How cisco creates new value via global customer service

419
In Bust the Silos: Opening Your Organization for Growth, Hunter Hastings and Jeff Saperstein offer
a new concept for business growth in today’s global economy. It is called “demand creation”: the
design of new organizational structures and processes to make managing the demand for a product
or service a process-based, predictable, and repeatable science.
The challenge is how to harness the capabilities of new productivity tools with new business
processes for success. Hastings and Saperstein argue that forward-thinking organizations must
work differently: in roles, not just jobs; in new forms of multifunctional teams, not just departments;
in networks, not just rigid structures; and in listening to escalate responsiveness, not just communi-
cating to get the message across.
We all now operate in a highly connected, rapidly evolving, customer-centric, and knowledge-
driven environment. Yet, most of our current management practices, organizational models, and job
functions are not effective in serving our customers.
Value is created through relationships with customers. Companies must adopt principles and
practices that encourage every individual in the diverse groups of employees to have a shared
sense of purpose to engage in more effective ways of working together to build customer intimacy
and loyalty.
This article profiles the Cisco Customer Interaction Network and the transformation of its global
operations from call centers to customer-relationship builders. It addresses the following questions:
• Why is being adaptive necessary for organizational survival?
How Cisco Creates New
Value via Global
Customer Service
Correspondence to: Hunter Hastings, EMM Group, 3505 Greenleaf Blvd., Kalamazoo, MI 49008, 415.720.4625 (phone), hunterhastings@emmgroup.net.
Perspectives from practice
By
Hunter Hastings
Jeff Saperstein
Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com)
© 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. • DOI: 10.1002/tie.20366

420 perspectives from practice
Thunderbird International Business Review Vol. 52, No. 5 September/October 2010 DOI: 10.1002/tie
• How does one design a customer support system that listens and teaches rather than just fixes
problems?
• How does one take full advantage of the Web for customer support?
• How does one give front-line professionals the training and tools to be consultants rather than
mechanistic problem solvers?
• How can evolving metrics be a game changer?
The article is adapted from Bust the Silos: Opening Your Organization for Growth by Hunter Hast-
ings and Jeff Saperstein (BookSurge, 2009). © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A
n enterprise’s purpose begins on the outside with the cus-
tomer . . . it is the customer who determines what a busi-
ness is, what it produces, and whether it will prosper.
—Peter Drucker
We all now operate in a highly connected, rapidly evolv-
ing, customer-centric, and knowledge-driven environ-
ment. Yet, most of our current management practices,
organizational models, and job functions are not effective
in serving our customers.
Value is created through relationships with custom-
ers. Companies must adopt principles and practices
that encourage every individual in the diverse groups of
employees to have a shared sense of purpose to engage
in more effective ways of working together to build cus-
tomer intimacy and loyalty.
The Service Paradox
Customers value relationships over efficiency, yet service and
support organizations are driven by efficiency. Furthermore,
while customer service and support systems are usually con-
structed around predictability (think about FAQs), business
problems—particularly those with complex business-to-
business products and services—are more akin to chaos with
natural patterns than predictable order.
Cisco Systems, Inc., is the worldwide leader in net-
working—2008 sales of $39.5 billion and net income of
$8.1 billion, with $26.2 billion in cash. Cisco prides itself
on excellent customer relationships, and its product and
service offerings have evolved from Internet enterprise
and service provider solutions to other segments, includ-
ing small, consumer, and commercial sectors.
Cisco customers are IT professionals who manage
Cisco systems purchased by their organizations; these cus-
tomers require ongoing, highly complex interaction.
Cisco service consistently strives to exceed expecta-
tions, and it has succeeded in becoming the Internet
category leader through continuous innovation and capa-
bility-building acquisitions. We focused on the evolution
of the Cisco customer response system as a best-practices
example to illustrate how value network, customer-centric
principles could be implemented on a multiproduct,
multimarket, highly complex product/service system.
To get the inside story on Cisco service, we spoke with
LaVeta Gibbs.
