Ellen McGirt is undoubtedly a good business reporter. Her recent cover story for Fast Company “How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist,” is a great piece that shows the many interesting and truly innovative reforms that Chambers has instituted at Cisco.
However, I think McGirt is trying too hard to be clever or just doesn’t understand what socialism really means. Socialism is a political system that uses the force of government to take money from some and give it to others. Cisco is a private enterprise that’s only asking for you to buy their products.
McGirt’s confusion seems to arise from the socialist-sounding rhetoric of CEO John Chambers. He uses what McGirt calls “Collectivist Catchphrases” like “Co-Labor” to describe Cisco’s approach to management. He’s replaced managers (what many consider the avatars of capitalism) with councils and boards; emphasizes information sharing, rather than hoarding; rewards cooperation, rather than back-stabbing ladder-climbing.
But Chambers is no socialist, he’s a capitalist responding to a problem as old as business itself: How do you give those with good information and good ideas, the power to get things done?
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Posted in: Open Source, Open Standards & Peer Production, What We're Reading
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
