Class presentation outlining the management structure and restructure of Cisco Systems

1. MAYLIN BRENNAN
TORY HARRIS
ANDREW MALLERY
CHRISTOPHER MCDONALD

2. BACKGROUND
• Pioneer of the global development, focused on their core
products of routers and switches
• The company grew to be crucial to all aspects of computer
networking from hardware, software, and firewalls
• Cisco expanded its products by rigorous R&D as well as over
50 acquisitions
• The strategy was to innovate, with products like the “cloud”
and higher band widths for video streaming, as well as
maintaining the core products
• Values of focusing on meeting customer needs, innovation,
creativity, flexibility, and fun

3. ORGANIZATION (1995-
2001)
• Cisco was structured with three primary customers: Service
providers, enterprise, and commercial (small/medium
businesses)
• Each business developed and marketed their own complete
product lines that would be aligned with their own sales and
engineering teams
• The Internet bubble burst and Cisco had to think about
restructuring
• Marketing and Engineering began to unify creating a chief of
marketing and a chief of development

4. COUNCILS (2002) BOARDS
(2007)
• Cisco decided to reduce the number of technology groups
from 11 to 8, fearing that the functional emphasis was losing
touch with customer needs
• Customer First Initiative (CFI), customer-centric decision
making training, and customer orientation is a key hiring
criterion
• Councils were set up as a system of cross-functional
executive-level committees beginning with Service Provider,
Enterprise, and Commercial committees
• Boards were composed of leaders that were a few levels

5. WAKE UP CALL (2011)
• Sales were dropping in once strong businesses and
consumer products were dropping company margins
• The extensive use of boards and councils was making the
decision making process more complicated
• Cisco hired the first Chief Operating Officer, that focused on
the Cisco strategy and company structure
• Restructuring began with divesting in consumer products,
focus on the companies 5 priorities, a matrix structure of an
axis of Sales and Engineering, and a Worldwide Field