Gibbs joined Cisco in 1995 as director of the Cus-
tomer Response Center (CRC), where she had opera-
tional responsibility for the front-line calls for techni-
cal assistance and the corporate operators. She later
became director of companywide call center strategy
and implemented the Customer Interaction Network
(CIN). CIN represented a new business model for
contact centers globally, one that heavily leveraged the
Internet and cross-functional knowledge sharing. She
retired in late 2009 as director of global contact center
strategies.
She has championed the implementation of global
call routings, globally shared phone queues, and global
Web/phone access. She has led Cisco in leveraging the
latest call-center technology to increase productivity and
customer satisfaction while reducing overall workload.
During her time at Cisco, she reduced the number of
calls, reduced talk time, increased customer satisfaction,
and increased the efficiencies of routing calls.
Gibbs’s experience is useful for all organizations who
seek to use Web tools and processes to become more cus-
tomer-centric and responsive—the core goal of demand
creation—thereby increasing customer intimacy and
loyalty for sustained profitable growth. She provided her
insight and experience in how she helped to transform
Cisco support systems.

How Cisco Creates New Value via Global Customer Service 421
DOI: 10.1002/tie Thunderbird International Business Review Vol. 52, No. 5 September/October 2010
The vision was to have a
single access point for the
customer and the ability to
answer the question or route
to the expert regardless of
the customer or the ques-
tion—it was called the Cus-
tomer Interaction Network.
was called the Customer Interaction Network. It required
that Cisco organizations share knowledge and that CIN
agents interact with the customer by sharing, teaching,
and capturing the experience.
They requested the call centers to provide informa-
tion that could be put on a single Web page for everyone
to use. They submitted a question they had received with
a short answer or a URL to use.
They could take customers to the URL to teach them,
tell them to bookmark the URL, and create a flow chart
that could be followed or a form to fill out, anything that
would help the agent while visually viewing it and talking
to the customer.
Inside We Do Not See the Silos
Another challenge Cisco and many other companies
faced, because of the silos that evolved over the years,
was a very complicated and user-unfriendly phone menu.
Each time they added a new organization or service,
they added another menu option on the phone tree. It
took four minutes for customers to navigate the phone
options—and not always successfully. So the clock and
the measurement for good customer service never turned
on for the four minutes it might have taken the customer
to get to the right person. While each call center was mea-
suring what they were doing—a bang-up job—the Cisco
rating of “ease of doing business” was lower.
Cisco was among the pioneers who effectively used
the Internet as part of answering the customer’s ques-
tion. They could teach the customer the answer and
show him or her where the online resources were for self-
sufficiency, not just to answer the same question again,
but also to enable the customer to find that topic and
query on the Web.
Designing a System to Take Full
Advantage of the Web
Cisco developed a process and model—not just the tech-
nology that made it work.
While talking to the customer on the phone, a Cisco
agent would ask him or her to join a Web session. He or
she would key in a code on the Web. The Cisco agent
would key in the same code and that would lock them in
together. The session was bookmarked for the next time,
building an archive.
Cisco could capture that experience (for it and the
customer) on the Web and analyze it. How well did it
work? How could that have been different? When did
they lose the customer? What were they hearing directly
from the customer about that Web tool?
Because the call center was using the same tools de-
veloped for the customer to use, for the first time they
could give valuable information to the Web developer.
This was a dramatic transformation for Cisco, because
now they were on the same page (literally), providing the
same information to the customer. Feedback on the ef-
fectiveness and intuitiveness of a Web page came directly
from agents who used the tools alongside the customer.
The call center could give Cisco developers real-time
customer response information about the usability of
their tools that they could never get in a survey.
Cisco was like most large companies that grew quickly
and ended up with many silo call centers, reporting to differ-
ent business groups and not sharing across to other call cen-
ters. This meant they were inconsistent, overlapping, and
not designed from the outside in. For example, they had
five different ways to handle returned materials, depending
on whom the customer called in the company. They were so
specialized that if someone wanted to buy a product, not all
call centers knew how to handle the caller. Customers were
frequently routed around from group to group.
Linking All Customers to All Services
The vision was to have a single access point for the cus-
tomer and the ability to answer the question or route to
the expert regardless of the customer or the question—it

TAC because the organization was so vertical and so suc-
cessful in its silos. It would be lost to the system!
