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the Software View: The Cisco kids. (Part III)
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PEOPLE PERSON
Eric Ransdell writes, "Michael McNeal doesn't look like he's from HR, sound like he's from HR, nor act like he's from HR. But he IS from HR - the HR department of a high-powered technology company that believes people are the driving force behind its rapid growth. "It's easy to be a great coach when you have great players," says McNeal, director of corporate employment at Cisco (during 1998). "It's easier to be a great manager - and a great company - if you hire well. Managers here no longer ask, 'How cheaply can I hire people?' They say, 'I'm going to invest money in the staffing process, because it's going to give me a return on investment.'"
McNeal started with Cisco in March of 1996. Back then, the company had annual revenues of $4 billion, a stock-market valuation of $33.3 billion, and about 5,000 employees. Cisco is adding new people at a rate of up to 1,200 per quarter. McNeal's job is to ensure that as Cisco hires fast, it also hires well. How does McNeal approach his job? By rebelling against nearly every piece of conventional wisdom in his field. "If you're going to be successful," he likes to say, "you've got to be creative." Consider, for example, his attitude toward the most basic tool used in hiring - the Help Wanted ads. McNeal hates these ads with a passion. He compares them to the Yellow Pages - "the only other place on the planet where you'd run your ad next to the ad of somebody else who's doing exactly the same thing you are."
So, how does Cisco let the world know it's hiring? Just ask the huge crowd at last year's Stanford-Berkeley football game. Every time a touchdown was scored, a group of Cisco people seated in the end zones waved placards that spelled out "www.cisco.com/jobs." In the days following the game, visits to the college-recruiting section of Cisco's much-visited Web site shot up by ten percent. "The response from the game was tremendous," McNeal says.
Or just ask the hundreds of thousands of people who visited the Santa Clara Home and Garden Show, an annual celebration of petunia planting and geranium growing. Back in 1996, McNeal's team put up the first Cisco information booth at the show. What do network routers have in common with roses? Demographics. Given the stratospheric level of real-estate prices in Santa Clara County, McNeal figured that anyone who could afford a home, let alone a garden, had to be at the top of their professional game. He was right. The garden show attracted up to 50,000 people per day - an astounding 78 percent of whom held professional degrees and worked in the high-tech sector. "People would walk up to us and say, 'What are you guys doing here? Are you selling ISDN lines?'" he recalls. "We'd say, 'We're just talking about what it's like to work at Cisco.'"
That's classic McNeal. When it comes to recruiting, Cisco is most famous for its cutting-edge Internet presence. The company's Web site has become a turbocharged recruiting tool that lets job candidates match their skills with openings, submit an online resume - or create one using the site's resume builder. But it's the idea behind the Web site, not the site itself, that separates McNeal's approach to hiring from how most companies do it. For one thing, he believes that great hiring requires creative marketing. "When it comes to staffing, we are the salesforce inside Cisco," he says. "We sell Cisco every single day." Indeed, McNeal analyzes his "hiring channels" in the same way that marketers analyze distribution channels.
One key channel is current employees. "If you have lots of great people at your company and you're not asking them who else they know, then shame on you," he says. Referral rates at Cisco are twice the industry norm. CEO John Chambers tracks referral rates as a key performance indicator, and he needles his staff if the numbers slip. Another key channel is college recruitment (hence the placards at the football game). And then there's what McNeal calls the "direct channel" - people whom Cisco has identified as stars in their field and whom the company recruits directly. McNeal has twelve "sourcers" whose only job is to identify high-impact players who don't yet work for Cisco. Sourcers scour the trade press, search through patent databases, look at who's addressing prestigious conferences.
"Traditional recruiting limits you to people who are looking for work," says McNeal. So he and his team go after what he calls "passive job seekers" - people who are satisfied with their current situation, haven't thought about looking elsewhere, and may not even have a resume. The only way to recruit such people is to find them yourself. "That's why we decided that we wouldn't target places where people are walking around with resumes," he explains.
