Cisco

Great work-life balance. Great place to start and/or end your career.

Great people.

Work-from-home option can be exercised freely.

Decent benefits.

Perpetual organizational churn. Employees referred to as resources. No clear goals/targets (talking about engineering departments here). No performance evaluation, making it difficult to chart a growth course if you are beginning your career.

I think with all the spin-in business, Cisco forgot about internal organic growth.

1. Delegate.
2. Trust and back the people you manage.
3. Think a plan through and then let it run its course. Example: Moving a team from Waterfall to Agile is not going to give you desired dev velocities and quality immediately. Hold your judgment for a couple of sprints at least.
4. Focus on implementing changes in letter AND SPIRIT. Going back to the dev life cycle: Breaking a waterfall into a cascade is not Agile.