Hot on the heels of our several posts on the article about Cisco in Fast Company, I just ran across this video from a presentation and Q&A he carried out at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Thanks to Martin Dugage of France’s Boostzone Institute, who provided the following commentary on the video clip.

My emphasis below … I am reminded of Euan Semple’s classic post about implementing social computing (The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?), and I don’t doubt that one of, if not the, the hardest part is senior managers and executives getting used to the idea of less or different control.

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Cisco is undoubtedly a lab for E2.0, and Chambers is definitely in the pilot’s seat. His point about collaboration revolves around productivity and speed.

My attention was drawn by a couple of things he said, such as the new ability of the company to pursue 26 top priority projects at the same time instead of just one or two last year; or the fact that Chambers meets more customers now but less often face-to-face and more often virtually, less often one-on-one and more often as a group; or the fact that he had to get rid of 20% of his staff composed of control freaks who didn’t get it.

Chambers believes that communities are the very core of E2.0, and he admits that he had a hard time getting used to it.

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Based on Cisco’s own experience in the past several years, organizations will completely restructure around these new capabilities. Indeed, he offers up his company as a paradigm of this vision. Once a hierarchical, command and control-based organization, Cisco is now much flatter, a company running “off of social networking groups.” Councils with cross-functional responsibilities suggest and take on many more projects (from emerging markets, to video, and smart grid boards); from one to two major ventures per year, to this year’s 26 launches.

The next generation company is “built around the visual.” Cisco employees do non-stop teleconferencing with collaborators around the world. The company hosts 2500 such virtual meetings per week. It also employs Webex, Wikis and blogging to move work along.

With this kind of communication and carefully managed process to match, “operations can be turned on a head,” says Chambers. It’s the recipe for market-dominating speed and scale. Chambers is “loading the pipeline” with projects that assume other companies will want what Cisco has and makes.

“If we’re right, we’re developing a huge wave of revenue opportunity.” Perhaps this is one reason why he’s “an optimist on global productivity, global economy and our ability to handle the challenges.”

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