How Cisco is Nurturing the Next Generation of Leaders - Alistair Wildman SVP&GM of Customer Experience EMEAR

From flat sheets and fitted sheets to getting told off by Bill Gates, and everything in between. Alistair Wildman SVP&GM of  Customer Experience EMEAR at Cisco shares why he is so passionate about Cisco’s emerging talent and we meet Rhiannon … A Cisco apprentice who oozes talent, who shares how her career has got off to a flying start.

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Sam 0:10

Welcome to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group, the podcast for tech industry leaders and aspiring leaders who want to help help their companies execute faster. As always, we're virtual. I'm in Sonny Buckinghamshire. Vicki's over in Deepest Darkest, Oxfordshire. And Vicki, we have an old friend on the podcast today, don't we?

Vic 0:26

We certainly do. We are joined by an old friend and a new friend, in fact. So today we are joined by Alistair Wildman, who is SVP of Customer Experience at Cisco. And we're also joined by Rihanna Dobson Edwards, who is an apprentice at Cisco. Now, if I just go back a little while, even just to this week, I saw a post on LinkedIn this week that said it doesn't matter how senior you are, you can be kind. And that just made me think of Alistair actually, because Alistair, you have a pretty senior job at Cisco. And yet when I asked you if you would do this podcast with us, you were back within seconds going, of course, how can I help you? And actually, you were one of our first clients at the Amplified Group as well, which seems like a lifetime ago now. So I'm absolutely thrilled that you're on. And the fact that you and Sam know each other so well as well, I feel like I'm going to have a very entertaining hour.

Sam 1:29

Happy days. So, Alistair, I think you'd best start by giving a supported history of what I well know as a most illustrious career. Uh, but it would be good to bring our listeners up to speed if you don't mind.

SPEAKER_02 1:41

Certainly, I'm not sure if it was illustrious, but yeah. So, yeah, I started in the year 2000, just after Y2K, at a small software company called Microsoft. And um, and my first job was unbelievably, I was called a dot-com business manager. Do you remember dot com's exactly donkeys 21 years ago? Uh yeah, so I joined Microsoft. Um, I was about 27 years old. I'd not really done, I'd done some crazy stuff before that was not related to tech or IT, so we're not going to talk about that. We'll talk. Um I was born in the entertainment. I used to be the okay, so I used to be I used to be a promoter at a nightclub, uh quite a famous nightclub called the Hacienda in Manchester. And I did a few raves and some kind of big events for mainly students, but I did that for about probably five or six years after I got I got my degree. When about 27, I decided well I couldn't get a mortgage, so my mum said, get yourself a proper job. And I'd just got in, I just started working with a guy called Anthony H. Wilson who had fractured records. In fact, working with him in 1996, 97, he owned the hacienda, and he also owned Manchester.com, which was a uh the first kind of city portal information guide for Manchester. And we did a lot of work there around e-commerce, we set up e-commerce companies, we had web design, and I really got started to get stuck into the Manchester.com scene. Anyway, so when Microsoft applied for a dot com business manager, I thought, yeah, that's it. And I applied for it. I remember going down for the interview because I had a white t-shirt on, a pair of ripped jeans and some silver trainers. And uh, let's just say I didn't quite fit in. But nevertheless, and I said, I remember saying to Gordon Smiley, who interviewed me, that my mum wanted me back for me tea that night, so they had to make a decision that day. And they said, no, no, it's gonna be a you know a probably a two or three-day interview process. I said, Well, I can't afford to keep driving down from Liverpool where I was living. So you're gonna have to either give me the job or tell me I've not got it. Anyway, 9 p.m. that night, I got the job, and I then had the most amazing, yeah, most amazing 10 years of my career. Uh, I loved it. I started as a salesman in the dot-com team, and then I went into the solutions team, and then I looked after the NHS, and then I looked after a company called Reed LCV. I went to work in America as a global sales account manager, and then met this a really exciting executive called Maria Martinez. She was at the time the head of like the CEO of that business division. Um, she asked me to go to Redmond to become a chief of staff. So I came out of sales and went to become the chief of staff of one of the six CEOs of the company. I got to meet Bill Gates and Steve Balmer and all the kind of good and great in Redmond. That's 2005-6 now. Then came back to run what's called the global accounts in Amir. I ran all the communication sector and media accounts, so all the big Vodafones, Deutsche Telekoms, and that was brilliant. And then I got a phone call from Rhea and she said, Um, I'm gonna go and work in a different part of the business. It's called Microsoft Consulting Services. You need to come with me because you've done sales now for like eight years and you need to do something different. I was like, Well, I love sales. I've got a flash car, you know, I get to live in London in a nice flat. She went, No, no, come across with me. So I then became the global head of uh delivery for the Microsoft Consulting Services Group, delivering some of the what they call the special practices, uh, and keeping the BDM function. About a year and a half later, I got another phone call from Maria and she said, I'm going to this company called salesforce.com. And I was like, Oh, great, okay, where's that? And she said, Well, it's the cloud computing company. And I wasn't really aware of it. It was 2009-10 now. It wasn't that big at the time, it was it was well known in America, but not in in the UK. And in in a mere, it wasn't that well known. And cloud computing was kind of a term, but it wasn't really a genre at the time. So she then went there, and then after a few months, I then joined her at Salesforce. And I'm kind of and then I moved completely different directions. I went into what was called the Customer Success Group, which is called Customers for Life, and spent three wonderful years at Salesforce.com running Customers for Life. The first job was Amir and Japan, and then my second job, I actually went back into sales and ran the UK sales business as the CEO. And I just had my first child and I didn't want to travel anymore. And Miguel Milano wanted me to come into the sales team, so that was brilliant. And then from there, um I decided to leave Salesforce and go to this company called VMware Vicky, where I worked with Vicky and uh Sam. I met you there because you were at SoftCart and I met Mr. David Parry Jones and Marizio, Gali, and all the kind of great guys at VMware. And I was running the N-User Compute Group in sales again. I did that for a few years, and then my head was turned by the CEO of a cloud uh computing startup in the UK called Onap. I got a guy called Ditlev Breedle, and he wanted a chief revenue officer, stroke CEO, to come and help him take the company forward, and only a hundred people, $10 million revenue, so it's really small, you know, compared to where I'd just been. And so I went there and had three really interesting years based in the brick lane, being very cool and trendy. Uh, and we we after three years, we eventually sold the company, and it was a great exit. And and then, kind of coming back onto the marketplace, I had another phone call with my old boss, Maria, and she said, I'm on my way to Cisco. And I was like, Wow, Cisco, why Cisco? She said, Because, you know, she did nine years at Salesforce by then. She said, I'm looking to do something really different. I'm going to want to drive a consistent customer success motion. I want to build a motion that will include partners so they can actually see profitability from the life cycle. I want to build a motion around hardware and I want to help Cisco transform itself from where it is, which is, you know, a kind of legacy networking, you know, great company, great legacy networking to a software and solutions. And she said, Do you want to come and run the Amir business? So I said, Absolutely. So three years, one week ago, I joined Cisco and I've been there ever since, running the customer experience group across Amir and loving it. So sales, CX, sales, CX, sales, CX. What a journey though. Yeah, yeah. None of it planned.

