I'm part of their most recent acquisition, and despite six months of "we like what you're doing so we won't change much" reassurances, we were all like deer in the headlights yesterday. My group in R&D lost nearly half (4 of 9) and the rest of us were scattered to other managers. My manager (up to yesterday) had this incredible knack for herding cats (aka the 7 engineers and 2 scientists in her group), but she was demoted out of management to staff engineer because they didn't like her laissez-faire management style. She would give us these difficult assignments and then just stand back and let us do them with only periodic review meetings. She got the most amazing results, but that doesn't matter when your management criteria is to micro-manage each member of each team.
We had two meetings with managers at the Director and VP levels yesterday who tried to put a brave face on the fact that the SJM management had essentially been lying to us the whole time. We're now "better focused for success in the new year." Right. We're going to be successful even though they closed down entire sites where there were several centuries of technical experience on our main product (the one that's generating all of the revenues that SJM is now "re-investing in other divisions" according to our talk yesterday). How does that work again?
After reading through the comments here, I think I'd better start looking around, and I don't think it will be another med-device company.