Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

@Mm3DNoG-6qos,

Sounds like a certain political figure who needs everything reduced to a few bullet items.

The greedy fools that run CISCO are running it into the ground and on a yearly basis they lay off talented and very knowledgeable employees. Last August I was given the boot after 12+ years. The scumbags at the top could care less about their employees and their yearly layoffs of dedicated hard working employees whose lives were turned upside down. I hope CISCO sinks and these BoD's lives and financial stability turn to crap.

This idiot had so completely lost the ability to comprehend anything not in powerpoint form that he couldn't understand text that was not in slide form.

Be thankful. I've worked with multiple leadership teams at multiple sites (with both technical and managerial components) that couldn't understand PowerPoint, e-mail, text they plagiarized from web pages or words spoken in conference calls. It turns out that people who think they know everything see no need to acquire any new information which has significantly delayed and outright killed major programs.

To tie this back to the thread, replace every Wile E. Coyote SUPER Genius with someone who is merely "good" who continues learning and then apply that new knowledge effectively. Also, fire anyone who discourages this behavior.

@5hnw While I don't think banning powerpoint would help, it also wouldn't hurt. It reminds me of an unnamed "director" in IVSG (now IPG) who told his reports to put everything in a powerpoint instead of just putting the text in an e-mail. This idiot had so completely lost the ability to comprehend anything not in powerpoint form that he couldn't understand text that was not in slide form.

I really wish I was making this up, but I'm not. Of course he survived (and I believe orchestrated) my departure in the August round....

What would I do? Keep going the same thing and have fun while doing it!

Ban PowerPoint? Didn't help Sun

1 Weird Trick to fix Cisco: ban PowerPoint.

Microsoft and Google respect people irrespective of their national origin. Hence their CEOs are best and are doing a great job. Just read the other posts where cisco employees hate people from India,China and think just because they are on H1, they are bad and underpaid.

@2uob....awesome post!

This is a great thread! Not only is it therapeutic but if the right people would read it and take action...we could potentially pull this thing out of its downward trend.

Chuck should stop doing the bullsh!t Cisco Beats, save the cash and just monitor this site. TRANSPARENCY!

There's nothing inspirational here. That's why Cisco stagnates. Whenever something "interesting" comes along, a bunch of old guard and stale directors and VPs show up who don't have the slightest idea how to make it reality. It's a talent battle in IT and do you think for a second that we'll be able to hire people away from Amazon/Google/FB/Apple/Tesla/Netflix?

Maybe we need a "Culture Tzar" to be appointed and (s)he can come up with some shirts or free food. Speaking of free food, remember on Chuck's first day, the lunch cafeteria was free? Though the removed all the "premium" food from the cafeteria and left the grill/salad/pizza and fountain drinks.

@3bdt - ......AND the opportunities. Not how it is now. The Senior Managers and up...all the same faces (and races) for years and years and years. A big turn off for new people and as someone else here mentioned....something those sought after new-hire/millennial figure out pretty quick. Then they jet.

if you want to attract talent, you need to share the wealth. Plain and simple

I totally agree that we need to restructure the Board of Directors.

Carol Bartz is 68, Michele Burns is 58, Michael Capellas is 62, Chambers is 67, Amy Chang is 39, John Hennessy is 64, Kristina Johnson is 59, Roderick McGeary is 66, Chuck Robbin is 50, Arun Sarin is 61, Brenton Saunders is 47, Steven West is 61.

If the line is drawn at 60 to retire in high tech company, 7 out of 12 must go. 2 out of 12 nearly need to go or must go. If it is at 50, there are only 2 out of 12 that can stay.

This is the main problem to fix before this company moving forward.

The company needs more inspirational tech leaders. The kind people watch and think "Wow, this is really cool technology that's totally NOT smoke and mirrors"

Towards the end of my time at Cisco I was ashamed of some of the crap I was selling. All too complicated and not very interesting. None of the SEs or developers had any passion for what they were doing, it was all cooked up in PowerPoint and sent half-baked to unsuspecting customers.