What CIN did was pull the cover back. The CIN front
line was interested in all issues, regardless of why the cus-
tomer called in the first place. They weren’t focused only
on one organization and overlooking other concerns.
Call centers have always been responsive. But Cisco
was able to transform that ability to actually change, guide,
listen, and capture experiences and opportunities that had
nothing to do with the reason the customer called.
And so it really changed the dynamic of what a call
center was all about. The word “call” went away and it be-
came a Customer Interaction Network. Every agent that
picks that call up worldwide is a front-line CIN agent.
CIN changed the ability of the company to hear what the
customer is saying when the customer wants to say it, even
before they know what questions are to be asked in a survey.
Teaching the Customer to Be
Independent
Cisco increased both efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Previously, a customer would contact the call center
and the agent would open a case for them. They would
continue calling, and the call center would keep opening
cases. In the CIN initiative, when they called, the Cisco
agent showed them the Web page where they were going
to open the tool. They let the customers know that they
could do it, too—with or without the Cisco agent—mak-
ing it clear that they were going to use the same tool the
Cisco agent could use. So, there was no perceived advan-
tage for them to call, but Cisco was still always going to do
it for them. And they could hear the agent asking ques-
tions and sequentially opening that tool. Then they would
go there by themselves, and Cisco added a little “click
to talk” button on that tool. They said, “Look, if you go
to the Web tool first, before calling, if you subsequently
need a person, we’ll guarantee you’ll get to an engineer
faster than if you called our 800 number.”
Within ten months, CIN had reduced the number
of calls coming in to open cases by 50% because the case
open tool was the most popular reason to call. And cus-
tomers’ satisfaction increased because they were happy.
Cisco agents didn’t just slam down the phone on them,
then say do it yourselves—the agents taught them. It was
a valuable productivity tool for them. And in addition, as
Cisco was teaching them how to use the Web tool, they
could provide feedback to Cisco engineers for redesign
to make it easier for customers.
The key is that the tool has to be reusable, repeatable,
and intuitive. Also, make it desirable for the customer to
LaVeta Gibbs explains:
When you looked holistically at the company, and you
looked from the customer’s perspective, you saw all the
silos. None of us inside the company saw the silos be-
cause we were so busy doing a bang-up job on our little
process. No one “owned” ease of doing business, only
“how well is my team doing?”
And so the CIN charter was to make it easy for the
customer. Today a customer calls that same number
and a Cisco person picks the phone up, using the tools,
using the information as provided on the Internet
for the short answer, how to escalate, and use a URL.
Today, if you call that number you hear a live agent say,
“Thanks for calling Cisco. How can I help?” That per-
son represents all of Cisco and will get you the answer
or find the right expert. Ownership begins at that first
contact, not when it is determined the caller “found”
the right group or selected the right menu option.
They changed the name from Customer Response
Center to Customer Interaction Network. The new strat-
egy is that customers come in at a single point; then the
Cisco agent networks and interacts with the customers,
teaching them and guiding them.
Turning Calls for Questions Into
Opportunities
Added to the CIN business model was a tool to capture
the experience of the call (what is the customer saying,
how did it go, room for improvement, etc.). Call centers
in the past focused only on answering the question but
not on listening to what else may be going on that some-
one in the company should know about. Now it can be
captured before it becomes a critical issue.
So Cisco turned the conversations and the calls for
questions into opportunities to teach, guide, and capture
experiences. For the first time out of a call center, they
would capture what the customer was saying as an oppor-
tunity for improvement, because they were seeing things
at that level—that single entry point—that they never saw
in the silos. Before the Customer Interaction Network,
customers would dial a separate number, get to a separate
call center—say, the technical assistance center (TAC)—
and they would complain about order management. Cisco
agents didn’t even take note of that. That wasn’t their job.
They were sure going to give them the best technical assis-
tance, but they were not so concerned with problems from
the other areas. And then the same thing would happen
if a customer would call order management, saying some-
thing about a problem in TAC. And that never got back to

human network in action. So it’s no longer just a one-on-
one if you come to me and I share my resources with you.
The challenge to make it happen is all about people, be-
cause getting people to share their knowledge and articulate
it so anyone else can answer their question is difficult.
