Corporate Thought Leadership: A Cisco Example

I am a strong advocate for more focus on corporate leadership positions and thus I was glad to read two interesting articles today.

In Org Chart Innovation, Leigh Buchanan suggests some new titles that companies should add to their org chart. One is thought leader and this is what Buchanan wrote:

“Thought Leader. Industries and societies have thought leaders; so why not companies?

Maybe it’s a title for the founder who hands off operation of the business to a professional CEO so he can blue-sky the future. Maybe it’s the scary-brilliant vice president or technician whose brain is forever making wild-sounding connections that turn out to be revelations. Maybe it’s an add-on for the CEO who understands the trajectory of her industry the way Simon Schama understands art history.

The thought leader’s job is to inspire the troops with possibilities and to engage them in a vigorous—ideally intellectually rigorous—discussion of their role in the industry and the world.“

I fully agree with Buchanan and I was very pleased to see a great example a few hours later when I read a post by Marie Hattar, who is Vice President, Network Systems and Security Solutions Marketing / CMO 
at Cisco.

In her post, Going Gaga for Innovation, Hattar provided us some good perspectives on innovation. However, I paid more attention to the platform on which she used to spread her ideas and thoughts. It is simply called The Platform: Opinions and Insights from Cisco.

I think The Platform is a great initiative by Cisco and I am sure they will get much value out of this. Hopefully, it will also serve as an inspiration to other companies.

Please drop a comment if you know of similar thought leadership platforms and initiatives.