Diageo reviews

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.

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