If I were a finance recruiter for a company in Silicon Valley, I will never never hire from Cisco Finance. Will never bother to touch finance resumes from Cisco as one VMWare recruiter had commented to me while trying to hire a finance partner for my business when I was at VMWare. She knew the analytical demands of VMWare. The Cisco CFO is one of the mediocre I have ever seen. I am a senior director of products in a business unit at Cisco now and came to Cisco from another big hardware competitor. My finance partners in two other companies I worked for in Valley were quite intelligent and very analytical. Some has great understanding about the technology as well as my business landscape. Most of the time I used to engage them in my strategy discussions. But I see finance people at Cisco don't have proper finance degrees and yet in finance org. I agree with somebody when she mentioned that people have miscellaneous degrees and have been with surviving in Cisco just by means of politics. Just s--- up to your boss…It is easy to blame engineers for Cisco's mediocrity. But take a look at other orgs inside the company, like Finance. The CFO is one of the dumbest.. Frank was good.
I work with the finance people in corporate side and some of those people used to report to the current CFO Kramer a year back until she got a guy from a consumer goods company who is interacting with the directors and senior directors. I deal with the Cisco finance org. during annual planning as well as regular finance discussions. The senior directors I deal with are so naive. They barely ask any probing question. They just take whatever numbers I give them. It makes my life easy. In fact they sometimes tell me to provide them some number that they can show to CFO to get get her off their backs. In no occasion I was questioned about the sanity about my business plans and projections. I would have explained them had they asked. Seems finance did not care as long as their pay checks comes along. I also don't care if finance gets the right number or not. I am here for the short run.
Usually my previous finance partners were very probing and were also very helpful in giving me insights about my business. But the Cisco finance people are pure junk, They have been just manipulating these stupid SW numbers for the CFO. Always asking me to give them SW revenue when they do not even know my business. So they basically take my HW revenues and re categorize it as SW revenue because the CFO is asking them. Sounds funny at times. There is one finance director for SW on the corporate side. I rarely deal with him...usually let my finance folks give him some numbers. But it seems the individual has been complaining to CFO about all the business unit finance directors by discrediting their analysis and business annual plan numbers when this person has no insight into the market trends or understanding of the businesses. This person has survived 4-5 LRs by s---ing up to the CFO. The CFO does not get the true picture of the business outlook. I think the CFO is very mediocre, but she can do better by at least getting rid of some of her mediocre finance directors from old time in the org and bringing in new people with strong financial background and technology understanding who can help the business units with insightful analysis and better business partnership. Else Chuck should just let her go...Seems she has a math major but total useless....