Silos Prevent Effective Customer
Intimacy
Gibbs recalled how challenging it was to implement CIN:
While it should have taken probably a year to put the
CIN organization in place, it took three. And the first
two years were all about people and those silos that were
their own little kingdoms.
When we began to share knowledge across the orga-
nization so anyone could use the resource, it exposed
shortcomings inside the company. It’s very risky and
uncomfortable when you look at old processes and data
with new and questioning eyes. The process of imple-
menting the CIN model exposed some of the things
that we were doing wrong, some areas where we had
lost the knowledge internally, and areas of redundancy
and inefficiencies. We exposed things that weren’t
being done at all. We were exposing that there were
call centers out there where the managers didn’t even
know they were managing a call center, because it was
such a tiny little sliver of their organization. It was just
an incredible discovery and a territory issue; I was like
a bull in a china shop. At first I didn’t get it. Everybody
believed it was the right thing to do but when I wanted
to have the front line take their calls, it was almost like
nuclear weapons—not in my backyard. Managers said,
“I believe in sharing but not in my area of expertise.”
Metrics Can Bust the Silos
CIN learned a lesson on knowledge sharing from TAC.
Cisco has really smart engineers. What they knew was
at least try to use the tool. Don’t force them, but definitely
reward them when you can.
Turning a Call Center Into an
Escalation Expertise Area
CIN equipped corporate operators with intuitive Web tools
so that they could be the front line to all areas: the technical
systems, order management, sales, human resources, and so
on. Then they added to that so they could have a single front-
line organization take a caller to a sales-lead-generation tool.
Rather than just transferring them to a possible black hole,
or asking innumerable questions in order to transfer them,
the agent can bring up a Web tool. And the agent can input
information directly and it’s all ready for the salespeople to
start working on when they take that call.
So Cisco added value to procedures that were repeat-
able and reusable. The model changed. Rather than
having 69 discrete call centers around the world, they
achieved truly global excellence from the easy stuff all
the way up to the really tough stuff. What they had was a
single front line (virtual and global) for the entire com-
pany that could not just handle the first layer of that call,
but also had the ability—if the tool is provided to them by
all of these other experts—to take it a little deeper. And
then that turned the original silo call centers into escala-
tion expertise areas. Anything that was redundant could
be fed back in a consistent way into the Web for the call
centers to use. Using the approach of combining the In-
ternet with the customer while they are talking changed
the organization structure. Table 1 illustrates Cisco’s ap-
proach to the Customer Interaction Network.
It is not enough to know the answer; it’s not enough to
teach the answer. What’s valuable is that you can articulate it
in a way (visually, graphically, etc.) that anyone can pick up
to plug and play. And that’s really what Cisco strived toward.
The Challenge Is All About People
Customer intimacy used to be defined as when a cus-
tomer would call in and ask for Mary, because she knew
Mary, who always treated her well. So that relationship
was one-on-one. It was our personal contribution to the
customer that made us stand out, and everybody had to
come to an individual for the answer.
Now customer intimacy is, when that customer calls in,
anyone they talk to can say, “Here is the answer, but let me
share more: let me introduce you to my Cisco family; let
me show you all of my friends and all the things that they
know; and let me show you the Internet and all the other
resources available to you.” It’s a perfect example of the
Measure Old New (CIN)
Ownership Last transfer First contact
Metrics Volume Value
Customer My customer Our customer
ROI Costs Opportunity
Work Volume Manage it Reduce it
Organization Silo/specific Corporationwide
Knowledge What they know What they access
table 1 Cisco Customer Interaction Network

Why Call Centers Are the Front Line
for Innovation
Call centers are the first to know that something is wrong.
However, most companies have trained call-center person-
nel to ignore or smooth over a problem as quickly as pos-
sible and move on to the next call (“Take a deep breath,
smile, and take the next call”). They solved it or they passed
it off, but there was no focus put on problems outside the
silo or outside the scope of the agent. The focus was on
volume, talk time, all the mechanics of workforce manage-
ment. Statistics reflected only time, speed, and volume. This
is how most call centers in most companies have operated.
For a long time, many companies have been losing
that head start on what’s really going on and what could
possibly turn into a major issue further down the road.
