Pros
1. A handful of upper management are meritocratic. You are quite lucky if you have them as your line/direct managers (Honest to god, no sarcasm here) 2. Perfect place to groom your sycophantic behavior 3. You are in for a ride of suspense. I guess that counts for "thrill" if that floats your boat. You never know if worthy people will get their due promotions/bonuses or less deserving people with a particular talent for sucking air out of derrière would. Its anybody's guess. Keeps the "Corporate Slavery" spirit alive.
Cons
1. Finishing your allocated work between 9-5 is looked down upon behind closed doors. If you don't stay late that means you aren't going the extra mile. 2. Meaningful projects are a rarity to come. The team i.e. Catalyst is rapidly turning into a proper back-end office focused on doing mindless labor rather than meaningful consulting projects. 3. Since bulk of the employees work on the above-mentioned kind of projects, it is extremely difficult to assess a person's capability. 4. People close to the management are rewarded easily (To be fair, its a ubiquitous thing rather than a Catalyst/Euromonitor thing) 5. Upper management has the authority to change an employee's rating (despite never meeting or working with the employee) even if the employee's direct/line manager has different views. 6. Team's vision + outlook + hierarchy changes at the drop of a hat. Really no point in grooming/recruiting a specific kind of talent if you end up changing your direction on a monthly basis. Poor vision such as this leads to a good chunk of recruits being deemed surplus and consequently allocated mindless labour. 7. EXTREME EXTREME OFFICE POLITICS. 8. Borderline micromanagement by the senior folks in London (Cue EIC joke). Since when has the director of a company started taking stock in if a person has "swiped in" or not. 9. Different rules for different teams with respect to leaves, WFH, micromanagement, visibility, promotion emails etc.