Pros
Employees, mostly veterans below Officer level have very good understanding of their respective business areas. Very flexible, short communication lines.
Cons
Until 2010, Baker was a dream of a company to work for. Excellent reputation, good advancement possibilities and personal development. Challenging work in an open environment. I was proud to say I worked at Mallinckrodt Baker. Then, everything changed. Owner Covidien sold Baker to New Mountain Capital, which for some reason decided it wanted to play Chemical Company, and renamed it Avantor. New Mountain should have been very good at installing good management and making sure strategic goals were in sight. Instead, they appointed the former cadre at Rohm & Haas which had not been taken over by Dow Chemical during their take-over. For a good reason: these people had no idea how to lead a specialty chemical company. Even the much praised Chairman, former CEO of R&H, turned out not to be able to stabilize management. After the take-over and after the former global leadership team of Baker had received its pay-out and left, New Mountain discovered the company was not doing as well as anticipated. I would think an investment company would be better at assessing financial situations and outlook. So instead of investing, they went in to venture capitalist mode: cut-backs, austerity and layoffs. Now, most of the competent people have left. Top management has completely changed at least 4 times over the past 4 years (with 5 or 6 CEOs), the reputation of Baker has been severely damaged and the outlook is not well. A failed SAP implementation resulted in major loss in revenue (after multiple warnings by experts that it would be a disaster). Most BUs were severely impacted by layoffs: lab, electronic and pharma. Most disturbingly, marketing and R&D positions were cut which is a bad sign is you are in an innovative business. Increased talk of outsourcing to India and China and basically firing everybody who disagrees. Top management seems to only be there for own advancement and not to help build the company. If this sound too bad to be true, I hope it was. I really enjoyed working there and was quite successful as well. But it pains me to see what my former colleagues have to suffer at the hands of career-minded people whose egos are writing checks their abilities cannot cash, hoping they will have rotated into the next career before anybody finds out.