I've seen a few posters mention some "McKinsey" plan or strategy. It is some consulting company I presume....can anyone elaborate on this strategy or plan Cisco has adopted from them ?
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There is a BD lead running BD in cable. He was at McKinsey for two years and came to Cisco. He's a complete arrogant moron. Not smart as he thinks but he is good at intimidation, back-biting and keeping score.
Cisco's software business is a joke. They either OEM some small company's products and slap a "Cisco this or that" label on it or they write some piece crap internally. The dinosaur engineering groups tend to compete internally going the exact same space, they're oblivious to whatever is already in the market and can never come up with a product that's worth selling. What's their IoT software strategy? a half-cooked, small potato, open source toolkit and an obscure graphical user interface OEM'ed from someone else. Wow, what an "investment"! It was sad to witness the confusion and frustration in the sales force when none of these half-baked hacks deliver a coherent big picture for the customers. How about collaborating with other engineering teams to provide an end-to-end solution? Hell no! are you f*** out of your mind?! what a waste of resources. Well, that's what these massive layoffs are for: to mask the obscene incompetence of the so-called cisco leaders. There's your McKinsey strategy.
I've heard of Cisco's CDO Kevin Brandy preaching some McKinsey nonsence. Apparently Kevin and the consulting team determined that our sales pay-off structure is too rich and has to change. The commissions paid to all the many mouths in the sales chain (e.g. VAR, AM, SEM, Product Specialist after Product Specialist, etc.) is way too excessive and needs to be revised/streamlined. SHOCKER!
Observations:
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Anyone at Cisco more than 2 weeks could of deduced that. Been that way since the beginning
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Good luck changing that ingrained disaster. Will cause a mutiny of epic scale
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If that is your ELT go-to-plan for righting the ship.......Cisco is doomed
McKinsey Consulting made managers disappear for multiple months while leaving employees with even less direction then usual. Managers were running around completing their Mckinsey tasks because this was and still has a C-Level focus. In the end the big outcome from McKinsey was a recommendation to raise prices on products. The raise didn't even cover the costs for McKinsey to come in in first place and never will because the products they raised pricing on are going EOS before ROI will be scene.
This exercise should make a full season of scripts on "House of Lies"
Consultants laughing all the way to the bank.
McKinsey are used to advise companies on business strategy. The plan adopted by Cisco is to invest in growth focused on Cloud, IoT and Software. As Cisco can no longer grow revenue from its legacy routing and switching business, it needs to invest in business opportunities which will result in a valuable competitive position in the markets in which it competes. To pay for that investment it laid off 5500 of its employees.
Cisco's biggest challenge is executing on their plan. As they enter these markets, competition is fierce and profitable business models for IoT and Cloud are not as good as their existing offerings.
advised them not to get into the cell phone market. Had to buy McCaw for billions!