Call centers know about it right up front. Companies
need to provide the mechanism to capture a potential
issue (not just record the answers an agent gave), and
need to reward agents for recognizing opportunities for
improvement, capturing what they hear and what the cus-
tomer is saying. Build that into the job description.
By remaining siloed or blindly outsourcing without
retaining ownership of the knowledge and processes,
companies risk losing that connection to innovation,
because the understanding that something is even wrong
and understanding how to fix it is key to building the next
generation of product. So how do we innovate to make
something better? The contact center should become a
key player in innovation and must be positioned to bring
what they hear and what they experience when working
with customers all day long.
This is key for the future of innovation!
Why Mapping the Value Network Can
Be So Important
Gibbsexplainshowsheusedvaluemappingasabreakthrough
to understand the human dynamics for value creation.
What I’m going to say probably doesn’t sound profound,
but it is. In first building the CIN model, we needed a
new way to view what we were trying to do—other than
through square boxes and organizational charts. I wanted
my organization to think about our role and how we fit
in the company differently. And I thought that the value
network mapping was the best visual and process for us
to go through—to stop thinking about who works for
whom, what your job description is. So I wanted to think
differently about how we view our interactions inside the
company. And this is what I learned:
their whole identity. If they gave their answers up to be
repeated and reused without them, then who would they
be? Their answers were part of their value. And so TAC
started rewarding them on their answers—the number of
answers that they published on the Web and the usage of
those that were published. And what was reported was not
which customer they helped or the number of cases they
completed so much as the things they shared.
They also found that some of the smartest engineers
might not be so good at articulating solutions in a way
that someone could reuse. So they created a TAC Web
team of engineers that understood the language and
technical information. They were not the highest level
of engineer, but they were very good at articulating for
customers. They could collaborate with any engineer who
would be working on a problem. They might have just the
thread of an answer for the first time or there might be a
nuance about this particular case; TAC set it up so all they
had to do was flag that case, that trouble ticket, and then
pique that interest. And then the TAC Web team would
go through the files and pull up those cases eventually
and go back to the level three engineers to find out why
it was unusual. And so Cisco had to change the reward sys-
tem as an organization before they were able to really get
that information reusable on the Web. They focused on
making solutions reusable. This same principle applied
to the CIN model, where they needed knowledge shared
and reusable across the company.
Raising Collective Intelligence
Gibbs described how she was able to raise the collective
intelligence of the whole organization.
Years ago, my CRC team was worldwide with various call
centers trying to answer the same questions in a theater
(time zone). So we had two objectives: to be consistent
everywhere and to provide the best practices.
I asked my managers to nominate the best agents in
their theater, who actually talk to the customer. And I
brought the nominated agents together for two weeks
to document their stories. We cut out the turf, the
idea of ownership, and pride of authorship. So what
if all the good answers came out of Brussels instead
of Australia? We took out all of those potential issues
and had them go through the most common customer
questions and collectively came up with what we were
going to post on the Web site.
This put us in the position of sharing knowledge
on the Web site. This was the foundation of the CIN
model to follow.

decide how you want to use that value network. How do
you want to focus?”
Evolving Metrics Is a Game Changer!
Cisco changed the role of the call center. Instead of focusing
only on workforce management metrics—talk time, calls per
agent, after-call work—they can be measuring: How many
times did they capture quality feedback? How many times
did they recognize when there was a problem and let us
know about it? How many times did they flag an opportunity
for improvement? Could they articulate that a particular
Web page wasn’t quite doing what it needed to do?
Cisco began rewarding and measuring things that
they trained their agents for 20 years to hide. What a dra-
matic difference that made!
As Figure 2 illustrates, ownership of the customer ex-
perience begins at the first touch, not at final escalation.
First touch can define what should be measured for the
customer experience.
We succeeded by getting rid of silos. Making it so
that we had a single plan, everyone was pitching in no
matter where he or she worked, to be sure we had the
information that was consistent around the world, and
everyone could reuse it. I felt that every time I saw an
org chart or something that had a box or straight lines
in it, there were barriers and walls. I wanted us to be
fluid in how we were evolving. [Figure 1 shows how
Cisco mapped its organization.]