Sam 7:20

No, no, these things very, very rarely are. Very rarely are. You know, everybody says you've got to have a five-year plan, a 10-year plan, and what have you, but usually goes out the window when it hits the ground. Do you do you miss the hacienda days, or are you happy with where you've got to?

SPEAKER_02 7:35

Do you know what? Yeah, I'm terrible. I've got all the old t-shirts, I've got the books, I've got a pair of Hacienda trainers. You know, I became more Manchester, and I've lived in London for 20 years. But uh yeah, I know. I I look back with fond memories. Actually, there's a film uh about the Hacienda called 24 Hour Party People, and it's by a guy called Steve Kugan was the play the lead role. It was Michael Winterbottom. If you look in that film, there is a scene inside the Hacienda nightclub that was actually recreated in what's called the Boddington's Brewery. So they use that where they basically store the beer. And if you look on that dance floor, you might see someone you recognise. Because they invited us all the old staff, all the old staff has to come back, recreate our 1990s baggy clothing and jump around to the stone roses. Amazing, amazing. Well, there are lots of similarities, though. I mean, you may not think so, but you know, what you learn in in the kind of front of house aspects of running, you know, 10,000-person event, and what you've got when you're dealing with like 60,000 Amir-based you know customers, is there's a lot of similarities about how you deal with people, how you bring on brilliant young talent, which I know we're going to talk about today, and how you make sure that people see value from the money they're spending so they come back or they buy more solutions.

Sam 8:46

Yeah, it's funny, you know, I certainly, I mean, uh, you know, the stuff I did in music was was on nowhere near the sort of scale that you were operating on, but the stuff I learned about interacting with people, negotiating ways forward and so on by being from being in bands and creating music together, I definitely think stood me in good stead later on in my sort of my more professional, less rock starry career. It kept the look, maybe, yeah. Apart from the lack of long hair, but that's not a bad thing. So, I mean that's a crazy and fantastic and really cool journey. Um, so you bring yourself to Cisco, one of the biggest players in the IT industry, and as I'm uh led to believe, uh top on the 14100 best companies to work for list, which is pretty damn magnificent. Uh, what makes it so awesome?

