Fast and fun products. Tedious culture. - Manager Yamaha Motor Employee Review

The joke is that the parent company - Yamaha Motor Corp. (YMC) actually stands for Yamaha Meeting Corp. Lots of time spent in meetings and preparing PPT presentations for meetings and slogging through emails. Not uncommon to prepare at least three PPTs in a single week and attend three meetings a day, which severely impacts productivity. Very reactive business culture, often having to prepare reports for Japanese and realizing they aren't really read but simply passed up the line. This was proven when I learned to recycle presentations and simply changed the date. Business units not helpful to each other. Invitations to be involved are typically nothing more than attempts to secure your budget to subsidize their tactics and goals. No clear strategic approach - simply stringing tactics together. Many managers in place for decades. Often hear, "We want new ideas" but when new ideas are presented they're met with, "That's not the way we do it here." Human Resources personnel, not surprisingly, is very weak and unable to strike a balance between the employees' and the company's needs. Many employees simply riding the gravy train to retirement or holding on until a better opportunity comes along. The company is severely hamstrung by processes and procedures, reactive assignments, restrictive IT policies, and fear of lawsuits (due to a class action lawsuit involving the Rhino, which was baseless and Yamaha won but left the company shit-scared to do anything). Financially they are challenged while competitors have returned to profitability, yet they continue to say it's because of 2008.