Cisco's reverse mentoring plan helps middle-aged managers grok Gen Y Cisco has implemented a reverse mentoring program that sees its younger and less-experienced staff advise its managers, the better to help the latter develop strategy. Sabrina Lin, Cisco's veep for commercial business in Asia Pacific, Japan and China, revealed the program at the at the Canalys Channels Forum in Bangkok a while …
… these "middle-aged managers" think they can pigeon hole an entire generation into doing the same thing. They've got the attribute mapping backwards.
Repeat after me: You can't put people in boxes … people are the boxes you put things in. Just because I'm <40 does not mean I want to come within a bull's roar of social networking.
"Just because I'm <40 does not mean I want to come within a bull's roar of social networking."
Yes you do. You live for facebook and twitter. You're feckless and have an overblown sense of entitlement.
Stop trying to be something you're not and accept your destiny. Be all you were meant to be.
Icon, because some of us never grow up ...
What the heck does the twitterverse have to do with making a great router? I'm on the dividing line between Gen-X and Gen-Y and I think most of my older peers use Facebook and twitter more than I do (approximately not at all). Seeing a drab-gray company trying to get hip with the kids gives me the creeps. It's ok to be drab and gray and make high-end enterprise gear that you sell for a juicy margin.
...is useless if you don't actual listen to anyone, regardless of age.
Let me be loud and clear to Cisco, and they won't need social media to grok it:
Cisco, the world loathes you and your worthless, overpriced products because they are (drumroll) worthless and overpriced. There are a handful of things you make that noone else can touch. That's your anchor. Everything else is being undercut left and right.
Cisco, if you want to stop bleeding customers, lower your prices and make your products dynamic, admissible via API and maybe even advance to the point that your interface is something other than a requirement to memorize 500 pages of arcane CLI. I don't know if you noticed, Cisco, but nobody actually likes CCXXes. They're arrogant, egotistical pricks who cost way to much. When your competitors are offering widgets that are as fast as yours, allow companies to bin the expensive douchnozzle (running networks with any old sysadmin or developer) and do it for a quarter the price...why the fuck would anyone buy from you?
What? "Huawei is backdoored by the Chinese government" you say? How - exactly - is that different from you? China, the USA, it's all the same. Both foreign powers trying to turn the rest of us into serfs. So that doesn't work.
"Stability, reliability, blah-blah enterprise something marketing gobleddy gook?" Hate to say, buddy, but Juniper works a hot damn, so does HP, Arista, Dell...even Supermicro! Most don't need - or want - the majority of shit in your routers and those that do would can get it better elsewhere.
You exist on inertia and some core routing products that noone else can duplicate. Soon, Arista will take the latter part of that away from you. After that, where are you? Relying on your religious fanatics to advocate on your behalf? That's only going to get you so far.
...we hate the religious nutjobs evangelising your overpriced tat almost as much as we hate the tat itself.
If you need social media to figure out the above, you're doomed.
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