There's a second unconventional principle behind McNeal's approach to talent: Hiring can work best when you work in tandem with customers and suppliers. Most companies consider recruiting to be a zero-sum game: Why should we help other companies attract great people? His rebuttal: Companies embrace partnerships in marketing and manufacturing - why not in hiring? "When several companies sponsor an event," he argues, "we create more interest for people who might not be curious enough to look at one company, but they might look at several."
A few years ago, for example, Cisco hosted a high-profile public breakfast. Don Blue, a prominent local radio personality, broadcast his morning show at company headquarters. Cisco invited Yahoo! and a few other Silicon Valley highfliers to be part of the event. Blue invited his listeners to stop by on their way to work and to learn about the companies. More than 2,000 people stopped by - and Cisco, Yahoo!, and their partners generated hundreds of leads. "Sure, there are similarities in the kinds of people we look for," McNeal says. "But whether someone signs on with you or with me, we'll both be stronger as a result."
Michael McNeal may be creative, but he's not crazy. He understands that if you operate outside the box, you'd better deliver results. That's why he's worked with a team of programmers to create software that quantifies the return on his offbeat investments. The software tracks how much each recruiting event cost, how many business cards it yielded, and how many of those contacts resulted in leads, interviews, and new hires.
"If a manager desperately needs people," says McNeal, "and I walk in and say, 'Let's spend the $30,000 on the Santa Clara Wine and Arts Festival instead of a newspaper ad' - that's not an easy conversation to have. So, it's important to build systems that track results. Otherwise, you won't be able to shift mind-sets. And you won't get the support you need."
If you want to find great people, Cisco's Michael McNeal argues, you've got to look in unusual places: "If you and I were marketing people, responsible for selling products, we'd ask a simple question: 'Where are our customers?' Well, at Cisco, we ask that question about our recruits. If we're going to spend money recruiting great people, we want to spend it where we think they'll be." Superstar programmers and world-class computer designers don't hang out at noisy job fairs in crowded exposition centers. But they do attend the Boston Marathon and the Mountain View International Microbreweries Festival - which is why McNeal's recruiters (outfitted in their "www.cisco.com/jobs" T-shirts) attend those events as well. And talented people go to baseball games - which is why McNeal's crew signed up for a booth at the San Francisco Giants Fan Festival. (When the festival organizers later decided to make the event a combination Fan Appreciation Day and Job Fair, McNeal said fine - but he wanted no part of the Job Fair. He wanted a booth near the entrance to the ballpark, by the food.)
Train your managers to spot the best people in their fields. They should make a habit of capturing the names of impressive people whom they meet at conferences or on visits to customers. And don't forget that great people tend to know other great people. So, one of the first things you should do when you hire a super star is to ask him or her, "Who are five other super stars whom you know? How can we persuade them to join us? How can you help us strike up relationships with them?" At Cisco, for example, fifty to sixty percent of hires come from referrals of this kind.
Once you find great people, you have to create a relationship with them in order to get them even to consider you. These people are not looking to leave their company. You have to communicate just how interested in them you are - even if they never join your company. Create a database of the talented people you'd love to have on board. Send them product samples and marketing brochures from time to time. Ask if you can hire them as a consultant for a weekend or during a week when they're away from their company.
To create these kinds of ties, Cisco has established several programs, including one called Make Friends @ Cisco, which works over the Web and via e-mail. The program matches Cisco employees with people who have expressed an interest in Cisco. It's designed to create a learning relationship: "We're going to be friends with you because you're smart. Whether we hire you or not, we'll learn from each other. And if we do wind up working together, so much the better." That is the right attitude.
Cisco recently did an assessment of what people who are considering a job want to know. The answer: What would my real tasks be, and who are the people I would be working with? Simulations let you answer both questions directly. You can let a candidate do some actual work over the Web, and you can provide a video feed of the team that the candidate would be working with. A simulation doesn't just let people show you their stuff. It also gets them excited about working with you. Be honest: Why do most companies still do traditional job interviews? Because they don't have a better alternative. This is a better alternative.
LEADING THE FOLLOWERS
Joseph Panettieri wrote, "Cisco's employees are more than willing to follow Chambers' every command. Indeed, an 8 x 10 inch picture in one of Cisco's cubicles sums up the mood throughout the company. The photograph, a glossy of Chambers, sports the caption: "In John We Trust."
