Cisco

In a year, if you have the right personality, people will reach out to you to do exciting tasks, like flying to San Francisco to deliver a presentation on your culture and heritage. You'll get invited to a social event nearby, or you'll be asked to be interviewed for a YouTube video about what you're passionate about in social media, with millions of views.

In other words, there is NO shortage of cool stuff to do besides your day to day, which time you can manage on your own anyway. We're not just a networking company anymore; we're a technology company. Yes, it's a bit hard to get into the family because we want the best skillsets and culture fits, but once you do, you'll be set for life!

For your own initiatives, there is a defined budget (in my case, it's about a thousand dollars a month) for you to travel, pay for hotels and meals, and go execute on what you want or need to do for your job.

This budget keeps employees grounded on their initiatives because if you want to do many activities, lunches, trainings, events, etc., you're going to need to spend quite some money. Because the budget is set to a fixed amount, you might feel constrained.

However, in 13 years, I have sometimes doubled and almost tripled the allowed budget, and I've never heard even a peep from my managers. So use it wisely, but don't be too scared of it.

Direct managers can't really be said because I've had a few, and they've all been so different. However, they all share the Cisco culture, so they've been great.

Executive leadership, it's okay that we individual contributors don't see or hear from you, which is by design, of course. You're doing major initiatives and setting the strategies for all of us to follow, and they've been working so far, so thanks for that! But sometimes the optics from my point of view are: if I see an executive post social media content or otherwise communicate, it's about a community give-back issue. Don't get me wrong, that's great that we're doing all those things for our communities, but I get the feeling that the ratio is too much towards that, and I miss those communications about what's exciting in our business.

One example: for every two or three posts about executives building houses or helping the homeless, I'd like to see a post of them having fun and trying to guess how much a DNA Center appliance weighs, for example, or showcasing the new Meraki camera vision intelligence, or talking about the markets and stuff like that.