It became interesting when we started looking at the
various interactions. The hearts represented “the pulse
points” for the organization. Everything was going into
one place. Is this possibly a place that is a bottleneck?
Here is a place that is touching the customer, yet there
is another place that is touching the customer. Are we
consistent? Do we have the focus that we need to have?
So you can use the little hearts and those little markers
in a lot of different ways. When you have the fluidity,
you get out of the barriers and the boxes. Then you can
figure 1 Cisco Value Network Mapping CIN With Pulse Points for Monitoring and Focus

Typically, our area is a feeder pool for the rest of the
company. Now the company provides agents with
more information. Before they would leave my organi-
zation to do that second-level job. Now why leave the
organization? Why not bring that job to us? And it’s
cheaper for us to do it than to have that agent move
to a higher level. We can pay our agents more if they
can solve more complex customer problems. We are
bringing that information to us rather than sending
our agents to them.
We made this mistake designing Web pages with
all these different sections—like little silos—based on
where you report inside the company. The minute you
step away from silos and areas of expertise and focus on
ease of doing business, you’re now changing the orga-
nization from the outside in.
And we started with the first touch coming to a single
person and changing it so that the organizational func-
tions with the experts that have the answers are now
there. The front line is no longer just responsible for
From Dead-End Job to Stepping
Stone for Career Growth
Employee turnover in a call center is often because of
low morale. Low morale is the result of no career path,
burnout, no sense of self-worth, no power, and no sense
of making a difference.
The first contact with customers is their first impression
of the entire company. Usually, difficulties within a call cen-
ter are often symptomatic of deeper and broader issues. So
management should take their experiences seriously.
However, people can be more valuable and can do
more things. At Cisco an agent can chart his or her career
path to become an engineer or marketing executive. The
deeper and more proficient someone is, the more valu-
able he or she becomes as an agent on that first contact.
Changing the Organization From the
Outside In
Gibbs suggests this can transform the contact agent’s role.
figure 2 Cisco Customer Interaction Network: Changing What We Value and Measure

• Encourage participation to evaluate and improve con-
tent effectiveness.
• Use the same tools for agents, employees, customer,
partners, and communities.
• Assure seamless and easy access, blind to organizations,
to customer relationship management databases, com-
panies, and communities who own the content.
• Answer, but also listen, teach, learn, share, and cap-
ture the experience.
• Measure and reward value, not just workforce manage-
ment costs.
• Encourage new career paths to include value ex-
changes and social network proficiencies.
• Develop new skill sets that include mixed media,
multitasking, and short-text-message languages.
Summary
• Organizations have to become adaptive to capitalize
on Internet tools.
• Customer intimacy can be better achieved by helping
the customer to understand and use the array of tools
and solutions themselves, so they can solve their own
problems.
• Changing reward metrics can drive culture change.
• Product and service improvement through innovation
can be accelerated through smart use of first-contact
personnel.
• The organizational challenge is to learn how to share
knowledge (what information is important to the cus-
tomer), both internally within the organization and
externally with the customer, rather than just provid-
ing information.
workforce management monitoring and answering a
question and going to the next call, but they’re teach-
ing, guiding, listening, capturing opportunities, and
following information back to the areas of expertise.
My advice to other companies is to stop traditional
training and focus on capturing information in a way
that can be reused by anybody. Anyone who works for
Cisco should be able to use the same tools as call cen-
ters use. Any customer that’s calling in should be able
to access the same tools. That is radical!
Also, your readers should be aware that there are
thought leaders out there willing to share and at this
moment are working on models and tools needed
in five years. One example is the Consortium for
Service Innovation (CSI). This is a nonprofit, global
organization that I received much inspiration and
support from. I was on their board for seven years
and found listening and sharing far-out ideas with
this group was a highlight of my career. Finding folks
to associate with like my example should be a great
help to others.
For more information, check out the Consortium for Ser-
vice Innovation’s Web site at www.serviceinnovation.org. CSI
is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the improvement of
knowledge management and showing how to share knowl-
edge and how to create knowledge within organizations.
LaVeta Gibbs teaches us that in any organization
key cultural shifts are required to leverage interactions,
collaborations, and innovation. Think global, virtual, mo-
bile, and sharing—outside in. Specifically:
• Design repeatable, reusable knowledge in a single
form shared by agents, employees, customers, and
larger communities.
