We were a great company once that respected its employees and did everything it could to keep the best talent instead of looking to get rid of them in any way possible because they "earn too much." I can't pinpoint when the shift happened, but I can see the change and I miss the old company. It was a pleasure working for the old Cisco. Today, I hate my job.
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When did it start going downhill? Right after the first big layoff in 2001, when JC cried big fat crocodile tears about how he rode Wang into the ground with layoff after layoff and never wanted to go through that again, so "20% must go so we have breathing room."
Everything sucked after that - annual layoffs, hunger games, slideware over product, and every all-hands meeting a personality cult "60 minutes of love for dear leader" event.
Boards and Councils was another low-light watershed moment. Was that around the same time as the Flip acquisition? Both case studies of lack of imagination combined with self-deluding hype.
2011 - the year that CSCO started to spin out a dividend.
cut costs and ask for the un-natural in order to find 3% in dust bunnies
We lost our way when we brought in leaders that failed to acknowledge mistakes and started gaming the data, rather than dealing with reality. The whole SFDC crew has invented and reinvented an alternate reality. Example: Ask why we quit using historical data on Net Promoter Score. It is because, while still “decent” relative to the rest of our peers, it is nowhere close to where it was under the previous regimes.
Exactly two years before Chambers left. He overstayed to the point of making everyone cringe whenever he spoke on behalf of the company. But it just got worse with MM and her clique of followers from SFDC. Watching the last Check-in with Thimaya repeating we are transforming to become One Cisco without any substance was painful.
Just one word: INTERCLOUD.
2 Specific Events:
- After a rough quarter back in 2008-2010 (cant remember the exact quarter) the CFO at the time (F.... C........) sent out a video out to all employees essentially pointing the finger at them. It did not go well. The comments were so rough that JC had to do a second video a few days later to try to calm things down.
- CR hiring MM. I get what he was trying to do, but it didn't work. She brought in her whole SFDC crew and upset a lot of people internally. They can try to financially engineer all the numbers in the world, but the reality is that customers are not bought into the CX concept. Revenues are exactly where they were back in 2015 (+/- a few percent) and I put a lot of this on her. When she took out the legend JP 3 month into her reign, that was a bad sign. She may be a great operator, but from an employee/customer POV she is not good.
The beginning of the decline occurred when Chambers went off the deep end with 50 business priorities and Boards & Councils. He couldn't figure out how to create the next wave of growth because he was a sales guy that didn't understand the technology that was available to solve customers' business problems and because he couldn't bring himself to re-organize the company to prepare it for the changes in the industry. He was throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if anything would stick. His last gasp was bringing MPLS back to try and recreate the 90s magic.
Since then, Cisco has just been living off of the innovation created by Cisco employees in the 90s. Everything else has just been theatrics by the people at the top who are taking home big paychecks to manage the decline.
@ejs+1me1i8L6 Two years before JC should have left? So 1999?
If you look at that population growth graph from junior high school which starts with exponential growth and ends with population collapse after all the resources have been consumed you'll recognize the same thing is happening here. In the early 2000s most of Cisco's biggest competitors died so Cisco was still able to feed but the stock has never approached the $82 it was in 2000 because packet pushing revenue just can't grow at the same rate and Cisco hasn't been able to acquire its way to rapid growth elsewhere.
Does anyone remember the wage freezes of the early 2000s? If you got a promotion then you didn't even get a raise. It's been cuts and financial illusion for decades. The rest is merely a matter of how violently the pot has to boil before the frog realizes it's in trouble.
Probably hit that slope down about 2 years before JC should have left. chuckie and the incompetent MM have cemented that run into the company DNA.
@OP+1me1i8L6 Since when Cisco respects its employees and did everything it could to keep the best talent? That has never been the case during my 25+ years at Cisco. To me, Cisco is managed by a group of very talented people who manage to make profits from everyone including customers, vendors, and employees.
2012 sounds about right.
It is now the complete inverse of the company it was, in early 2000s.
About 2012 I guess. Everyone who I can talk with freely feels the same way. It is a job now and not a career. About then we became a dumpable commodity to fit the quarter numbers and not important and cherished employees.