CISCO Gets Social

A recent phone conversation with a friend that works a CISCO and a tweet by of the individuals I follow prompted me to search and read more on CISCO. I found a lot but I particularly recommend:

• Video for the presentation delivered by John Chambers, CISCO CEO at MIT October 15 2008.

• Article published in Fast Company: “How Cisco's CEO John Chambers is turning the Tech Giant Socialist”

I captured below a few key snippets from the video and article to open your appetite; if these are indeed the principles driving CISCO I believe there is no stopping them! (Anybody knows who is driving this at CISCO? Would love to have a conversation with him/her)

Video:

• Around 13:07 “Is not about you; is about us. Communities” shortly after: “we are focusing on networked, visual, collaboration tools to drive productivity”
• Around 22:06 check the slide titled “Collaboration in action” with the evolution on CISCO’s approach and the impact on the number of priorities it allows them to tackle.

Article:

• Mike Mitchell: “We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know…….You can write a blog, upload a video, and tag your myriad strengths in the Facebook-style internal directory. "Everybody is an author now," he laughs. Blog posts are voted up based on their helpfulness.”

• Ron Ricci: “inspired in part, Ricci says, by management guru Gary Hamel's ideas about the need to democratize strategy and distribute leadership in order to stimulate innovation. "One of the traditional ways you define power in a big corporation is by the resources you control," Ricci says. "It's one of the evil characteristics of corporations. If you control resources for your unilateral use, you can move away from the greater whole, even if you make good decisions. Now we believe it's about learning to bring resources together to the table with groups."”

• John Chambers again: “People still have their own individual personalities. In fact, the system depends on it!”

What do you think?

Filiberto Selvas
Filiberto.Selvas@Gmail.COM