Constituents of Cisco's Culture

Summary:

Cisco is a great company to work for - what makes this a great company? Culture - in one word

Great companies have great culture, they:

• Value the employees and Nurture leadership
• follow Open and Candid Communication
• Grow
• Give back to the community

Cisco's Culture:

• Open Communication
• Catch Market Transitions
• No Technology Religion (imp for tech company)
• Drive Market Changes
• Stretch Goal Mentality
• Taking Measured Risks
• Healthy Paranoid to excel
• Empowerment
• Teamwork (has become important over the last few years)
• Frugality
• Giving back
• and the base of everything we do - Customer Success

John believes two things that can get us away from being a great company are: (1) losing touch of customers and employees (2) bad execution! Powerful, eh?

Background:

I recalled that Collins and Porras did a great job detailing what Great companies do in "Build to Last". I have to revisit it again. Let me just add that John wants to build a company that is not only "Build to Last" but also "Build to Lead" - I guess they go hand-in-hand, but anyway it is a stong message

Lastly, a challenge to analyze and pen-down a culture is that many of these are implicit and may not be easily visible