AIG (American International Group)

"Stay Away...

De-Motivating"

"The pros of this organization are not to be undervalued, even if they seem less tangible than the cons. Middle management on the production side and employees at all levels on the service side have an exceptionally high skill level. Day-to-day, you work with experts, with people who are capable of understanding and working within contexts that are complex and full of constraints. And you can do so with autonomy. Things move pretty quickly, the company lingo is practically a language of its own, and most people prefer working with someone who learns the ropes fast, does what they have to do and makes decisions regarding their own domain without asking permission to do it. The cons are related mostly to the flip-side of individual autonomy. It's a big organization and obviously corporate governance is a crucial concern. But the way compliance is put into pratice is to have a lot of procedures for monitoring without there necessarily being much of a link between the rule and the activity/transaction/practice that needs to be controlled. Paired with a certain personal risk aversion among senior management who seem to just now be discovering that they are supposed to be accountable and knowledgabe - as opposed to just putting production pressure on employees - the sense is that compliance is no longer a means for checking that proper rules for doing business are in place and being respected, but that it is an activity unto itself and there to provide personal reassurance for someone higher up on the food chain.In other words, there is litte communication of rules and guidelines to enable people to do their job "in bounds", and, to make up for it, there is an inordinate number of boxes to tick and after the fact review to show that a procedure exists for catching what probably wouldn't have been done if there had been a guideline.Also, while the worker bees do genuinely seem innovative and technically expert, this mentality has not exactly flowed up. Not sure what the reason for this is, or which of these reasons is worse, but among a) preferring to keep talking about the problem rather than fix it; b) not allocating resources to fixing the problem; c) not being able to understand the problem; or d) not having the patience to hear out that there is a problem, upper management is not inspiring confidence.A final criticism is the appearance of transparency and communication over actual, meaningful transparency. For some reason, there will be a town hall meeting in which the CEO will answer a question from a subsidiary in Singapore about the strategy of selling off assets to pay the Fed financing - as if this were going to be done on a global employee referendum - but there will scarcely be a posting of job openings and an application process instead of appointments by management when it comes to new opportunities. "