Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

JC was the architect of Narcissism at Cisco and still runs strong today

Leadership is still a bunch of arrogant, egotistical, narcissistic clowns.

I'll just leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeAEFEXvcBg

You can skip the intro and jump to 2 minutes 23 seconds for three plausible explanations for why this is common.

LR'd 7 years ago. Thought Id check in to see comments. Absolutely nothing as changed with this company. Leadership is still a bunch of arrogant, egotistical, narcissistic clowns.

It doesn't help that there are about 10 layers of Management that do nothing except pass down the requests from VP's down to the next layer of management.

They keep going down and down until no one even remembers what the VP actually wanted.

We could cut 50% of management levels at Cisco and it would hardly change a thing.

...an innovative technology company that had a market cap of $1T...

What company was that? Accounting for Cisco's basic shares it topped out around $550B in 2000 and was severely overvalued at that point which is why it immediately dropped like a rock ultimately going from over $80/share to an intraday low in the $8 range in 2002.

The layoffs both big and small started in 2001, sometimes as frequent as quarterly. Quadrupling the broken routing and switching operating systems was a great way to dilute the focus and development budget. Cisco's management problems go back decades.

Chuck has more than doubled the stock from a few days after he took over as CEO to now which is a period somewhat less than 8 years, which is an annual return around 9% and an average dividend which appears to be better than 3%. Cisco is clearly bleeding business to others so the big question is how long Chuck can keep this from ki-ling the stock because that's all investors care about.

It's been fascinating to watch an innovative technology company that had a market cap of $1T become so irrelevant to the future plans of its customers.

That's some historically bad leadership right there.

The ELT is beyond clueless. BU VP/GMs are largely incompetent. Look at all the money Liz wasted on random pointless acquisitions. To what goal? Look at how we let Zoom and Teams eat our lunch. Look at how Arista has outpaced Cisco in the DC. Look at PAN and Fortinet in security. All this with no corrective action. Ignorance prevails and leadership stays in place.

There is no leadership at Cisco. You know why?
Because all of those who've been at Cisco for over 10 years, 15 years, 20 years have no skill, no experience outside Cisco, i.e., ignorant and incompetent, but only since they've been at Cisco for such a long long time, the company considers them being able to be a people manager, which is totally wrong and such a stupid idea.

But that's Cisco.

Cisco never changes. Cisco never learns. It's a sinking ship.

CEO needs to be fired ASAP

and

It ain't gonna happen.

If I'm CEO material for any new development in the past 30 years why would I take many steps backwards to fight 40 years of inertia at a legacy company that has to acquire because it can't do native development?

On the acquisition side, what can Cisco acquire which is close enough to its core business that Cisco can actually manage and sell it which will provide 10-plus digits of additional revenue per year (a billion dollars represents less than 2% growth) with the kinds of margins Cisco needs to keep the stock price up in a short period of time?

These aren't rhetorical questions and they've never been answered here because no one can answer them in a meaningful and actionable manner. Even if you get the perfect CEO and the best acquisitions there is far more rot that needs to be cut out and you aren't going to be able to get the kind and volume of forward looking talent to sign on to fix 40 years of egregious mistakes before they can advance the state of the art.

CEO needs to be fired ASAP

Agreed, after the dotcom crash, the board doomed the company by letting JC keep his job. Honestly, I don’t think we’d have a chance even if we swapped out the ELT now. We’re too far gone.