Cisco's Arrogance Bugs Me Again

Cisco is a brilliant company with very smart people. They know a lot about networking; all aspects of networking. But sometimes this knowledge gets converted to arrogance when these same smart people assume everyone outside of Cisco doesn't know networking.

Now, in defense of Cisco engineers, I'm sure they go into many customers' networks and find organizations that can't spell "design", let alone explain what it is. Plus, the management in those poor organizations is probably blaming Cisco for the network mess. As if it's Cisco's problem that you don't have a plan for all those shiny, new routers than arrived this week. But, in the end, some really smart Cisco engineer comes into these broke customers and (probably doing simple, basic things) makes incredible, positive changes. The customer is happy, Cisco gets more sales, and our favorite Cisco employee's ego grows larger.

But every now and then Cisco works with a customer that does know what they are doing. In this case, the customer is looking for advice, best practices, and guidance. They are not looking for Cisco to do the work and save the day. But, since Cisco employees have seen so many broke networks in the past, they assume "if they called us, it must be broke". The "we're here to save the day" ego kicks in, but this brilliant Cisco engineer has no idea what the customer wants.

If you haven't guessed yet, I am the customer in this case. I am not afraid to say our team can out-design 75% of the engineers at Cisco. We know what it means to have templates, written architectures, and good documentation. And we know how to design and build networks. So, when I ask Cisco to come in and help us it's at a very deep, technical level as a partnership.

But, enter our inflated ego Cisco engineer the other day who failed to listen to us for 45 minutes. He assumed our BSTUN technology (let's say it was BSTUN for the sake of the story, but it wasn't about BSTUN) was broke, we didn't know what to do, and he was going to build all the configurations for us (i.e. "save the day"). This really got me hot. That's not what we needed. We had a good design that we wanted a peer review of, not for them to come up with a completely separate design.

The best thing Cisco can do is handle each customer independently and LISTEN! Listen to what the customer wants, asks questions, and clarify the goals. Then you can ride in on the white horse if necessary. But, that won't always be the case. The last thing you want to do is irritate a very smart and knowledgeable (and demanding) customer.

So, to all 60,000 Cisco employees out there...make sure you're listening to us first....save us second. Thanks.

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