And for good reason. With Chambers at the helm, Cisco's revenues have swelled from $4 billion in 1996 to more than $8 billion during the year of 1998. But unlike some winner-take-all captains, Chambers has shared the wealth with his company-mates. The average Cisco employee enjoys $250,000 in stock-option profits. What is even more, non-managers hold a hefty forty-two percent of the options outstanding.
"Because of this, we are able to attract and maintain the best employees in the industry," says Chambers.
Chambers has modeled Cisco after General Electric. Just like GE CEO Jack Welch, Chambers requires that Cisco never finishes worse than second in any core market.
"We will not be in a market where we don't bring an expertise or an advantage, and a minimum of twenty-five percent market share, with forty percent plus being our goal. If we can't do it ourselves, we'll do it with partners," says Chambers.
And where Cisco is number two, the company is making aggressive moves to become Number one. One telling example is the security market, where Cisco is gearing up to bury market leaders like Check Point Software Technologies.
CHAMBERS BLAZING
Will anything slow down Cisco Systems, Incorporated and its super-charged Chief Executive Chambers? Not likely. Since taking the helm of the world's largest maker of data networking equipment in 1995, the 51-years-old Chambers has quadrupled revenues and profits. In 1998, despite Asian economic turmoil, he put even more distance between Cisco and then competitors such as Cabletron Systems, Incorporated and 3Com Corporation.
But Chambers didn't pause to savor his success. He then turned his attention towards a new and even bigger target, the vast $175 billion telecommunications-equipment business. And Chambers didn't lead his troops on bravado alone: With military precision, he built his management team and acquired key technologies.
John Chambers is no gambler. On the night before his welcoming speech to his company's more than 1,400 value-added reseller partners at a Las Vegas hotel, Chambers never even got close to the wagering tables. He was asleep by 10:30 p.m. In his four years at the helm of Cisco Systems, Incorporated, Chambers has played a steady hand. He has seen some of his rivals choke on high-priced, high-risk acquisitions. He's seen others grind to a standstill through accumulated inertia. He saw his mentor An Wang fall from grace when his company Wang Laboratories, Incorporated, held on too long to an idea whose time had passed. A former IBM'er, he'd seen IBM Corporation become a victim of its own arrogance and he learned some lessons about survival. "I've learned the hard way at IBM and Wang Laboratories not to fall in love with technology, but to go in the direction our customers push us," he says. "I learned that if you don't change, have too many layers of overhead, and you get too far away from your customers, you pay a terrible price."
Above all, he's practicing his specialty - courting customers. Chambers has selling in his blood, and his focus on service is a big part of Cisco's success. Obsessed with customer satisfaction, every night before he goes to bed, Chambers listens to about ten voice-mail messages from staffers, in the field, reporting the status of Cisco's top accounts.
"We have to deal with the world the way it is, not the way we wish it were. The key is anticipating how the industry will change: What role will you play today? What is your competitive advantage that your customers will pay a premium for today? What will commoditize? And how will you move to the next level? Companies that don't adopt change as an essential part of their culture and don't stay focused on the customer will not survive."
To be sure, Chambers is a fierce competitor. He is a fiercely competitive executive - who tosses off phrases like "it feels good to win" with utter sincerity. He always keeps one eye upon Cisco's business and the other upon his rivals' performance. Shortly before our interview, we spotted Chambers in a cubicle down the hall from his office. Upon closer inspection, we discovered that the cubicle houses a customized workstation. The system tracks stock prices for Cisco and eight other rivals - including Lucent, Nortel, IBM, and 3Com. On this particular morning during May of 1999, Chambers smiled as Cisco traded up four percent to $105.37. What was even better was that several of the company's rivals were trading down.
"We continue to see increased competition and consolidation from technology start-ups, traditional competitors, and large old-world telecommunications manufacturers. I truly enjoy healthy competition, as it keeps our companies and the high-tech industry strong. Both Lucent and Nortel are well-run companies, and we view them as formidable competitors," says Chambers.
