Culture at work - The work culture at Cisco systems

This is the final article for the Culture at Work department. As a special treat to the column's readership, I decided to look into my own backyard and explore the culture at Cisco Systems. Cisco, a major supplier of Internet equipment and solutions, is a contemporary business phenomenon. It grew from two Stanford graduate students in 1984, Sandy Lerner and Ken Bosack, to the current over 30,000 employees. I selected Dixie Garr, Vice President of Customer Success Engineering, to interview about Cisco's work culture. Dixie's organization has its roots in a more familiar “quality” organization, but as you'll see, it has evolved into a more vital role to match its title. Nonetheless, when an irate customer calls and demands to speak to the Vice President of Quality, they speak with Dixie, so her perspective on the company's culture comes from a unique vantage point. She deals with customer pain and facilitates innovative feedback mechanisms that directly impact engineering. © 2000, IEEE. All rights reserved.