Case in point: Ask any 10 year + SE why they joined Cisco and if they still feel it. Now find a non-drooling 2-3 year SE the same question.

Sad times when a tech company has such horrible tech and a sales organisation that hates it.

This thread is the best I have read. So many folks are right on. My only tweak to the thinking is you need a new Board of Directors. We have a crony Board, and at Microsoft, change included the Board. We need software. We need to be more technical. We need to split the core business to force focus and accountability.

I feel it is not too late.

Gerstner was brought in to turn IBM around and he was an outsider... his book "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance" would be an excellent xmas gift for the ELT.

Our ELT should write a book, "Teaching Turtles to Fly", as they just don't have the skills to pull it off.

Microsoft was in the same place before their new external CEO was brought in.

Even if you BUY a new set of executives with $1B/yr salaries the technical talent sees Cisco as a dead end. There's nothing s-xy about working for Cisco, so the engineering talent won't show up. Who wants to work on R&S hardware? Cisco blew it with regards to the cloud and is paying dearly for it.

When you observe Microsoft, the new CEO formulates the new strategy and injects new management ideas in the corporation. Microsoft starts to turnaround in a couple of years.

Lol, the threads stop when the lr's stop as a regular coarse of business. For that to happen it means new leadership since this team can not lead and inspire internal innovation. it can only overpay for acquisitions.

Last poster has nailed it. Nothing more to say for any of us. We can now stop this thread and any others. Very well said.

I think the company could be salvaged but it would require massive changes.

1. Start by putting discipline into the up front decisions on new products. Anybody product manager that can't put together a coherent business case that doesn't just depend on "if we get 3% of this bajillion $ market then..." gets fired on the spot.

2. Examine Span of Control seriously. Directors with no reports, managers with 2 - 3 reports are all ripe for consolidation/position elimination.

3. Take a portfolio approach to investment. We are going to invest x $ in this cash cow and y $ in this speculative endeavor. Speculative endeavor has z time frame to pay off.

4. Instead of doing massive LR's give employees on eliminated products every chance to find new positions. Up to and including giving 6 months on a new team where their cost doesn't come out of BU OpEx so that they can learn new team/skills without risk to hiring BU.

5. Task managers with Management goals instead of IC goals.

6. Manage Directors and VPs based on results including time to make decisions. The wait 6 months to make a decision on things dooms things to failure.

7 Hire an outside Engineering Lead and give him/her the authority to make decisions on product directions/investments. Target platform consolidation.

1. Identify the 3 key growth areas and invest a few Billion in each with short, medium and long-term goals. When goals are not met (which should be a reasonable percentage of the time if they are aggressive enough), use that as the point to reexamine those goals. Don't be afraid to call it a loss and move on without punishing the people that were doing it if it wasn't there fault. Cisco claims to want people to take risks, but when they do and fail people get slapped.

2. Either get serious about solution selling or give it up entirely. If you are going to be serious then you need solutions driving product requirements, and having TAC support.

3. Fire the entire ELT.

Well if you put digital in front of something it instantly becomes business relevant apparently in cisco.

Cisco needs to stop pretending it sells "business outcomes" and embrace the fact it's brought at a technical level. This means a technologist leading the business, not a chancer sales guy.

I remember us going around telling everyone UCS was better than HP, because HP couldn't do what we were doing because they had to maintain their legacy products and customers. I don't think it'll be that long before that happens to Cisco in switching and routing and when it does, which numbers are showing it's already started, Cisco won't have anything to maintain the revenue. I believe it is too late and it stems back to some poor decisions made 7-10 years ago.

Very well said. Needs new blood at top and middle. Bottom will sort its self out.

IMO, Cisco badly needs a technologist CEO from outside the company to objectively assess the portfolio, establish new direction, and then clean house. Replace every member of the ELT who can't get with the new program with executives who can.

With aggressive pruning, the tree may survive.

