It's been two years since I left and it looks like Cisco is still attempting to cut its way to profitability instead of actually trying to fix everything that's been broken for years now. And apparently after years of trying to do the same thing the same way and failing, the ELT has not learn its lesson. Why am I not surprised?
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Arista or HP earning more government contracts would literally shut the lights off. Although unlikely due to our focus on government relationships.
Stock has seen no growth in the last year. People say we are in bubble, tech companies are over valued. CSCO seems immune to any of it. If the price is stable in bubble times, what can happen if markets tank. The biggest culprit is Collab and Webex in particular. Every 2 years, bring in an SVP and that person will do some clean up here and there and repeat the cycle.
Even worse, starting April last year, Zoom started going by $5B every month in market cap. The Webex BU had a full year to react to it. So far nothing has changed. It cant get worse than this.
The problem at Cisco is that most directors, VPs and SVPs don't have the courage to tell their hierarchy when they are wrong. Saying "yes boss" to anything and everything is just engrained deep in the culture. SVPs who have long outlived their time and have failed to understand market transition focus on irrelevant, minute changes rather than strategic ones. And with nobody to challenge them, the company is sinking a little further day by day.
Who agrees middle management tier is useless?
Cisco has a government protected monopoly in North America. We don't need "leaders" to generate billions in revenue. Just a few used car salesmen that can learn high-level buzzwords.
Headquarters has transformed into 1970's Soviet Union. Layers of bureaucrats that protect each other and steal money from the company.
It only gets worse. Those “leaders” are useless overhead. All they are capable of doing is to transfer jobs to India. The new products are either not working or extremely poor quality.
When the only tool you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail....
Build an organization full of "leaders" who don't lead how can you expect them to drive change and fix problems.