Let's say someone makes you the CEO tomorrow, what do you do first?
13 replies (most recent on top)
Remove subscription licenses from hardware products.
Fire everyone from Director up.
Raise dividends to make long term share holding more attractive.
Actually reward talented engineers, and look to get them in to (our version of) cutting edge tech so not to lose them from boredom and kickstart that new tech.
Do away with the open office settings... JFC it's terrible.
Probably drop IOT as it nebulous and aimless.
STOP CHANGING WERE TECH DOCS ARE STORED. bock-bock, jive, IBM whatever, smartsheets. It's to much moving the manure pile around and calling it progress.
Install solar panels above the parking lots, get the power keep people from giving their skin the 3rd degree.
Mandatory d–g testing for Chuck and executives from Cisco + all acquisitions.
Recruit a CEO with world-class technology chops, then step aside.
First thing I’d do is, fire Gerri! She has ruined a terrific sales and technology sales organization.
sell off the switching and routing business. Keep the rest.
Ditch XE. It's embarrassingly bad compared to XR. What a waste of manpower
Looking at 4 suggestions below - implementing any of them would help a ton... Just use common sense.
20 years of incompetence and stagnation is impossible to fix
Cisco must cut 10-15% people first not to shrink or cut cost but to revise the salary and talent pool. Raise the hiring bar tremendously, pay good salary, attract the top tier talent. Not pay like f—ing 140K or such lowly base to even G10 people with such terrible comp and hire people who work without zeal.
- Everyone is measured on the same goal. No more competing across groups.
- Settle down on tools. We don't need to change every 2 years
- Manage people out instead of LR's every quarter. People are afraid to question anything because they'll be on the next LR.
Focus on having a sensible user experience for every single one of our products and sales / buying experience, ensuring they were all compatible and worked together in a sensible way (esp security suite), reposition each of our products given realities of their compeition.