Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Good riddance! My company was acquired by Cisco and after seeing through the bs in the first month I left without hesitation. The ELT, especially Chuck were some of the fakest and unintelligent people I ever came across. It's clear from others commenting here as well that many believe much of the ELT needs to go along with Chuck and get someone competent in to actually revive Cisco to what it was. It is a laughing stock now and run by a slew of id--ts. I hope the board takes notice and actually takes action but that probably won't happen either. Maybe a mutiny will do the trick if it can sweep the legs of all of the lemmings and make an impact.

I'm pretty sure she was fired for some type of breach of her contract. At that level, they don't just abruptly quit without a successor lined up so not to disrupt the business and possibly calls for negative publicity. It may have to do with people that she aligned with once she became COO and all of a sudden, Cisco started to become a laughing stock with underperforming, and underwhelming departments while customers were taking business elsewhere.

She was fired.

Per FORM 10-Q
Cisco informed Maria Martinez, Cisco’s Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (“COO”), that the COO position currently held by Ms. Martinez has been eliminated.

She should have been fired a long time ago. She is one of the worst I have seen at Cisco ! Led with fear and has delivered nothing in the past 6 years! Anyone with half a brain who challenged her craziness would get fired. Hope they get rid of all her minions too whom she brought from Salesforce and all the rejects from Google!

Cisco used to be a great company !! The toxicity is spread across the company now. There are others like her sitting at the ELT who need to go along with her. Glad I left when I did. Hate to see this great company being run into the ground :-(

Don’t forget about the figure 8 race track that she brought with her to develop the CX story. I Was employee number 24xx2 and was a Sales RM when she was brought in. She spewed BS and we were all trained in how to sell the figure 8 to our customers. 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

Working with and around MM was an eye opener. I left last year after 4 years. here are a few of my observations.

1. Her lack of trust in the people that reported to her resulted in complete disempowerment of her entire organization. All important decision making was centralized to her rather than her highly compensated leaders.
2. If “Because Maria wants it this way…” is a consistent answer to the legitimate question of “WTF were we thinking when we decided to do this!?!?!” … You might be f’d up and headed for disaster.
3. The majority of significant organizational improvement initiatives have failed and those failures were obfuscated with re-orgs and layoffs.
4. When key, successful leaders leave the ELT and blame their departure on an inability to work with MM, and nothing is done about it… You might be f’d up and headed for disaster.
5. MM’s leadership style causes people to hide the organizations’ inability to deliver on commitments. Her team hides the truth until it is too late to adjust. The initiative then gets added to the long list of failures.

Lastly…

6. Her actions during her tenure with Cisco have truly changed the tone and timbre of the company in a negative way. It will be many years before Cisco can recover from the impact of her disempowering, fear-based, leadership style.

The whole "CX" idea makes me roll my eyes. Don't keep changing the brands, and don't develop so many overlapping products. Focus focus focus. Small, mid-tier, large, and SP. That's it. Stop rebranding products, just make them better. It's not about the name stupid, it's what's under the hood. Lost so much market share esp for security products. It's not how much but rather the quality. Stop hiring 100 dead weights, hire honest and hardworking people. Too many hind sniffers that's not focused on the customers but rather what they need.

Honestly, good riddance.
Bye bye Maria.

Quite the obit.....

Too many layers of management period. Everyone trying not to be accountable. So they keep hiring managers underneath them.

I was at Cisco for 21 years. From the most exciting, thrilling, rewarding place I had ever been/seen, to a shell of a company that is run by a sales person and that cares not one wit about it's employees. Sure, you can say that most large companies are like that now, but Cisco really was different in the pre-chuck days. Now it's stupid things like v2mom and laying off thousands after having the best year ever.

Glad I left of my own accord with a wonderful package.
Sad for all the wonderful people that got nothing - this layoff has nothing to do with merit - those just LR'ed should be proud that they managed to make it all work during a terrible time to be a Cisco employee.
Would I ever come back to Cisco? Probably not, and definitely not as long as it's run by a sales team with little acumen and reliant on v2mom's.

Context: middle aged now, started at 24, grew up at cisco, lived there for 22 years. I loved the JC years, there have been a lot of leadership I still admire and became part of. These days CR has f'd it all up. Customer eXperience? nowhere to be found. lets put a team in place to help that out. But we don't fund them. SiliconOne? How is this better then the others, there is literally no strategy that you can be excited about.
I left 2 years ago, I still do care, it's sad to me that the place where I grew up gotten to such a rotten place as if your parents you once loved became addicts.
The great people are let go, the ones who have the favorite color of their leader can stay no matter of their competency.
I hope they'll do better, Martina's exiting is the first next (not best, because there is a lot more to be done) step. Next thing is to build what people ultimately love from Cisco.
And if that desire is there, I'll be back.
But some more "leadership" has GOT TO GO!

Copy paste V2MOM is a result of poor leadership. Cisco has got too many management and very low leadership reason people don't know how to better use of what is the benefit of defining a strateging and cascading. But is not d-mb to think that more stock awards helps people feel accountable to contribute to the overall objectives and how their action result on the big picture. Many people at Cisco they simply won't care, they'll do the job they are asked, they get paid and if in the end they don't care if they contribute or not. Cisco always was great to nurture a cultural belief of put some skin in the game, everyday, being proud of be at Cisco -poor leadership results at some rotten apples and some copy paste d-mb things to do. Well, that's what some people can just do -copy paste. Thats why AI/ML going to continue doing the natural that everyone sees it. Sorry folks, you're no longer needed if you won't use your brains a show you actual do something more than copy paste!

not sure at the exec level whats going on, i do know that v2mom is stupid. our mgr simply has us copy / paste from their mgr. its d-mb, no one follows it

Understanding Cisco complexicity has all to due with 20y directors and vp packed making just noise and doung nothing at all. Those are most packed at the engineering tower the heart and soul of cisco. 1y ago they moved the strategic office to better governance, without addressing the org issuez at the highest levels. CX wasnt the biggest issue but whom saw those people debating standarization, digital transformation, CX wasnt ever win anything aside what was already happening. The V2MOM was a solid framework but with an excess horizontal and vertical management ratio to individual contributors the strategy wasnt aligned 10 levels lower. Cisco needs to became leaner from the top. Maria made mistakes with CX forgot 10% of her org that had a complete blackout due to the reorg. Dont blame frameworks blame who didnt execute them right.

MM should have never been hired. Whoever hired MM should be held accountable.

Only in Fran's DEI kingdom would the term "LatinX" still be de rigeur despite the vast majority of Hispanics preferring the term "Hispanic.".

This leadership team simply doesn't listen to anyone.

Looking back on my decision to leave the Customer Experience (CX) team over three years ago, recent events have only solidified my belief: the CX initiative, especially under the V2MOM framework, was a far cry from success. The abrupt departure of Maria, a key leader, feels like the final nail in the coffin for a strategy that, in my view, was flawed from the start. This only validates my long-held opinion that the CX effort, despite its lofty goals, turned out to be more of an organizational misstep rather than the groundbreaking change it was touted to be.

https://blogs.cisco.com/gov/national-security-telecommunications-advisory-committee

In your face :)

It's funny that we call out her giant CF where she burned down the world with her stupid V2MOM cr-p success. Even with a huge finance team she couldn't balance her budget.
But I suppose that if Chuck admits that his selections for so many of these positions that he has fired while CEO that he would likely need to fire himself. Oh well. Soon enough Cisco will be broken up for parts and sold off. Great work Chuck!

You are all getting fired, we a bringing in the B team to fix all these excessive redundant redundancies.