Cisco systems uses its culture for competitive advantage

Overview of the Case: Cisco is one of the leading fortune 500 companies. CISCO has different organization chart which cannot be read in by any person until he spend his 15 minutes of time with the help of some expert and a whiteboard otherwise it may take up to hours to understand what is going on in the Company. Basically the Company’s main aim is to get their decisions in minutes. Further the company’s motto behind this strange hierarchy of organization is to achieve ‘ speed, skill and flexibility’. In the year 2001, the company changed its organization chart under the leadership of John Chambers. Chamber idea was to merge the sales force with the engineering in order to make the decision making process much speedier. First 3 years were less productive for CISCO after the change introduced in 2001 but with in a period of 7 years the Company got use to the new culture introduced by Chamber and now the Company has more than 10 boards and 30 councils which Rivelo cannot recall exactly the numbers further this number is evolving every now and then so it’s hard to remember the exact figures. The speed of decision making has increased so much that the Company decided within 8 days to acquire another Company WebEx. Questions for discussion 1. The answer for observable artifacts should cover following: a. Employee’s dress code. b. Employee’s communication. c. Employee’s Strategies. d. Employee’s award and celebrations e. Bonus to employees for customer satisfaction. f. Job Guarantees. 2. Competing value framework is one of the most important frameworks available in the history. It was emerged in 1983 while a research on what makes organization effective. It has following components. a. Dynamics: There are many applications of this framework one of which is applying it for bringing a change in the organization. b. Level of analysis: This is second most important application of CVF as it mentions how the leaders can create value in their organization with the help of CVF. 3. CISCO Core values are a. Customer success is priority and that is what they do work for. b. Learning and trying to achieve innovation in the system. c. More focused on sharing ever thing. d. Team work is the integral part of the culture in CISCO. e. Achieving more output from less input. f. The mission and vision are consistent with the core values identified by us in the paragraph and this is gives employees a feeling of being independent in nature. g. Further it should be noted that sharing each and every idea within their teams makes very good the people who are try to do work. h. Further employees are given flexibility in their working hours and every comfort they need to do their work. 4. CISCO has used the technique of Competing value framework for bring in the change required in their organization. This technique has worked a lot good for the organization in every aspect and it is a very efficient tool and because of this tool the speed of decision making has also increased and employees are very much happy with the current change in the organization. 5. CISCO is one of fortune 500 companies. Every company has pros and cons associated with it. Mr. John Chambers is very good person who is currently leading the Company. One of his quotes is “ treat others like how you want to be treated”. During the period of recession when ever employer was not missing a single chance to remove its employees CISCO tried and does not removed any of its employee. The projects which were useless and were not generating any revenue and needs to be closed the employees related to that project were not removed instead they were moved to another profit making center who needs more employees. Therefore avoiding removing people from their jobs. Further you have the freedom to work with flexible timings you can also work from home through remote access provided to all the employees. 6. Each and every unit of the Company operates as a separate entity and the vice president of that unit has the power to allocate its revenue to the expenditures. The vice presidents also enjoys their work because they are leading one of the units and they are in continuous competition with other units of the company. The only con for working at CISCO is that having remote access you cannot deny working for a particular task and you should always be working for the company. 7. I would love to work for this company. Based on the guidelines above the problem can easily be resolved by any student. References http://competingvalues. com/competingvalues. com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/The-Competing-Values-Framework-An-Introduction. pdf