Pros
I am a former exec who did very well financially at Avantor. However, I am sickened by what I saw and was a party to. I could have made different decisions and chose not to. Every current employee at Avantor needs to make their own decisions, But I do want to provide some insight about how decisions are made so that you have a full set of facts. When NMC identifies a potential candidate for an EVP spot they send us through an expensive evaluation process. Once they decide on you they convince you that you are more talented then you are and that you are exactly what the company needs and make an offer that is significantly more than you made before. By playing to your ego and over compensating you they get you to believe their propaganda. Once you arrive at Avantor you realize that you are not going to be nearly as effective as you were led to believe. But by this point you have accepted your $xxx,xxx sign on bonus and told your family and friends how wonderful this opportunity was and how you were going to be a strategic leader of the company. The dollar and ego cost is too much to walk away from. All of this is set against NMC trying to justify a purchase that they did not understand which was based on assumptions that were not realistic. This put the execs in difficult position. We needed to do everything we could to keep up the sense that we were talented enough to make the kind of dramatic improvements that the owners demanded in order to buy time and sustain the generous compensation as long as possible. We knew that success as the owners defined it was not possible but only wanted to survive as long as possible, This reality forced us to take money from the group that had no voice in the discussion making process. We started by skipping the bonus for the employees one year, then two, etc (although may of us had guaranteed bonuses that we collected). Then benefits, then profit sharing,,, We knew it did not take any managerial talent to just take from our fellow coworkers but it was either prop up earnings that way or admit failure and walkaway from our personal compensation packages. As I said, I could have done more but it would not have swayed anything. I always thought that HR should shoulder more of the ethical responsibility to prevent many of these practices but they were some of the biggest advocates for many of these changes. If you are happy with your role at Avantor and think your base pay is fair then by all means stay. But if you are staying because you expect the tide against the employee to recede then you may want to reconsider. The current group of execs are as unable to change the company direction as I was. Their egos are equally large and their desire to hang on just as strong.
Cons
pros and cons discussed above