SPEAKER_02 9:44

Oh, it's definitely the people. I mean, I mean, I and I run the people side of the business. So for it for me, it's definitely the people, the team, you know, it there's a real mixture of you know, you know, really exciting young people that are coming in to help give us those ideas and of the kind of current generation through to 25, 30-year-old veterans who've you know who've been here a long time but have that great depth of knowledge. So I think that the people absolutely, and and and also the diversity of those people as well. So, you know, we we try really hard to make sure that everyone doesn't look like me or else it would be really boring. Um, and then I think then the second thing obviously is the is how we integrated with our technology and the solutions. I mean, Cisco has got the widest portfolio. I mean, I thought Microsoft was wide because it had the Xbox and MSN. So you've got two consumer units, and then you had a whole bunch of software and then a little bit of hardware. Where but Cisco is really diverse in terms of the portfolio as well. So it's got the traditional hardware, the networking, which is 60 odd percent of the business, and we are number one in pretty much every uh category there. And then you've got the automation and the controller and the innovation side of the network, and then that that slides into security because security is embedded in everything we do. And then we go into the visibility and you look at what we do around applications and then network visibility, and finally you go across, you've got WebEx, which is the biggest single collaboration and communication tool still in the marketplace, still number one, even though it may not have the strongest brand, uh, because obviously there's been new entrants in the last 12, 18 months that have really done well in terms of market share. I mean, WebEx is still the best end-to-end encrypted mass market scale network for business users. So you try style that portfolio to it to a single customer. So they can go from data center, they've got the network, they can go to security, they've got services. I mean, services is 26-7% of the business and still growing. So it's just an incredible place to work because it's so interesting. But if you're Rihanna, who's like just starting her career, she's got all these chances to go to different places inside one company. She can go and work in a high-end software business with the, I think we're the seventh largest software company in the world now by by volume, okay, and numbers. Or she can go and look at the traditional side and talk to clients who've been with us for 30 years, where we've been uh you know managing and securing the enterprise networking, or we can go into new areas around applications and visibility and you know the whole new world that's coming. And then finally, if she's really excited, she can go and help us rediscover the internet because we've got new technology that will become the next version of the internet in the next few years, and that that's all coming down the line as well. The pipe of innovation is just stuffed full of great things.

Sam 12:07

You you heard it here first. Web 3.0 coming soon.

Vic 12:12

You know, just before we go on, it's really interesting that you say that, Alistair, because we we recorded a podcast earlier this week with Lamia Megadish. She's a VP at Conval, and she she was at HP, but we worked with her at VMware, but she talks about she was an engineer in France, and now she's VP of Partner Strategy, and she's gone through various different roles, and that came from HP, giving her the flexibility to move from different type of group to different type of group till she found where she really wanted to be, and she that wasn't planned.

SPEAKER_02 12:47

But that's what great companies do, though. So great companies, they you know, we profile in a really nice way talent, and we look for those people that are rising quickly, and then we help them and accelerate them. And then you know, it's like it's like when Maria tapped me on my shoulder and said, after eight years in sales, you need to do something different. So if you want to become the CEO of a company, you can't keep doing sales because you'd be one track trick pony. She said, Right, I want you to go now and run global service delivery. I knew nothing about delivering services, probably still don't today, but don't anyone. And uh, I think that's what you've got to do, is you know, in big companies, because we can we can place people in so many different environments where they can learn different things. Now I've got I've got rock stars in their 20s now that are managing, you know, teams of hundreds of people because we we and particularly I'll tell you a quick story in Saudi Arabia. Uh the my leader of Saudi Arabia is a young lady called Buthenna. Now, Buthaina is a female in Saudi Arabia, and so they've only been out in the workforce for a small number of years, and she is now leading the delivery team in Saudi Arabia, one of the fastest growing markets for Cisco, and she's amazing. She will be the next you know CEO of Saudi Arabia for Cisco. I know it, she'll she'll break every possible glass ceiling because there's amazing talent. So that's exactly what you have to do, is you have to find that talent and you have to help them by giving them that a little bit of a help in the next job and and and allow them, but then give them space to be creative and to do their thing, you know, don't micromanage them. So almost get the right people on the bus and worry, worry later about what seats they sit in. Well, it's the classic people always say to you, How have you been successful? And the answer is, Well, I'm not successful, but the team around me are brilliant, you know. And that's what you've got. I never forget that was actually Bill Gates who said that to me once. You know, he said two things to me, Bill Gates. Walm and don't be late. I was like, Okay, I'm sorry for a bit late. And then I've already said, hire people that are better than you at things that you're not good at. And I was like, and I never forget that because you know, when you Bill Gates is giving you a telling off, you tend to listen to him. Um, and he's right, you know, you know, that's that's the whole thing about you know your team. If you hire a team and tell them all what to do, what's the point? You might as well just do it yourself. You know, you've got to hire a team and then you've got to empower them to get stuff done. All not just the team report to you directly, but all the way through the organization. Yeah.

Sam 14:53

So having seen you in action, particularly in your VMware days, you are very clearly a people person, and that that seems to me to be your your sort of USP. Have you always been like that? I mean, you must have been look that's all part of the Hacienda days, the promoter thing. Well, no, you say it.

SPEAKER_02 15:09

My father was a market trader, and I think you know, when I was 11 years old, he said there's no pocket money, you've got to get on the market stall. And so I did. Ah, good for him, brilliant. So Chesterfield, what were you selling?

Sam 15:21

What were we selling?

