Here’s an extract from my new book The Cisco Way.

Explore the media coverage at http://www.theciscoway.com

This brings me to the critical importance of the
right people strategy as a key component of your
organizational design. It can make all the
difference if you want to build for a sustainable high
margin. Every new services organization should include
three aspects that relate to people strategy: affordability,
scalability, and people clustering.

The New Songdo project (South Korea) was one of the flagship projects
for Cisco’s smart-connected-communities global
practice, which was created to pursue the $30 billion
emerging global opportunity. It made intuitive sense
to collocate some of the global practices such as the
smart-connected communities and health care in
Bangalore.

Resource sharing and clustering talent came
into laser-sharp focus as a means to streamline the organization to drive better, healthier margins. Shifting global talent needs driven by business volume
swings, especially in the developing nations,
made this a priority. The smart-connected communities
practice was established with a critical mass of
highly skilled employees in Bangalore. They could
fan out to the various countries that had these projects,
deliver, and return. It was no coincidence that
the percentage of new hires in the top ten Cisco
centers had gone up steadily from 55 percent to 62
percent from Cisco’s fiscal year 2005 to fiscal year
2009—and kept climbing.

Learn more about the three critical success factors and strategies to deploy them for “build to last” organizational design in my new book “The Cisco Way”. http://www.theciscoway.com