Pros
great products and technologies. people really care about the impact on patients.
Cons
toxic management culture... some examples at US Surgical in CT... one time... management decided that they wanted Covidien to be viewed by the market as producing strong talent. To implement this, they decided that a Marketing or Sales person or executive at Covidien was equivalent to an employee that was one grade higher at a competitor company. Therefore, they proceed to have everyone in the marketing and sales orgs to re-interview for their jobs and ultimately gave everyone a demotion of one grade in their titles (kept the salary the same). Talk about demotivating an entire team!! another time... sales had always focused on selling via large hospitals. however, for a new product launch, the largest target was obviously in the alt. site. so, rather than compensating the sales org to go after the alt.site, the executive team decided keep the commission structure the same but give enormous sales targets for the product launch. unsurprisingly, the product launch revenues were completely off target, the sales org was not making any money, and the management team started pointing fingers to blame each other! eventually, they decided to fire all the sales people and lower level marketing people that didn't hit the ludicrous targets they had set. unbelievable! finally, Mansfield is clueless about how to run a surgical device company. the silos of Pharma, Kendall, Valley Lab, and US Surgical from the Tyco HC days are all separate entities and managed like they are all the same business.