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Uh uh quilts and quilt covers and dusters, yeah, flat sheets and fitty sheets. And we made them all the best Lancashire-based cotton you've ever seen, Sam. Let me tell you, they go crazy for these sheets in London. Uh, and that was it, yeah. So I had a strong work ethic, and I and you know, someone comes to the market store and you pitch them the price, and then you tell them 10 seconds about the product. If they don't buy it, they've gone, they'll never come back because that's the way markets are, because there's more stalls. So you learn to listen, but then talk quite quickly. As you know, I talk too quickly, I can't help that. Uh, get excited, be enthusiastic, and then you know, hopefully you they'll listen to you. But there's another great thing that uh this was actually uh Maria Martinez said this, actually, she was right, which is people buy from people, and I think that you know, you particularly when you're in sales roles, you know it doesn't matter, you don't need to know everything about the products, you don't, you really don't. That's what you got this the specialist sales for. You don't need to know everything about the pricing, that's what you got the pricing team for. You need but what you do need to do is be able to listen to your customer, understand what they're actually trying to do in their business, and translate that back into their language, and just listen. And honestly, nine times out of ten, they'll tell you exactly what they want, and you can figure it out from there. And I see many times I go into you know meetings with your young sales teams and they immediately start presenting a hundred slides. I'm thinking, nah, just stop and ask them why they're here and what they want to get out of it before we do anything else.

Vic 16:41

I heard a phrase last week that was listening is like a trampoline, and I think that's what you've just described there. It's like you listen and then you bounce back, and then you're you're you're replaying it back to the customer rather than just listening and shutting up and not saying anything at all.

SPEAKER_02 16:58

Yeah, I mean, when I went to Salesforce, I've got to say the technology was so amazing that you had to tell the story, or else no one understood it. It was, you know, and the story was there, and Mark Benioff was a storyteller, and he would record that story for the entire company every quarter and you'd relearn it. Uh, but I think in most tech companies, you know, because the technology is quite mature and people understand it, you've just got to listen, you know, you have two ears and one mouth, use them in that in that direction. Um but the other thing I was I think is interesting. I I've worked at major brand companies, so you know, Microsoft, Cisco, you know, I don't need to, you know, I don't really need to have a reason to meet I meet a client or a customer or a partner. They want to meet you, but they want to hear the story and they want to hear about customers just like them. And that's the key thing is relating everything back to people just like them so they can put themselves in the shoes of just like them, and then all of a sudden they're getting empathetic about what you're talking about.

Vic 17:49

Yeah, it's a good point. Very good point.

Sam 17:52

Makes sense. So, what's important to you as a leader, Alistair?

SPEAKER_02 17:57

Oof. Um I think for me, I obviously I mentioned the team, right? That that's definitely it. I mean, right now, I think that the the focus for me from all companies, doesn't matter who you're working for, is that people start to use the technology they buy. I think you know, the days of doing the big deals and just walking out there buying the Ferrari are over, aren't they? I mean, we we saw that. I mean, VMware Dales, sales, for even Microsoft days, people did big deals and then never bothered coming back. You know, as we move the business model to a reoccurring revenue and a consumption model as well, where people only pay on demand, you know, pay for what they actually use, it's consumption based. You've really got to focus so much more on the post-sales activities and less on the pre-sales. Now, sales is so important, and absolutely salespeople are brilliant and wonderful, and we need them. But we need the post-sales teams, both professional services and consulting services and customer success to come together to create that continuum. So it's the customers then transitioning from the I'm gonna sign to I have signed to I'm deploying to I need to see value, and just being able to articulate down the value. So for me, that that is really now more important than anything else, Sam. That we really focus on making sure that customers actually get value from that technology because you know what, they might you might have a deal for a couple of years, but they won't come back to you.

Sam 19:09

And I think loyalties are it'll go away very quickly if it's self-ware.

SPEAKER_02 19:14

Well, but I don't think people are as loyal anymore. I mean, there's so many opportunities in in the marketplace for a customer, so so many different technologies, you know, you can literally pick and choose. There's so many new, exciting companies coming through, you know, that are you know, and if you are the large player like we are at Cisco, you've got to be careful you don't get you know dinosaurs. And and that will happen if you if customers don't use the technology.

Sam 19:36

I mean, that's what Martin always used to drum into us at SoftCat, you know, there will be another SoftCat, younger and hungrier, coming up behind us at some point, and we've got to keep on our toes and keep moving forward and keep doing a better job and keep improving things. It's you know, you've always got to be looking behind you, haven't you, as well as looking ahead. So in your in your position as a senior person in the the tech industry, uh, what do you see as the challenges going forward, you know, particularly with your focus on people?

