Management Reset: Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness

Chapter 6. Structures for Sustainable Effectiveness

There is a popular story about how John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, settled on a way to make Cisco more flexible and customer focused. While participating in a small-group visioning exercise at the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in which executives from a variety of industries and countries were tasked with thinking about the future, it dawned on him that this wasn't a bad way to make creative decisions.

Chambers had recently reorganized Cisco—the third major reorganization since the company's founding in 1990—from a decentralized business unit organization where each customer-facing unit had a full complement of staff functions into a centralized functional structure.^{[41] ...}