"Our industry moves at an Internet pace and change is constant. The game is no longer about the bigger companies beating the smaller ones, but the faster versus the slow. There are just as many advantages to being small and nimble versus large and nimble. It's not longer about the big eating the little. The message now is that the fast can eat the slow. Small companies can compete with much larger ones on a global basis if they set it up right. Cisco has embraced this pace and, as a result, has been able to quickly respond to changing customer needs. With good execution and some traditional Cisco luck, I truly believe that we have the potential to lead in almost every segment of this new market."
Never one to gloat, Chambers balances respect for the competition with confidence in his own management team. "Taking on a Lucent, Nortel, Alcatel, or Siemens is not something that scares us," he says. "We have the proper amount of confidence and a healthy paranoia that makes even Andrew Grove (Chairman of Intel Corporation) look relaxed."
Winning drives John Chambers. "I don't have the killer instinct. I learned that you don't want to kill your competitors. What got IBM and Wang Laboratories into trouble was that they did not have competitors for long periods of time, and that unseats you. The last thing I want to do is be the best, uncontested, because someone will come up and completely unseat me. Regardless of what the legal rules say, we don't do what is unethical. No one has ever accused us of giving things away to undercut competitive pricing, no one has accused us of using patents to gain competitive advantage or using regulations to slow down the competition. Our goal is to be a company that's very fair. I love to compete, though. We play by Internet standards of higher purpose and open competition and we want to win, we will be a stronger company five or ten years from now with more market share because we have good competitors."
"The weakness of old economy telecommunications firms, very simply, is that it's an IP world. They have very little experience in this world. The second weakness is that this is a fast-moving market. And traditionally, Lucent, Nortel, Alcatel, and Siemens have moved very slowly," says Chambers.
Chambers continues, "As unusual as this may sound, we'll have more market share from five to ten years from now if we have good competitors rather than no competitors. I learned that lesson the hard way while working for IBM and Wang. They didn't have good competitors pushing them. Having a good competitor like Lucent doesn't drive me crazy."
"Our goals for the fiscal year of 2000 are to be the leader in data, voice, and video networking. I'm not talking about having just a leadership role. We want to be the leader. And 2000 is the year we can break away from the pack."
He uses the word, "evangelize", a lot, which makes sense in a fundamentally new business that many people don't understand. "Evangelizing? I spend way more than half of my time doing that," says Chambers. Unlike most CEO's, he runs a long-established, hugely profitable company, yet even he has to keep flogging his big idea, which is the vast scope of the Internet revolution. "You've got to evangelize the concept," he says, and immediately begins doing so at the fastest rate of speech you've ever heard: "Over seventy percent of our customer support is provided over the Internet, and ..." He has met with government and business leaders globally, and has become a sort of evangelical Pied Piper preaching the gospel of the "Internet economy," a concept coined at Cisco.
Chambers thinks Cisco can become the dominant supplier of gear for next-generation networks that carry data, voice, and digital video. His ace in the hole is Cisco's mastery of Internet technology, the basis for such networks. The showdown will test Chambers as never before. But with a track record like his, he's no one to bet against.
TRIP THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
Escalating the intensity of its battle for networking supremacy with Lucent Technologies and Nortel Networks, data communications giant Cisco, late in August of the year 1999, shelled out $6.9 billion (USD) for Cerent, a company that made next-generation optical networking gear designed to assist service providers in making their voice networks more suitable for data traffic. Cisco also acquired Monterey Network, which was working on networking gear that expanded the capacity and flexibility of network backbones, for around $500 million (USD).
By invading the optical transmission realm with the purchase of Cerent and the purchase of Monterey Network, Cisco had pulled off its first major strike against the strategic stronghold of its then main rivals. Lucent, Ciena, and Nortel, along with European telecommunications giants Alcatel and Siemens, made most of the optical gear designed to shuttle billions of data bits across fiber-optic wires. Those telecommunications equipment makers were the leading providers of optical networking gear, which interfaced with fiber-optic wires to form the transmission layer that underlies the Internet and other data networks.
Industry analysts said the nearly $7 billion (USD) purchase price of Cerent was both a sign of Cisco's determination to dominate the networking industry and the runaway valuation of high-tech companies.
