Starbucks. I offer to free up his hands by holding onto his sheaf
of papers. He dashes away, leaving me holding not only his
papers but also his laptop. In some companies, this would be
akin to handing a perfect stranger your purse or your infant—
things that even friends think twice about handing over to a
member of the national media.
Trust and openness are words you hear a lot in the endlessly
optimistic world of Web 2.0, but at Cisco, it seems to be more
than a PowerPoint mantra, even to my jaundiced eye. As Mitchell
and I settle down to our conversation in an open space not 25 feet
from Chambers’s ofce, I can hear the CEO chatting on the phone
with customers. Mitchell, who is charged with encouraging the
company’s rank and fle to adopt new technology, is undistracted.
“We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you
know,” he says. So he promotes all kinds of social networking at
Cisco: 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. There are blogs about blogging and classes about
holding classes—all gauged to make it easy for less-engaged
employees to get with the program.
The goal is not just tech for tech’s sake. For Mitchell and his
bosses, vice president of IT, communications, and collaboration
technology Sheila Jordan and chief information ofcer Rebecca
Jacoby, Cisco has become a laboratory of connectedness and
productivity. They are teaching people to use the stuff that
Cisco sells—the routers, switches, IP telephony, data centers,
mobile devices—by starting with their own people. As chief
marketing ofcer Sue Bostrom puts it, the frst wave of the Internet was an exercise in installation: “Really, it was all about
just getting people online.” In the second wave, the job is to
show people how to best use the tools, she says: “Now that I’m
updates, all created deskside and published directly to the network with the click of a mouse. No flter, no lawyers. It is a petri
dish for ideas and exchange.
“We are always looking for the applications that help people
really have water-cooler talk, something that we thought was
impossible in a global business,” says Jordan (whose group takes
over rogue ventures like C-Vision if they become superpopular,
to scale them and protect against network overload). “
Collaboration this way helps a world community solve big problems,” says
vice president Jim Grubb, Chambers’s longtime product-demo
sidekick. “If we can accelerate the productivity of scientists who
are working on the next solar technology because we’re hooking them together, we’re doing a great thing for the world.” And,
of course, selling more routers and switches.
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
It has come as a mildly unwelcome surprise to
Chambers that his blog—in video, which he favors because he is
dyslexic—is only the second most popular at Cisco. He pauses
almost imperceptibly, smile frozen in place. “Second?” he asks.
“What’s the frst?” The two handlers sitting with us begin shuffing through papers.
We are sitting in the cramped 10-by- 10 meeting room behind
Chambers’s ofce. It is my third encounter with Chambers, and
nearly a month after Mitchell told me about the staff blogs.
When I walked in, Chambers invited me to sit in his ergonomic
chair at a small table as he cleared away the remains of three
Diet Cokes (he drinks them constantly). He has been warm and
polite throughout our conversations and remains that way,
“We now have a whole pool of talent
who can lead these working groups,
like mini ceos and coos.” —John chambers, :<F
on, what can I do?” So that Facebook-style directory at Cisco
serves not just as a way to make lunch plans or fnd a second
baseman for a softball game. It is a real-world, real-time sorting
apparatus, designed to help anyone inside the company easily
fnd the answer to a question, a product demo, or precisely the
right warm body to speak to a waiting customer or present at a
conference—in any language, anywhere around the globe.
The open-source nature of the culture has yielded a litany of
surprising results. For instance, while PCs are the ofcial desk-top hardware at Cisco, Mac users in the company have created
their own unofcial help desk using the company’s social tools,
outside the ofcial purview of the IT department. Mitchell’s
team created its own “rogue deployment,” as he puts it, called
C-Vision, a YouTube inside the frewall that has become one of
the company’s most popular communication tools. Most of the
videos are short product reports, sales ideas, and engineering
though with the blog business, it is clear he is a bit piqued.
The company’s No. 1 blog, I tell him, is apparently about collaboration, which seems to mollify him. I offer that I’ve been
told the third most popular is “some random director” in the
middle of the pack, who blogs about how to position Cisco products against various competitors. (The random guy turns out to
be Michael Beesley, a director of engineering in the edge-routing business unit, fve layers down in the reporting hierarchy. Among his greatest hits are “ASR Completes Security
Testing” and “ASR 1000 Customer List.” Heady stuff.)
Chambers bursts into laughter, a hee-haw that longtime
employees imitate to perfection. “You see?” he says, wiping his
eyes. “The neat thing is that all this,” he waves his hands, “just
motivates people higher.” He turns to his wranglers. “I want to
continued on page 134
94 Fast Company December 2008 / January 2009