SPEAKER_02 20:05

Uh, talent is number one. There is a massive war. I mean, we got Rihanna, poor young lady's not said a word yet. We're gonna bring in the conversation in a second. You know, we've got to attract and retain the best talent, and we're really good at attracting them, we're not as good at retaining them. And that's why I love things like the Apprentice Programme, which is a massive, massive driver for us at Cisco early in career programs. We want to bring them in when they're really young and full of ideas, and they can help shape the future of the company. So, talent, and then we need to make sure that we keep our the people we've got relevant, and I mean that I'm in skills relevant. So, you know, I was actually having a call yesterday with a young lady who's really, really technically brilliant. She's uh what is she CCIE, so she's one of our highest certifications, and she was actually saying that she started a career only two years ago in routing and switching, which is kind of bread and butter networking, and she's now already taking a CCIE in security, and she wants to go even deeper into cybersecurity. And I said to her, that's exactly right, because if we've got you know routing and switching, which is the backbone of Cisco, but that's what the partners do. That is kind of bread and butter. We want to make sure that we make sure that all the people in my organization, which I own all the services, all the post-sale people, that we're actually delivering the higher value services that are more difficult: automation, migration, you know, cloud, cybersecurity, security, advisory, because that's where it's really difficult. So you have to make sure you keep you attract and retain brilliant talent and then you keep them really relevant for the future of where we're going in the market. And that's difficult because you're often training people on technologies that we're not yet really selling very much. So you've got lots of people with the latest skills, but they're not really deploying them because they the sales have to catch up with you. So you have to kind of balance that because you have a PL. But that's a great one. Also, I think it's very important that we make sure that we have a diverse and interesting workforce. And I made a joke before, but you know, I think Cisco has struggled in the past at making sure that we've we've kept it that way. And I it's been a real focus in the company and making sure that we we have, you know, uh our male female ratio is correct because you look at the leadership team now at Chuck's. Level that's our CEO. There's as many female leaders in his executive team as there are male leaders. And I think that's a really interesting signal to the marketplace. You know, that diversity of all types of diversity is very important because of the customers. Your customers are diverse as well. So you need to make sure that you that's a big focus. And then I think the last thing is, and we've mentioned that as well, is just spotting talent and how do you help nurture and promote the next the next future Vikis and Tams and uh you know aspiring leaders and companies like Cisco they do a really good job of that. I mean Microsoft was also really good at that as well. So I'm really proud that we those three things are coming together.

Sam 22:37

So you're clearly very passionate about this sort of stuff, which I guess feeds into your role as exec sponsor for emerging talent at Cisco. What does that mean? What do you get involved in on a daily basis?

SPEAKER_02 22:49

I mean, bluntly first thing is money. So myself and Wendy Mars, who uh is the president of Amir, we we basically carve out a dedicated budget for early in career and we hold it back at our level to say, nope, we are going to make sure that this amount of money is put to good use. So, yes, we we absolutely have people that own their own PLs inside Cisco, and we empower them completely, but we do keep a little bit centralized to make sure, and then what we do is it's an investment. So we will invest, uh myself and Wendy, in that great talent that's coming in to help the teams as they make sure they build out their plans. Um the next thing is just passion and time. So uh I spent a lot of time on what you call getting to know your calls, just short 15-minute calls with kind of people in early in career, and I do about 15 a week at the moment, so just little short calls getting to know people, you know. And I don't I can't go too deep because I have 15 minutes, but I get to hear, and also I can ask them questions about the role, you know, how's it going? Because I don't hear everything, and I find out loads of interesting stuff. So I have you know, I took calls with people in Dubai, uh, Poland, Milan, uh, UK, uh, Bedfont, etc. So all different people across the hole than me. I've got a call with Russia later, just getting to know people, so it's an investment in that. And then the last thing is I think is also just going to the marketplace and just making sure the messaging is getting out. So it's great if you've got an early career programme, but if no one knows about it, you're not going to attract the right people. So we get out into schools, we get out into you know Henley College and you know, places like that, and we and we we build strategic relationships across the whole of the UK and across all universities in here as well. And we we want to make sure that we're we're feeding properly. So we and that's an investment as well, time and money and passion to make that happen. But it and it works for us because we bring in hundreds and hundreds of great, amazing young people every year into our organization.

Sam 24:34

Fantastic. So yeah, having been involved in the tech grad program and the tech apprenticeship program at SoftCat and training every batch of news starts for about the year 2001. Uh yeah, I'm also very passionate about that sort of thing. Uh, which brings us on to Rihannon, who we're joined by today, who's a first-year apprentice who interviewed and joined Cisco in our new crazy lockdown virtual world. Uh, do you want to introduce yourself, Rihanna?

