Why Promoting Wendy Bahr was the Right Move

Some of my colleagues here on the subnet suggest Cisco might have missed an opportunity by not raiding the channel talent of Microsoft or some other large vendor when it chose a new VP, U.S./Canada Channels. As I read the blogs I kept thinking, “Not for this job, guys!”

That’s because Cisco has a global channel program. The VP for U.S. and Canada certainly gets a seat at the table in developing that global strategy, but the bigger part of the job is about operationalizing the program at the theater-level. It’s about working through the details to make sure the global program is properly tweaked to meet the needs of channel partners in the United States and Canada. It’s also about talking to channel partners and evaluating feedback. In other words, it’s about trying to balance the interests of these constituent channel partners with the desires of the company that writes your paycheck. If you stray too much in either direction, you’re the one who ends up losing.

So while fresh faces can be a great in certain circumstances, I don’t know that it would have been good to bring in somebody new to become the official interpreter of the Cisco channel program for U.S. and Canadian partners. It’s an immensely complicated program and I have yet to meet anyone who truly understood it when they first joined Cisco – or became a Cisco partner. It almost demands promotion from within.

Wendy Bahr was acknowledged as the heir apparent for this post long before Chuck Robbins vacated it. Time will tell if she does a good job. But she’s talking about a style that’s pretty compatible with Chuck’s, and Chuck was pretty well-liked by the channel.