Next Steps

Observations from Hearing Alan Cohen of Cisco Speak

July 16, 2009 @ 3:21pm

Updated — July 24, 2009 @ 3:22pm

by Mason Razavi

I recently attended an event in Mountain View in which Alan Cohen, VP of Enterprise and Mid-Market Solutions for Cisco, spoke his mind about the nature of contemporary business communications. The meetup was billed partly as a networking event and partly as an opportunity to learn about emerging social technologies in enterprises, so naturally I was compelled to go. Unfortunately, the event turned out to be little more than a recital of the obvious mashed up with some advertising and seed-planting for Cisco products.

Don’t get me wrong. Alan Cohen is a talented and charismatic speaker who seemed to have the audience in the palm of his hand. As I am someone who truly appreciates talented performers, watching him deliver his piece was in this sense a delight and an education in itself.

However the content was….shall I say, lacking? Allow me to summarize:

“Meetings are boring, and people fall asleep during them. Big companies are inefficient, as they spend too much time trying to get information from one place to the next. Email kinda sucks. Not important. Sorta annoys me. Human interaction is important. Face to face contact is important. That’s why Cisco makes this really neat video stuff that lets you do that, and in the near future we’re coming out with some more neat video stuff that lets you do that even better. Awesome, huh?”

Alright, I might be simplifying just a tad. Still, talking about the sloth-like path of information within giant corporations and how meetings are boring and inefficient is not exactly groundbreaking news.

I was lured to the event with advertising that teased potential attendees by asking if Twitter and Google Wave were the future of enterprise-level communications. My disappointment stems from the fact that I was expecting to actually hear what tools, specifically, were going to change things, and not just some stats and filler about how you only retain 10% of what you read and how 39% of people admit to falling asleep in meetings, and how Cisco is going to save Mother Earth and all its businesses.

In the end, I have to say that observing Alan Cohen’s delivery and the Thai food provided were the true highlights of the evening, even if the noodles were a bit cold.