I'm afraid Cisco's heyday is well over at this point. ELT has no idea how to recover from the spiral in the video space. Even the business model of building good talent and products through acquisition isn't working from what I can tell. After any good acquisition, the old school, heavily siloed Cisco takes over and assimilates both people and product. Then when the acquisition doesn't pan out because the product is vapourware due to poor execution, the "limited restructuring" ensues while ELT continues to flounder at the top with no actual vision or strategy while touting how hip and cool Cisco is. I don't know of anyone who actually believes it. It's going to take more than just talk, and I don't think Cisco is capable of anything else in this new age.

It's going to be nigh on impossible to disrupt the old boys cult.

Replace the senior & middle management(thought leaders), there is still hope!

Tougher and tougher to be empowered to take accountability and actually execute.

Too many senators with a primarly political driver, trying to weave a pleasant story to make themselves look good as the primary driver.

Do away with the arena that allows a middle-level to be exceptionally great at telling a great story upstream and not much else. Do they really know the technology or process? If not...why are they in that position?

Upper management should strip off this new attempt to be cool for the new millinneal masses. The new hires aren't buying it. At all.

What happened to ongoing managed performance? I don't know if I am doing a good job of not. Old fashioned sometimed necessary fear is a good motivator. Now everyone gets a trophy. Is that how nature has worked?

Are people truly still empowered to take joy in the crazy hard work scaling the technology by engaging their customer? Can't remember what a CAP or escalation truly is. Some of the best problems and process issues are solved with an escalation. Are we pushing that envelope?

Too many layers and complexity to really engage the customer and then not empowed fix their problems quickly.

Too many poweful people who care first about their own hip brand and political uprise, rather than simply, really, getting things to work end-to-end. For many it's not anything to do with money or fame...just to get cool stuff to work good.

An IT system ever increasingly so laden with unnecessary rules, processes, documentation, and approvals; that any energy one might have had left to drive true resolution, is instead drowned by unneeded internal standardized unnecessary process. How can you have a standardized process on something just getting off the ground.

I couldn't solve it...just wouldn't know where to start. Jaded. Hope these themes still out there somewhere. Wishing those that really still care...all the best.

Last Poster hit the nail on the head. All this tweeting and social media push about stem, diversity, women in it, love where you work b---s---e.

It's all a lie and just a front to protest a new image when the backend is still wet and smoky with stale leadership. Come on the last cto could spin better records than spin a tech story. Every GM in the company is a former AM and grown up on the good old gravy train so they simply can't adapt. I mean... who has software overlay sales people???? Does not make sense, should be mainstream not specialised.

Half the current company is built on four different operating systems with on average dozens of release branches each and tons of cut and pasted code in each branch, which means it's maintaining more than 100 times the code required to operate that business effectively. It's too expensive to maintain, too expensive to fix and they don't have competent staff capable of doing either well. They should spin out routing and switching now along with all the Distinguished Chief Senior Principal Telephone Handset Sanitizers that made it the mess that it is. Other technologies and employees too mired in dying legacy should go as well so they won't ultimately drag down what's left.

What remains has to pull in acquisitions which bring both business appropriate technology and competent development teams to build the ongoing Cisco into a company which can actually do organic ongoing development without dying from the infections of the current company. Unfortunately this only works with a new dream executive leadership team that can form a coherent vision and acquisition targets that can satisfy these requirements, and even then there are no guarantees.

In the mean time if they keep blowing tens of billions on acquisitions every few years with no revenue growth and the internal infections are allowed to grow things will continue to get worse. Even if Cisco is about to enter its first death spiral (OpenVMS may yet live on after going through four companies and onto its fourth CPU architecture so first does not always mean final) with $70B in the bank, $50B/yr of profitable revenue and a massive installed base, Cisco can struggle on far longer than most would dare imagine.

Too late, I always thought the only way to turn around the company involved the acquisition of Salesforce. Marc Benioff would have made an amazing CEO at Cisco, and Salesforce would add a tremendous amount of value.

Cisco is a company that specializes in selling boxes & telling stories. Unfortunately, the ELT is merely a bunch of people that are amazing storytellers.