The then recent transformation of Juniper Networks, among others, into companies worth billions on the stock market greatly enhanced the value of Cerent, which was upon the verge of an initial public offering (IPO).
HIGH FIBER DIET
Cisco pulled the trigger for that much-anticipated move to add optical networking equipment to its extensive data-oriented product portfolio.
Industry experts said the acquisition of the two companies' product portfolios and development teams provided Cisco with the ammunition to battle network equipment makers Lucent Technologies and Nortel Networks on their own turf.
To accommodate the runaway growth of the Internet and electronic commerce, next-generation network operators were focusing on increasing the capacity and the intelligence of the optical portion of those high-speed networks. Cisco's acquisitions of Cerent and Monterey Network better positioned the data communications giant to grab a share of that emerging market.
Cisco recognized that the core of the Internet was going to become optical. It needed to have both the optical switch, which was where Monterey Network came in, and the equipment on the edge to fill up those fat optical pipes, and that was where Cerent came in.
The selection of Cerent and Monterey to spearhead Cisco's push into the optical realm was, in a sense, foreshadowed. Cisco had recently made large equity investments in both companies. Holding according to form with Cisco's traditional acquisition model, the two purchases provided the company with a beachhead to launch an invasion into a new market. I liken the moves, along with a previous buy out of PipeLinks, to the technology-through-acquisition tactics Cisco used in 1993 to enter and eventually dominate the enterprise networking market.
The company's immediate objective was to expand its marketing opportunities, which would come at the expense of Lucent, Nortel, Tellabs, and others in the optical transmission space. That gave them an opportunity for a greater level of penetration into the service provider market. It would help them to be stronger against a larger set of competitors.
Far more automated and programmable than traditional transmission equipment, gear from Cerent and Monterey enabled carriers to fully exploit the capacity of their networks and instantly provision new services.
Cisco officials estimated that the then optical networking equipment market would be worth $17 billion annually within the next couple of years. Cisco's then recently acquired product live gave the company the ability to pursue about a $10 billion portion of that overall market.
RICH AS CROESUS
While undeniably rich, the all-stock purchase didn't seem so crazy when compared with the then public stock market valuations of other networking equipment companies at that time, such as Juniper Networks and Redback Networks. Juniper had had $10 million in sales in the first quarter of 1999 and $17.6 million in the second quarter; at the time, the company was worth around $10.7 billion.
GOING HOME
A leg of Cisco's networking journey will bring the company directly into your living room. "The home market will be actually bigger than the business market if you look out ten to fifteen years. You'll see us partner with major established consumer electronics players that you might never have dreamed of, like Sony, Panasonic, and Samsung," says Chambers.
"We consider our ability to partner with and acquire other companies a major, sustainable, competitive advantage. In the service provider space, we are partnering to accelerate broadband access to the home at dramatically lower costs and at speeds hundreds of times faster than today's slow modem connections."
HOME RUN
Jodi Mardesich writes about Cisco's plan to pop up in your home. The company whose products power the Internet is looking for new territory to conquer. Its next push: the wired household.
It's 6 a.m. and you've just popped a mug of water into the microwave for tea. While you wait for it to boil, you check up-to-the-minute stock quotes - from the front panel of your Internet-connected microwave oven.
Lunacy? Cisco believes it's a likelihood. The company whose networking gear powers eighty percent of the Internet backbone is looking for new territory to conquer. It's betting that if some of the world's toasters and televisions and coffee makers get wired with Cisco network software, the builders of the Internet will ramp up their purchases of Cisco's really expensive routers.
It's part of Cisco's plan to connect everyone and everything using open standard Internet protocols. If Cisco succeeds, consumer appliances - and the personal networking they enable - may be the foundation for a new class of applications, making Cisco the emperor of the post-personal computer world.
To get the word out that Cisco is serious about the home, Chambers unveiled the plan in a keynote address at the 1999 Las Vegas consumer extravaganza, CES (the Consumer Electronics Show). He even showed a video of an Internet-connected microwave oven (actually available for just $50,000 from NCR). He also announced a deal with AT&T and TCI, valued at slightly under $100 million. Cisco will provide the telecommunications company with equipment to route phone, Internet, and video traffic over its cable lines. AT&T's ads touting the service may speak of "Cisco-powered networks."
