone at the corporate office is so beaten down and demoralized that the work ethic is in the toilet. No one is passionate about what they do and no one much cares for putting in a full day's work, taking pride in their work or really acomplishing anything. It has an effect on everyone. But again, this trickles down from the poor management at the very top.

Advice to Senior Management

Put your people over your bottom line and I promise your bottom line will improve because your people will work harder for you and be more invested in the company's bottom line.

Pros

Requesting time off was never an issue.

Cons

High stress, low pay, and nothing makes any logical or common sense. Management is so far removed from the real world, they don't even have a clue, but to them it is all in the sense of "forward thinking." Continual negative almost hateful feedback and never any raises or reviews with also very unrealistic goals and expectations. Extremely bad policies towards customers and dealer base that are detrimental towards business growth and are borderline illegal. Company puts out sub-par product, but really exploiting the Gibson same to it's fullest degree. Trust me, the "mystique" of working at Gibson wears off really quickly when you realize that you are in Office Space, but even worse.

Advice to Senior Management

Change your dealer policies, have more positive reinforcement, and hire managers that know how to deal with people. For the CEO, let the managers do their job and stop micro-managing everything. Listen to sound advice when those below have good ideas. Some of the best ideas of businesses come from the bottom up not from the top down.

Pros

A good name to have on your resume. There is no other reason to work for this company.

Cons

No raises, reviews or feedback.

Advice to Senior Management

Considering this is a private company, and the only management that matters is the CEO (one of the owners) my recommendation is for Henry to sell the company before he ruins the name any more.

Pros

Great people. The people I worked with at Gibson were second to none. Gibson was always somewhere that I was proud to tell people I worked. The company has an amazing history and being a part of that is very gratifying. Being a musician in Nashville, it was also very fun to work with people with whom I had so much in common. Lots of musicians of different types work for Gibson and they're fantastic people. Every now and then Gibson would also throw a cool party or give you a t-shirt or something (who doesn't love a free t-shirt?), but not very often...

Cons

There are quite a few down sides unfortunately. The main one that came into play for me was financial. I worked at Gibson for three years and never received a review or a cost of living raise of any kind. At the point to where we were supposedly going to be given raises and be allowed reviews, the process was stalled for various reasons and eventually we were told "The raises are on Henry's desk, so that's all we can do..." If our supervisors are to be believed, that means that Henry ignored a large percentage of his employees (what else is new) and chose to fill his time with other things rather than make sure his employees were happy and taken care of.

Also, Henry likes to pretend that he runs a tech company. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to realize that he holds the greatest guitar brand in the history of the world in the palm of his hand. Instead of making guitars that his customers want- the Les Pauls, SGs, Flying Vs, etc; guitars with historic value and instant charisma, He'd rather try to reinvent the wheel buy producing guitar that tune themselves (that is, for about five minutes... then they break and the customer is forced to begin the convoluted customer return process).

Advice to Senior Management

Wake up. You run a guitar company... not a tech company. Gibson guitar is not Microsoft. Henry Juszkiewicz is certainly no Bill Gates. It's time for you realize that you have a sure thing and present yourself as that sure thing- the coolest guitars in history... not the lamest.

Pros

This company had grown for a tiny business to a global business that dominates its industry. It is implementing some of the best practices in business and managment.

It has a foundation that shows its commitment to bettering the world.

Cons

This is a goal driven culture. All people have specific goals and those goals are tracked daily.

Advice to Senior Management

I would try to bring better executive talent to support the CEO.

Henry works very hard and is overly stretched.

Pros

Don't know what else you want to do.

Cons

Micromanaged to the nth degree. Culture of bitter employees that are settling because they do not know what else they would do if they did not work at Gibson. Management does not make business decisions. All direction is based on emotion and subject to change with the wind.

Advice to Senior Management

Make a plan and commit to it. Lead your employees. If you believe something is worthwhile and communicate it to your employees, the dedicated people will believe in it too. Oh, and please take down the Gibson Commandments. They are an insult to every deserving employee that has been slighted.