SPEAKER_00 25:01

Yeah, sure. So I'm Rihannon, as everybody said. I joined Cisco for the 21 fiscal year, so back in July. So I came straight out of school. I was 18 when I joined. So in my last stretch of the first year now, I've had so many opportunities this past year. Just the rotations that I've done, I thought I'd come in and only do sales straight away. I was turned to do enablement and do event planning and training sessions, and I really enjoyed that. That was a whole new world. From that, I then went into sales marketing. Again, never thought I would do marketing. Now I'm in global virtual sales and just looking forward to what's to come next in the next fiscal year. Um, yeah, I was attracted to Cisco a very long time ago, actually, back when I was 14 in my first secondary school, we were taken to Green Park to do an Internet of Things project day with Cisco, and I'd never heard about the Internet of Things before, and we were given a talk about it and then projects, and I was mind-blown, I was so fascinated by it. Went home, researched the company. I then tried to tailor my education over the next few years to become as successful as I could be as an apprentice. So I went to a school that was sponsored by Cisco, did loads of project days there, made contacts, and I think what's really beautiful about that is actually we had apprentices coming in to do these project days with us and people in the business, and they remembered us. And even when I've come to Cisco now, I've spoken to people and they're like, Oh, we remember you from your first secondary school or like college, because then I went to Henley, as Alistair mentioned, and continue to do so many different subjects, and I thought I have to be all technical to join. I thought I'd have to do all IT and engineering. I did the complete opposite. I did all humanities, and that's worked amazingly for me too, because it reflects the apprenticeship in the way that there's like 200 plus different rotations to choose from. So yeah, that's just like a bit about me.

Vic 27:09

Do you know? I think that's so fascinating that we tend to think that if you're going to go into the tech industry, you have to be technical. So I love the fact that you've just shared that. Thank you so much.

Sam 27:21

And as you know, from Vicky, from our I think it was might have been the last podcast that we recorded. Uh I I did classics, Latin and Greek and stuff like that. So absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with tech, and ended up as CTO. So Rihanna, you can go anywhere you want to go, absolutely.

Vic 27:39

Yeah. And I started out as a primary school teacher, so it you know it just shows a great industry to be in.

Sam 27:46

Funny old world, isn't it? So now's your opportunity to give Alistair some uh some serious feedback. How are you finding the program? Are you enjoying it?

SPEAKER_00 27:55

I absolutely love it. I obviously had an idea of what it would be like from quite early on from opinions and apprentices that I had contact with, but it's completely different as soon as you step foot, even virtually from the very first day. I never realised the amount of opportunities that we could do. I never realized that we could choose where we wanted to go. There's been rotations where they may not have been offered before, and I've spoken to somebody in the business, and then they've asked me to come into the team and stretch projects as well. I thought I would have to just stick to my work and my rotations, but I've had the opportunity to do such amazing things within Cisco that I look at other people, maybe at normal traditional university, and think, wow, like look at my career and what I've done in this past year. What can I then go on to achieve if I'm doing this now and have the continued support? Like at Cisco as well, when you join the apprenticeship, you're given a buddy in the year above to help guide you in your first couple of months. You then also have the opportunity to get a mentor within the business. So I have a mentor who's in DevNet, which is so technical, and I'm not technical at all, so I've got that really nice balance of opinion there. She guides me on so many things. I've got a sponsor as well, somebody who can see potential in me and helps guide me. I've got my skills coach for university, I've got my manager, I've got like a whole team of people around me, and so does everybody. Everybody is helping everybody get a step up that ladder, and it is such a nice environment to work in.

Sam 29:38

That's a serious investment in the uh in the future of the business.

Vic 29:43

God is so impressive.

Sam 29:45

Tiki, you wanted to come in with a comment there.

Vic 29:46

I'm just well, I'm just blown away by it in all honesty. You know, it's no wonder that that Cisco is the you know top of the Fortune 100 best places to work. I mean, and and this when Helen first suggested, Helen Douglas first suggested that we take on this topic with you, Alistair, it it was really interesting to me because it's a topic that I've always been really passionate about. And we had six different interns work for me at VMware, and they come in and they do a year and you invest in them, but there wasn't an official program to keep them. And I just I lost them to places like Accenture because they had a graduate program for them to go to because they just didn't have the right programs in place. But that sounds such a comprehensive solution because I get so frustrated with the talk about the balance and the gender imbalance in tech, but it's because we're not starting early enough. But you know, Cisco sponsoring schools. Wow, so it's it's worse than that.

Sam 30:47

That's the way to really solve the problem, isn't it?

Vic 30:50

It has to start, I keep saying this, it has to start earlier on, doesn't it?

Sam 30:56

Yeah, that makes sense. So how do you ensure, Alistair, that you keep these people that you start off? You know, that was always an ongoing discussion at SoftCat. Were we just training people for the competition? How do you make sure you keep them for as long as possible?