The company sponsored a twelve-city shopping-mall tour with At Home Networks to educate consumers about cable modems. Cable modems, which are generally paid for as part of the monthly cable service fee, are gaining popularity because they let you bring up Web pages about one hundred times faster than with the typical phone modem connection. "We want to make Cisco synonymous with the Internet," says Keith Fox, Cisco's then vice president of advertising.
Market research firm Dataquest sees the market for connected consumer devices growing rapidly. The firm forecasts that about six million homes will be networked by 2003, up from a measly total of 15,000 today. Cisco's deals reflect their strategy of licensing its software to partners rather than introducing its own products. This strategy works, says Mark Stubbe, then vice president of Samsung's networks division in Dallas, Texas. "Working together, we're able to get new technology and new services out quicker than we could individually."
Cisco hired a chief for its personal networks division: Robba Benjamin, vice president and general manager of Cisco's consumer line of business. Benjamin, formerly an executive with Sprint and US West, tapped a handful of people to form a "personal networks" steering committee.
A non-techie who wanted to be a Milton scholar, Benjamin said her top priority was to sign up home users for broadband networking through their cable providers, which would equip them with Cisco cable modems made by Samsung and Sony. (These modems were the first co-branded products available to consumers.) So far there are only 300,000 broadband subscribers, including users of cable modems, in the United States, but market research firm Forrester Research predicts that number will mushroom to 15 million subscribers by the year 2003.
Cisco also offered digital subscriber line (DSL) modems, which are speedy but not as fast as cable modems. Their main benefit? They use existing phone lines and let you make phone calls and surf the Web simultaneously on a single line. Eventually a simple device dubbed a "residential gateway" will control home electronics - from home or remotely over the Internet.
Once all these fast connections are in place, new applications will be built that we haven't dreamed of, Benjamin says. No longer will you have to go back to the kitchen to check on the progress of a roast. Instead, digital probes will send a temperature and time update to your personal digital assistant (PDA) or your television.
How is Cisco going to connect everything else in the home to the set-top box or cable modem? Benjamin didn't say, but mentioned that Cisco invested in ShareWave, a startup making a wireless home-networking system. She also sat on its board of directors.
Cisco was wise to get into the market then, says David Paul Doyle, an industry analyst with Dataquest: "It's going to be harder to compete once Intel, 3Com, or Bay Networks gets entrenched in that space."
Chambers adds, "Our goal is to provide the solutions our customers will depend upon both today and into the future. Specifically, we are working with companies such as Telcordia (formerly Bellcore), GTE, Sprint, HP, and ICG Communications and others to standardize protocols for IP networks and to provide an open environment for products and services.
We continue to make progress towards interoperability standards and are dedicated to pursuing standards that will be beneficial to the industry. The new world depends upon interoperability, and we have supported this through the partnerships we've built - to continually provide new network services, operations systems, and support capabilities.
At Cisco, we do not preach a technology religion. As a result, we are positioned to offer service providers the best solutions in all market segments, which gives our customers the freedom of choice. For example, we have a variety of access capabilities (dial-up, DSL, cable modem, leased line, and frame relay), giving our service provider customers a broad range of offerings.
Our primary focus over the next year is the ability to provide end-to-end, data/voice/video solutions for customers in both the enterprise and service provider markets. In the near future, data traffic will surpass voice traffic, and it is our goal to take the leadership position in this combined market. In the long-run, we continue to see tremendous opportunities created by global networking in the Internet economy across all industries. The extent to which Cisco participates in these opportunities depends upon how well we execute versus our competitors.
When mulling the future, Chambers tends to reflect upon Cisco's successful past. "Over the last eight years, people have predicted our demise ten or fifteen times," he says. "There were statements about ATM blowing us away, us not understanding LAN switching, start-up companies that would bury us. There were claims that we couldn't compete against IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Digital. They were all wrong." Clearly, Chambers likes answering his critics.
Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich
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