As chairman of the EMM Group, a demand-creation consultancy with clients in the Americas, Asia, and Europe,
Hunter Hastings coauthored (with Jeff Saperstein) The New Marketing Mission (2004) and Improve Your Mar-
keting to Grow Your Business (2007), and now Bust the Silos. Hastings developed demand-creation principles
and case studies at the EMM Group and now applies these principles in his role as chief marketing officer at JBS
USA, the North American arm of JBS, the world’s largest multiprotein producer.
Jeff Saperstein is an author, teacher, and consultant. His books and case studies focus on best practices for innovation.
He has worked with governments, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations to use marketing to increase growth.
Saperstein teaches in the College of Business at San Francisco State University, as well as at other corporations.

Hunter Hastings and Jeff Saperstein. 2009. Bust the Silos: Open-
ing Your Organization to Growth. Charleston, SC: BookSurge.
182 pages. ISBN: 978-14-3925-972-6.
By
Michael R. Perman
Business Goes Human,
Again
I
n the early 1980s I was part of the marketing team at
a $2 billion diversified food company in Minneapolis
called Multifoods. We owned several specialty foods
brands, many of them acquired as members of a dying
breed of family-based brands where all aspects of the or-
ganization were connected: manufacturing, distribution,
sales, and customer service were under one roof. Sales
and marketing leaders could walk from their office to the
plant floor and watch the product being made, packaged,
loaded, and shipped. We made a variety of products in
different locations, ranging from peanut butter and beef
jerky to muffin mixes and breakfast cereal.
Every manager within these smaller companies could
and would interface with a spectrum of functional areas
and have direct contact with customers, enabling empa-
thy and inspiring daily innovation in response to visible
needs. We could ride in the front seat with delivery driv-
ers and meet customers in grocery stores along the way,
noticing the opportunities to create demand as they
arose. We would be face-to-face with customer insights
that could then be leveraged immediately to help custom-
ers grow.
Collaboration in these organizations was systemi-
cally embedded, and the synergy among teams, along
with strong customer connections, drove demand for
the business. We worked in harmony. The only silos that
existed were used to store grain used in production of
bakery flour.
Eventually, these individual companies enjoyed
growth and were divested opportunistically. With their ac-
quiring entities, they subsequently reaped the benefits of
organizational efficiency from consolidation more than
growth. Similarly, consolidation of many business catego-
ries over the past two decades has required new levels of
efficiency in the supply chain in order to reap the rewards
of acquisition investments. So, businesses have rightfully
prioritized pragmatic approaches to making processes
more orderly and logical. But, in the process of becoming
efficient, many organizations have lost their natural abil-
ity to leverage customer connections, collaboration, and
insights as a means of prosperity.
Hastings and Saperstein’s new book, Bust the Silos,
provides a spectrum of examples where business orga-
nizations are moving from generating efficiencies in
the supply chain to generating growth in the demand
chain. It’s a hopeful perspective that has the potential to
fundamentally drive global economic recovery in a way
that finally reaps the rewards of pragmatic organizational
decisions of the past two decades, rectifying the deleteri-
ous impact that’s had on jobs, and the functionally con-
strained approach to human resource development in
general.
Correspondence to: Michael R. Perman, Senior Director, Global Marketing, Levi Strauss Company, 1155 Battery Street, San Francisco, CA 94111,
415.501.5048 (phone)
428 Commentary

Business Goes Human, Again 429
The concept of value networks is superior to sales-driven
stimulus approaches because it leverages natural talent
at its most pristine level, whereby everyone helps grow—
personally and with open-source, internal/external teams
because they are all connected to the network in a trans-
parent manner.
Hastings and Saperstein’s point that “roles are dy-
namically defined and linked by intangibles in the pursuit
of deliverables and outcomes” speaks to the dynamic
nature of community and the fundamental paradigm
shift in business structure that’s likely to permeate suc-
cessful firms in the next few decades—its community of
social networks that aggregate quickly for the common
good and disband naturally when diminishing returns
are reached is a way of being for a new generation. Bust
the Silos illuminates the human condition within organiza-
tions that is lurking behind the Dilbert-like dysfunction
that has been created by silos.