SPEAKER_02 31:12

Well, so so the the hard thing is not the first job, it's the second job. So typically people are very happy with their first job, and then when they go to the second job, that's where you tend to lose people, particularly graduates. So there's a very different so we've looked in profile. So apprentices come in at 18, like Rihanna and has done, and they they do a degree with us. So we we help them through university for three years, we give them rotations, so they go to different parts of the business, completely open, so they can choose, and they can choose where they go, and then they take their, they also pay them as well, so they get paid for three years. So they leave after three years, they kind of graduate into Cisco, or they always work there with a degree, with loads of experience of doing different types of jobs in Cisco, and you can go anywhere you want in the company pretty much. Uh, and then you also they also have been they got some money in the bank, hopefully, as well, or maybe not spent it, but they're not coming out with a massive debt anyway. So the the apprentices are pretty loyal and tend to stay with us a very long time. We've seen that. The program's about 10 years old. The grads are really difficult. We can attract them really well, but then we have to really focus on the second job. So for apprentices, we focus on landing their first job and then helping them because they're young. I mean, they'd be maybe 21 when they're going straight into workforce. So we put some you know guardrails around the fact that they're young, uh, particularly the younger ones of the cohort. For graduates, we focus a lot on the second job, because the first job we can they land where they come in, that's the entry job. And then how do you move into second job? And then for other early in career, because early in career for us is kind of below 30, it's about that portability. So making sure that we open up opportunities. So, for example, we we focus stock at early grades, okay, on purpose. You know, we have special off-cycle focals, which are only for younger grades, you know, the lower grades in the great pyramid. And again, the last thing we do is we do very open talent reviews across the whole business where we bring all the different leaders in. So, as you know, as a big global company, you've got different people with different groups, okay? So sales groups and customer success groups and renewal groups and servicing groups. We actually do, you know, kind of talent expos across everybody. So we get to know all the people in the market, in the UK market, in the Swiss market, in the German market, in the Saudi market, so that people can see opportunities outside of their current working team or working group. So they could there can be portability. And like all big companies, although we haven't done it recently, we do quite a lot of you know assignments abroad. So you can go and work in different countries if you're interested. You know, it's it's not, I'm not saying we do huge amounts of it now because of COVID. We we can't really do much, but you know, you want to give people the platform where they can showcase. Um, also we do a lot of with video as well. So, and Helen Douglas, who we've mentioned before, has really been inspiring in a lot of the early in career programs, just using you know video forum, you know, uh people our age, maybe we may still be on text, message, and email, but the younger Rihanna's age, they never do it. They're all on their own, you know, Instagram. And so let's go to where the people are and let's get we get them involved. So we ask a lot of the younger people in the organization to help us with that recruitment. So if you are thinking about joining Cisco, you're more likely to meet Rihannan than me because she's more likely to talk to me. But she'll touch you at the level you're at, whereas you know, you might meet me at the end, kind of thing, and I'd say, well done. But so let's just let's just try to kind of get level with people and make it real.

Sam 34:17

I think that makes sense. So you you kind of touched or hinted at it briefly there, but obviously we're in this crazy hybrid world. Rihanna, you joined during uh during COVID, so maybe you haven't even seen a real person yet. I don't know. I hope you have. Um perhaps you could talk a little bit about how Cisco is addressing that. I presume the technology is in place, right?

SPEAKER_02 34:38

Yeah, so obviously we've got our own technology, which really helps. We've got these beautiful devices that I'm currently using, desktop pro, go to your local curries and buy one. No, I mean that they're amazing. I mean, so we try to make it as easy as we can do. We uh obviously WebEx helps. We we also have started to really mandate, and I mean mandate people don't spend eight to ten hours a day talking to video because it's not healthy. So we want people to take breaks, go for walking meetings, go to the dog for a walk, have a lunch break, do some exercise. You know, as much as it's great to work from home, because you take your kids to school and pick them up again, you know, it's time permitting. It's also we know that people are starting to overwork and getting really stressed. The other one that's interesting is that we've got a very large workforce in India, particularly where our support center is. Can you imagine taking 10,000 people and sending them all home? You know, we're getting emails like, I don't have a desk, uh, I don't even have a chair. Just allowing people to go and buy a desk and a chair where people live four or five people in a shared accommodation. They may not have a room with a desk in it. You know, and then the last thing is just the work-life balance really is important with people working from home. We want people to simply go out and just take some fresh air, you know, spend some time. You know, we we've given five days back now this year to Cisco employees on top of their holidays, on top of bank holidays, there's days for you. You know, just go and have it. You know, you know, we've had some terrible, as everybody has, COVID has been rampant through the world and that's affected everyone. And we're we're not unlike any larger enterprise, you know, we've lost team members, which is incredibly sad, and and many team members have lost family members as well. So we make sure we give people proper time off. In fact, we're we've we're enforcing this summer that people take holidays. We're literally telling people, you've not taken up holidays, go on holiday. I don't want to see you in work, you know, in August because you know, you need to go have a break. You've worked far too hard. And so managers now are being, you know, we're we're we're checking for it. So we're doing what we can do, Sam. But you know, I can't wait to get back in the office. And I'm sure Rihanna and the whole of the team can't get back in as well.

Sam 36:29

I can well imagine. Fantastic. So I guess we should start to sort of bring this to a close. So perhaps you could give us your your three takeaways on the subjects that we've covered today, please.

