Chief Development Officer, Charlie Giancarlo, Discusses Cisco’s Culture of Innovation

Chief Development Officer, Charlie Giancarlo, Discusses Cisco’s Culture of Innovation

News@Cisco spoke with Charlie Giancarlo, Cisco’s chief development officer, about the cultivation of innovation at the company. As the head of Cisco’s product development organization and leader of Cisco’s 16,000 engineers, Giancarlo is the company’s innovation evangelist. Through his leadership, Cisco has redoubled its efforts in fostering the innovation that has helped it become one of world’s leading communications and information technology companies. The following is a modified excerpt from a News@Cisco podcast interview with Giancarlo. (The podcast is available at http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/podcasts/audio_feeds.html#MP3_103106).

What do you think are some of the keys to nurturing innovation at Cisco?
Charlie Giancarlo: One of the most important elements in nurturing innovation is to make sure that you create an environment where it is acceptable to test limits, and to fail. Now, of course, people failing repeatedly in the same area would not be considered innovative. But if it’s in pursuit of something that is agreed to be a valuable goal and the approach is well thought out, we try to embrace that and give the employees the support they need to take that kind of risk. Encouraging your best people to take risks by letting them know that they will be supported and, in fact, that they will be promoted in spite of having a few failures on their resume, is extraordinarily important. Most people do want to go into things that are innovative. We just need to give them a way to do that.

What are some of the innovation challenges Cisco now faces in its third decade?
Charlie Giancarlo: I believe that one of the big changes that will occur for Cisco-and I think in many other industries as well-is that we’re going to be much more focused on delivering an end-user experience than on delivering a set of boxes or products. And that will be true regardless of whether it’s a consumer or a business user. So it will no longer be about delivering switches and routers and building networks. The quality of the experience more than the functionality of our products is going to become paramount. That speaks to the entire company, not just to the technology itself. It’s the way we market. It’s the way we sell. It’s the way we support all of those environments. There’s a pervasive innovation taking place throughout Cisco.

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