The Challenge of Sustainability at Cisco - Case Study Example

?Cisco Case Study Introduction The relationship between the company and the case could be said to be one that is parallel and synchronizing. This is because the focus of the issues raised in the case and the vision of the company are directly related. For example, whereas Cisco as a company has an aim of breaking the link that exists between people by providing the world’s most effective networking system, the case is also oriented around how the link between wellbeing and the citizens of Lebanon can be broken through a result oriented relief program (Brennan, 2012, p. 1). Both entities are thus concerned about issuing out relief. For Cisco as a company, its major culture has been to take advantage of the market dynamics and critically study it to take advantage of it. It is for this reason that it is stated that “Cisco managed to stay ahead of its competitors with its speed and talent in adjusting changing conditions taking place in the global market” (Brennan, 2012, p. 2). This means that dynamism has been the strategic approach of the company and in doing this, it has made the entire globe its platform for operation. Hitherto, Cisco began a right company to include in the Partnership for Lebanon (PFL) when it became necessary to put together five companies to send relief to the country in various ways. If for nothing at all, functions of corporate social responsibility are part of a globalised dynamic strategy and so meet the vision and culture of Cisco squarely. CSR Lessons Reading through the case, there are several key strategic lessons that any senior manager of projects within a company could adapt. The first of this has to do with the use of integration in both the approach and stakeholder base. That is, the Partnership for Lebanon, as the name implies, was undertaken in an integrated or partnership manner. Integration has been found to hold the key to the many failures recorded in project management in terms of effectiveness and efficiency (Nonis & Swift, 2001). This is so because most project managers tend to take up all the task of project implementation and execution or at best include only a few stakeholders. Once this happens, there tend to be inefficiency and ineffectiveness because very little is achieved within a longer time frame and what is achieved is hardly guaranteed of quality. From the manner in which the Partnership for Lebanon was implemented using as many stakeholders and agents as possible, it is important that senior managers always adapt an employee involvement approach when carrying out major projects. In terms of approaches too, it could be seen that as many as five criteria were set for the implementation and running of the development program. In light of this, senior managers are admonished to always have a backup strategy that they can fall on in case substantive strategies fail. Alternatively, they may choose to use many strategies at a go so the weaknesses of some of the strategies will be overshadowed by the strengths of others. The second lesson that can be learned in terms of implementation and running of development programs has to do with the implementation approach adapted by the stakeholders. Indeed, not only did the stakeholders have a differentiating approach that was made up of several different strategies. What is more, the approach that was adapted when implementing the strategies gives a strong signal to senior managers. The implementation approach is what could be referred to as the spiral implementation approach. In such spiral implementation approach, the strategies or tasks in implementation are prioritized. The prioritization is made to move from the less complex to the most complex. Complexity could be defined in terms of cost, urgency, relevance and resource demand. In whatever the case, the ones that demand less are first implemented before jumping on to the ones that demand more (Norberg, 2000). In the present case, we read about stakeholders of the project at the April 2007 conference in Paris, deciding on the immediate priorities to tackle, whereby the priorities were set as emergency relief and response, job creation and private sector revival (Brennan, 2012, p. 6). In this manner, it can be said that the major focus of the implementation group was on the urgency and importance of the strategies and options that were available to them, whereby they wanted to first save lives and move up high to ensure the welfare of the indigenes by creating jobs to cater for their day to day needs. Other senior managers are also advised to adapt this spiral approach to implementation whereby they will ensure that the implementation process is not done in a haphazard manner but in a well crafted and designed fashion. Cisco, Corporate Sponsors, and PFL Even though the execution of the Partnership for Lebanon was carried out in an exclusive corporate social responsibility manner by engaging the services and efforts of several non-profit partners, it is also true that each of the corporations involved benefited in one way or the other from the corporate responsibility that they performed. But before going on to how individual corporations such as Cisco benefited, it is important to stress that the main beneficiary was the people of Lebanon who had their lives improved and their immediate needs well catered for through the efforts of the five member countries and the non-profit partners who were later brought on board. For Cisco, it assumed a leadership role of a host and fund leader pumping as much as $15 million in the initial stages of the project. Because information technology was also a whole component of the structures of change that the partners wanted to achieve, Cisco took advantage of this to also serve as the sole IT consortium for the partners, ensuring that its long sustained social citizenship campaign of social investment was held on to. Once these things were done, Cisco and all the other partners recorded various forms of benefits including and exposing exemplariness of a group of companies who were committed to putting the welfare of the ordinary person first. On the part of customers and consumers who reward social responsibility, this was translated into patronage of products and services of the companies involved. The Challenge of Sustainability Despite the fact that the early stages of the project saw highly impressive commitment levels from the partners with Cisco alone contributing $15 million, the project manager still has fears that sustainability would be a problem and this fear may well be justified. Judging from the fact that the hopes of most partners were shattered in September 2009, it can be said that the commonest form of factor that poses threat to sustainability is the assurance that earlier efforts will not be wiped off by recurring and repeating events of disasters, especially man-made disasters such as terrorist attacks and wars. But since the major approach is to offer social relief and corporate social responsibility remains an important stake or part of corporate management, it is admonished that solutions be put in place in solving the identified challenges with sustainability rather than running away from them. In this regard, it is recommended that the interventions being used currently by the partners would be a behavioral approach that is embedded in the principles of social change orientation (Nonis & Swift, 2001). By this, a call is being made to target interventions at social campaigns on the need to promote social well-being, peaceful coexistence and avoidance of violence. Once this is secured, the fear of looking back at what has been done before and thinking that it may all be shattered off again with a single attack would become a thing of the past. Conclusion The need for multinational companies and other international corporations to hold on to their corporate citizenship roles has been stressed and discussed in the paper. It has been realized that even though most multi-national companies are profit oriented, the need to give back to society is very important and eminent and should not be avoided in any way. While carrying out these social responsibilities, it is important that an integrated approach is used to make the whole implementation process easier and accessible. This is because once the contingency support for Lebanon was carried out through a partnership approach, much efficiency and effectiveness was guaranteed. It is also important to point out to the need for ensuring that the designation of implementation strategies for various corporate social responsibility projects is undertaken through careful planning and initiation. Through these planning and initiation processes, which would of course include a vibrant feasibility study, it will be possible to identify the key approach interventions to address an identified social problem. It will also be possible to identify various ways of combining these interventions so that they can be executed in a well coordinated manner without the implementation process getting haphazard and ill planned. Finally, the discussion has underscored the need for senior managers of various corporate social responsibility projects to make it a priority to identify challenges that may possibly hamper the successful implementation and sustainability of their projects at the very early stages of the projects. It would always be a wrong approach to wait till the challenges escalate before thinking of solutions to apply to them. In the application of solutions, it is also important to give credence to those kinds of solutions that tackle the solutions from their very root causes. References Brennan, S. (2012). Partnership for Lebanon and Cisco Systems: Promoting development in post-war context. Nonis, S., & Swift, C. (2001). Personal value profiles and ethical business decisions. Journal of Education for Business, 76 (5), 251–256. Norberg, H. M. (2000). Use of collective trademarks in consumers’ choice of foods – Preliminary results. Okonomisk Fiskeriforskning, 10 (2), 144–161. Read More