Cisco 3.0: A New Tech Star Rises In The East

Cisco is systematically globalizing its US-centric corporate culture. To capture the exploding market opportunities in the eastern hemisphere, CEO John Chambers opened the Globalisation Centre East (GCE) in Bangalore in 2007, which de facto acts as Cisco's second headquarters and which is helping design a new global company blueprint, spawning whole new business units to serve emerging markets such as India, China, and the Middle East. This is just the tip of the iceberg: Mr. Chambers wants to locate 20% of Cisco's top leadership outside the US. These senior execs will soon equally call the shots with US-based execs on how Cisco operates globally. And the GCE is just the first of what Cisco expects will be a handful of strategically situated Globalisation Centres. When its Bangalore-based center is fully operational, Forrester expects Cisco to be the first tech multinational corporation (MNC) to have evolved into a globally adaptive organization (GAO) — a socially responsible and culturally sensitive enterprise with globally integrated assets, talent, processes, and partnerships. Other tech MNCs have much to learn from Cisco on how to succeed worldwide as a genuine GAO.