Hapless, sales driven leadership, who grew up in the 90s cisco, now betting it all on too-late me-too acquisitions in an attempt to silver-bullet salvage some degree of shareholder value at the expense of talented engineers, field teams and loyal customers. Quick and easy never works. Other mature techs (msft, orcl, goog, ibm) have all turned the corner and embraced valuable change, via hard work, risk taking and disciplined, knowledgeable senior management. That Cisco isn't among them is a tragedy and will make a mandatory HBR case study someday. Where's the board of directors!
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when senior management comes up through sales ranks, they will always have a bias towards incumbency (milk the base) and not necessarily innovation. the most successful tech companies promote engineers to senior leadership, not sales drones.
Big rumour Fran is going to take the mask and suit off to reveal she is Hank from Sausalito
So think about how you'd perhaps act if in an ELT position. Name of the game is to milk the system, to get the balance sheets dialed in; just enough, to justify your salary, bonus, and options. The rest of it? Who cares. Someone else's problem.
By the way, their are plenty of other mid- to mid/senior (G10/11/12) milkers who rode the same gravy train, but at the $150-175k salary level. I got the boot at 18 years and thank you Cisco for the generous package to leave. Retired in mid-50s and very thankful. Told my boss I wanted the package five years ago, then he took his the next year.
Yes it changed so much since late 90s/2000s. Not even same company. Went back as a contractor for a few months a year or so ago, just for something to do. My Cisco "boss" was a clueless woke fool; so just could not stomach another ride in the clown car, so done for good!
Other mature techs (msft, orcl, goog, ibm)...
Browse Wikipedia for a long list of acquisitions by each, including $75B on Activision Blizzard by Microsoft and $28B on Cerner by Oracle. Google buys early so they can get things for a single digit number of billions, but there is also a website named killedbygoogle.com showing a shocking number of failed products. IBM has slightly higher revenues than Cisco but far lower operating margins and market cap. All include massive data collection efforts where at least the first three have data on billions of people, and that's a gift that keeps on giving.
On the other hand, look at the plumbing parts manufacturers and you'll see a fairly consistent slowing in the rate of growth for the past five quarters from Arista, Cisco, HPE and Juniper.
That Cisco isn't among them is a tragedy...
It's really not. Look at the top companies each year over the past 100 years and you'll see massive change throughout because there is no such thing as infinite growth and because a smart group of people capable of creating an optimal solution to one problem generally can't do that for every problem. When companies plateau the weak stay behind to do maintenance and the strong move on to companies that best match the skills they have and want to grow and that ongoing resorting of talent makes for more effective development of new ideas.
No worries man, it’s all in hand, just do the mandatory unconscious bias training followed by inclusion and diversity and then customers will buy Cisco! Simples.
so true.