Jamie Dinkelacker, engineering manager for Google
Maps, makes a poignant observation in the book. “Hu-
mans are interesting creatures—they are disorderly and
cannot be scheduled, predicted or treated like machines.
Yet managers have been trained to try to manage people
in a mechanical process of evaluation, scoring and sub-
jective criteria rather than managing the conditions that
enable work to progress.”
The book’s recommendations for organizational reno-
vation are sweeping and may be challenging for large
organizations to embrace in totality. But, there are plenty
of examples of entry points that are both human- and tech-
nology-based. The common denominator and epicenter
of these entry points are insights—and the opportunity to
enable everyone to generate them. That’s been a common
belief at Levi Strauss Co., where more than 7,000 em-
ployees have been trained to generate and apply insights.
After a quick scan of this book, I found myself high-
lighting with yellow markers, circling phrases with red
pens, and drawing stars in the margins where the really
great ideas were presented. I relished the lavish plethora
of verbatim comments that lugubriously but authentically
brought the voice of the consumer to life. While I wished
that more of these quotes were distilled into quintes-
sential insights for more digestible enjoyment, they did
add dimension to the claims. The graphic models were
also helpful. But given the importance of the ideas, an
extra dose of art direction would have more effectively
illustrated the important paradigm shifts and right-brain
thinking required to truly appreciate the significance of
the ideas presented in Bust the Silos. This book modestly
oozes of culture change that has the potential to drive
growth in a global economic recovery.
In fact, one of the most profound ideas presented in
the book is the move from jobs to “roles” within organi-
zations—an optimistic remedy for the structural isolation
that supply-chain-driven organizations have created. The
concept of multi-disciplinary collaborations replacing
functional departments stimulates the kind of feng shui
thinking that may get our economic mojo working again.
These open-source sprouts of green have emerged from
the ashes of demolished fiefdoms that were ruled by ca-
pricious operational efficiency decisions rather than stra-
tegic growth ideas that reflect the way holistic and healthy
ecosystems thrive within organizations.
Fortunately, Bust the Silos is insights-centric and holis-
tic in its embrace of the total customer experience, which
leads to sales. Hastings and Saperstein introduce an anti-
dote to the supply-chain ethos that’s driven business for
the past two decades: value networks, which leverage the
power of strong relations between (1) organization and
external environment and (2) team and teammates.
Value networks are based on “collective intelligence”
where mentors, coaches, and enablers become important
components of the organization in order to leverage col-
laboration as a value-creating engine. It’s a renaissance
in the way traditional businesses are structured because it
requires utilizing diversity in talents—broad more highly
valued than deep, multidisciplinary teams more valued
than functional departments.
Finally, content meritocracy—the notion that ideas
and inventions generate status—moves from the social
media world where the democratization of design, music,
filmmaking, personal investing, and legal advice has driven
enormous growth to smaller business, individuals, and even
larger organizations that have the potential to unleash ac-
cumulated knowledge. Leveling the playing field enables
opportunities to contribute to value creation for all.
The beauty of a society and organization based on
content meritocracy is that it’s self-generating. The ad-
vent of creative and intellectual contributions being re-
warded by peers has the potential to make people more
autonomous, free thinking, and motivated. As Hastings
and Saperstein note in the book’s afterword, young work-
ers in Moscow clarify, “You see what you think is lack of
drive for achievement. But an achievement defined by
superiors in a hierarchy is no achievement at all. The
achievement they strive for is to do something creative and
unexpected that is noticed by their peers.”
The beauty of this idea is that there is no place to
hide—there’s opportunity and an inclination for liter-
ally everyone in the organization to make a difference
because the networks have a naturally abundant multi-
plicity of “neurotransmitters” just waiting to be activated.

430 commentary
Michael R. Perman is a senior director of global marketing at Levi Strauss Co., where he leads global proj-
ects in consumer insights, innovation, and marketing. His professional experience includes brand management
for consumer package goods and brand consulting. Perman has spoken at professional conferences and taught
classes on storytelling in business and the use of brand communities. He lives in Larkspur, California.

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