Alex, and all
You may want to peruse an article from Wired Magazine. I'll paste the URL and some paragraphs below. The article presents a much different in fact positve perspective on CISCO and the people that work there.
http://www.wired.com/wired/5.03/features/ff_cisco.html
The Cisco Mantra
Those shiny, happy people at Cisco Systems have created the third most valuable company on the Nasdaq after Microsoft and Intel.
By Joe Flower
I'm sitting in a cafeteria at Cisco Systems, the networking equipment giant, and after days of this bombardment, my eyes are glazing over. My pulse is feeble. I feel an overpowering urge to weep big warm tears, to beg for mercy.
There's a voice in my head that says they're all lying to me, every last one. Nobody has this much fun going to work. I mean, these people aren't dancers or acrobats or ice cream tasters or Michael Jordan. These folks do work that is difficult, that takes long hours, that can be exquisitely frustrating and twisted. They are basically very, very good mechanics of a type that is peculiar to our age: they build the plumbing of the Internet. And all they do is smile, smile, smile.
But real journalists don't break under pressure. I've been love-bombed by Moonies. I've been forced to listen to the greatest hits of the 1970s. I've had lunch with PR people; I've even had lunch with magazine editors. Nothing gets to me. I've got my game face on. Come on, I say. It must suck sometimes. Everything sucks major wind sometimes, right? What's the worst thing about working here?
"It's addictive," the answer comes right back. "It can take over your life if you let it. It's electronic heroin!"
"You get so excited about your work!"
"You get amazed at your own productivity. You can work any 60 hours a week you want!"
I mumble an excuse and stagger out the door. There's a men's room down the hall. I can hold it only long enough to get into the stall, and then the tears come, the loud sobs, the certain knowledge that resistance is futile. If I don't break contact soon, and get this article written and stuffed into the modem, I'm going to apply for a job at Cisco. I'll be one of them.
The days that follow are a writer's nightmare. I constantly struggle for meaning. Only my deep professionalism and the fabulous amounts of money that Wired is paying keep me at the task, searching for the answer to the one burning question: Why are these people smiling?
Then finally somewhere over Denver in a 747, it comes to me. I'm standing in the first-class lounge, the place is full of rock-and-roll agents and real-estate queens and Internet techies on service calls. I'm the only journalist with an expense account big enough to pay for all this swag. But between the bloated conversations and the Cisco brainwashing and the free booze and the Independence Day images of DC getting creamed on the tube, it hits me: the blueprint for this engine of happiness. The wellspring of this elixir of delight. The fat cable jacking high-speed Cisco straight through the amygdala and hippocampus to the cerebral cortex of every Cisco worker. I hurry back to the
piles of yellow foolscap filled with my nearly unreadable scrawl. I search the laptop. And there it is:
pathway HD/articles/wired/cisco/interviews/random/ warmspit.
...
The biggest criticism, voiced in articles in The Wall Street Journal and Forbes, is that Cisco has become brittle, because it is inflexibly wedded to a single technology (routers) in a swiftly changing technical environment. Such criticism seems to ignore Cisco's rather vivid acquisition strategy and eagerly avowed spread into other technologies.
The big question, though, is much simpler. Rarely, if ever, has a company mushroomed so rapidly, except for defense contractors in wartime with their guaranteed government contracts. Is it possible to grow a company this fast? And still make quality products? And still not fall apart into a congeries of bickering fiefdoms? And still drive the edge of technology? And still carry home money in big two-handled buckets?
The answer is yes. So far.
Regards,
Brian Malloy |