SPEAKER_02 36:39

Yeah, well, think first of all, so thanks a lot. If you've got this far, you can listen to us ramble on. You know, invest in young talent, okay? I I know it takes effort, and you you may think it's expensive, but it's not. You'll bring brilliant young people like Realan into your company and they will give you a boost of energy, a boost of ideas, and a boost to your business. So, really think, you know, just take time out and look at the apprentice programmes. There is a levy from the UK government that you actually they will fund it, so it's not that difficult to do it. Uh, second thing, um, also think about how you then retain and promote that talent. You know, I would I would love to see, you know, while I'm still you know uh in in Cisco, you know, a a VP under the age of 30, which we're starting to attract now. You know, let's break the glass ceiling, let's bring some of this amazing talent through because they are absolutely they can do it. You know, we talked about stretch assignments and cross assignments, we do that as well. But also let's let's really start to say I'm starting to accelerate promotion now for those people that I think deserve it. You know, it's not about how long you've been at this company, it's about how how good you are, what you can contribute back. And the last thing I think is um is just think about the diverse aspect as well. You know, we've worked really hard to make sure we have a very diverse and balanced team across all our markets, not just the UK, but everywhere. And that brings interest to us, okay, because we've got lots of different points of view and cultures coming together. Uh, and I think that really helps to make it more interesting when you come to work. I'm very proud that Krakow, where we have 1,200 people, we've now got 54 different nationalities in that office. It's incredible. And so it's a really great thing to see when you go there, all the different people coming together into Poland, where we have a we have a big center, but coming from all over the world to work together as one single team for Cisco.

Sam 38:20

Fantastic, that's brilliant. So, Vicky, you best uh take us into team experience if you don't mind, please.

Vic 38:27

Thank you. Yes, so uh recently at the Amplify Group we trademarked team experience, and team experience is so important to us because we see so much around customer experience and employee experience, but team experience is what work is all about, isn't it? It's who we're working with. And your title, Alistair, I know we briefly touched on this when we spoke, whether you when you were um agreeing to do the podcast, and you're SVP of customer experience. So, with that in mind, what does great team experience mean to you?

SPEAKER_02 39:06

Great team experience. I I think it comes back to what we talked about before, which is you know, if I get knocked down by a bus, you know, and and I'm I'm not able to go to work today, the business just keeps on going because my team just step in and do exactly what they they were always doing, which is amazing. You know, and I think for me that that's a key thing, you know, particularly where in this virtual world, how do you build great teams when you're not actually in the same room? And we've managed to do that stuff, we've managed to keep that kind of team command room. So, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, we called our organization customer experience, which by the way, being completely honest, three years later, I think may have been a bit of a mistake. Let's rename it again. We may call it something different. And what was interesting is when we decided to call this team customer experience, that we were the pretty much only company in the industry to do that. So Microsoft hadn't done it, VMware hadn't done it, HP, IBM. Now everybody else has a customer experience team. So well done, Maria. Uh, you've always been an innovator and a and uh and a forward thinking. So yeah, but I mean it's not just the the customer experience though, is the whole company, it's not just one team, that's the point I'm making. And team experience is about the whole company. So you you've got to all focus on this. You can't just be done by a few individuals.

Sam 40:11

Completely. What do you think you might call it then?

SPEAKER_02 40:13

Well, we couldn't call it services, we couldn't call it support, we couldn't call it customer success or renewals. So yeah, so but the reason is it's because everyone calls it CX. And what we've ended up doing is creating a brand within a brand, which is absolutely not what it wants to do. Our brand is Cisco, we have one brand, that's our company brand, The Bridge. Uh, and yet we've got this kind of CX group, and we all end up with jackets with CX on it, and now and I realise, whoops, that's probably not the best way forward. So, yeah, I mean, customer experience is great because it kind of does what it's the focus, but it's a focus for the sales organization, the marketing organization. So I don't have a better name right now, Sam. Uh, and obviously, I'm I'm not going to change the name of Maria's organization, but at the same time, I think that just making sure that everyone understands that we're all we're all.

Sam 40:54

Might be a job for the apprentices to come up with something.

SPEAKER_02 40:57

You know what? We've always said that we quite often, when we when we hit a roadblock, um, we often say, let's go and get 20, 18-year-olds, stick them in the room, and I'll bet they'll solve the problem. And you're right, they will do.

Vic 41:08

Yeah, yeah, fantastic. But I just want to say, from a team experience perspective, I mean, it just comes so naturally to you, having had the pleasure of working with you in the past. So I just want to say thank you, Alistair, for taking the time today. It's been a real, real pleasure. And I knew I was this was going to be a fun podcast. So I really appreciate that. And Rihanna, and actually, I think you ouch on him, to be honest, because he's pretty awesome, but you were amazing. So, so inspiring. And I can't wait to just snip your bit and share that.

SPEAKER_02 41:43

Thank you. So, so I would like to say my my final words are I would like to, in case they're what listening, you never know. I like all the people I've worked for. So, Maria Martinez, David Power Jones, Darren Mancini, Guy Chessel, Terry Smith, Mauricio Carly, thank you very much for trusting me and giving me jobs. And hopefully, I'll see you all soon.

Vic 42:01

Wonderful.

Sam 42:02

Brilliant ending. Fantastic. So it just remains for me to say thanks for listening to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group. As always, your comments and your subscriptions are gratefully received.