In its heyday, Philips had 14 thriving businesses, many related to innovative and fast moving consumer electronics industry. It's now down to three. Semiconductors and consumer electronics are gone, as are flat screen displays and TV business. What's left - lighting, consumer lifestyle and healthcare are sustainable businesses as long as you keep innovating ahead of hungrier and more agile competitors. Unfortunately, that's not the case at Philips. Management took focus off the innovation ball in exchange to quarterly results grind. As a result, they "squeeze the dime until the buffalo on it shits", or whatever the European analog of this saying is, by skimming on benefits and perks, and laying off thousands of people at a time. But I guess it would make business sense if it were done in order to cut dead wood by making operation more efficient - to the contrary, it costs them much more in hurt morale than they save on salaries and benefits. Classic case of being penny wise and pound foolish. I worked in Healthcare and the biggest innovation during my tenure was sticking a $50 wireless box to the bottom of a $4000 MSRP medical monitor using Velcro(!) tape. Really ! People I talked to in the field could not believe this thing bore Philips' brand ! "Times -are -changing..." I guess. At the same time they promoted the hardware "architect" who came up with the idea in the first place and whose job it was to design proper wireless solution and who failed to get it done in 6 years. He would take two years to do the design and by the time he was done, the chip he chose would be obsoleted or become incompatible, so he would scrap the design and start all over. And again and again and again. All while getting raises and praises from his manager, who incidentally was also his sailing buddy. From the outside this may look like some kind of industrial sabotage, but of course it's not - just a result of severe case of incompetence and a life long habit to pointing fingers - along with keeping brown nosing all the right people. Between going to the gym, taking 2 hour lunches and playing office poker there is really no time to do the actual work ! These are the people who are left in dark corners of the office space after corporate broom does its next round of sweeping. If you have any aspirations about your career, take a map, draw a 10 mile radius around every Philips location in the world and don't cross the line ! This company, in its 123 rd year of existence is full of metastatic cancerous material and you can become infected. Unless they need your contractual services (this happened to me) to do the little actual work that many employees are unwilling or incapable of doing. Somehow, many "lifers" see employment as an entitlement to collect salary for pushing their work onto the new hires and avoid any commitments at any cost ! Retirement on the job is the ultimate American dream, is it not :-) ?
