SPIRITUAL AUDIT FOR THE COMPANY CISCO

Spiritual Audit for the Company Cisco

Table of Content

TABLE OF CONTENT2

Introduction3

Discussion3

Spiritual behavior towards business environment4

Contemporary shifts in the global business environment4

A brief historical overview of American business culture5

Spirituality in the Employee Treatment7

Employees9

Not easy10

Cisco as a spiritual performer11

Suppliers and Community13

Diversity16

Customers17

Postscript21

REFERENCES25

Spiritual Audit for the Company Cisco



Introduction

Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American international company that designs and sells customer electronics, networking and communications technology and services. Headquartered in California, Cisco has more than 65,500 employees and annual revenue of US$37.11 billion as of May, 2010.

Discussion

In our continuous efforts to illustrate how spirituality in the workplace works, we need to keep track of one important question: how do we implement all the theories in real life? More directly, what do we do on Monday morning, when we need to keep our nose to the grindstone again? For, that is when we get confronted with real life issues and real human characters, and once again start struggling with questions such as, “Is spirituality at work really possible?” “What should my next steps be to get this going?” and “How does it really work?”

This article attempts to provide positive impulses toward the implementation of spirituality in the workplace by reviewing the performance of the Cisco Corporation from three angles:

Spiritual behavior and the business environment

employees treatment

Community

The corporation's performance is evaluated through examples, after which the definition of workplace spirituality used in this paper will be analyzed in light of Cisco' performance. The company's current performance will be presented in hard numbers, and a point will be made that spiritual performance does lead to organizational excellence and elevation of the bottom line.

Spiritual behavior towards business environment

Although the phenomenon of spirituality in the workplace will be reviewed more closely in the next section of this paper, it may be appropriate to first briefly review the business environment from a macro perspective, and how spiritual behavior of business entities will be interpreted here.

Contemporary shifts in the global business environment

As we are shifting toward increased global interdependency, corporate behavior is being scrutinized from more than merely the national angle. Organizations, particularly those operating in multiple continents, find themselves exposed to divergent cultural and political climates, and adopting more geocentric perspectives where they were previously controlled by ethnocentric mindsets, which Ball (2006, p. 546) define as, “related to hiring and promoting employees on the basis of the parent company's home country frame of reference”. In line with the above, Professor Vincent Ostrom stresses that “a new science of politics is necessary to forge a new democratic world for the 21st century, one that draws on human capacities to craft the rules of self-governance through reflection and choice” (in Shivakumar, 2005, p. 199). Ostrom further explains, “To do so, we begin with the belief that human beings possess the potential to improve their well-being by devising rules to govern their association with each other” (in Shivakumar, 2005, p. 199). Ostrom concludes, “Drawing upon mutual understandings, these rules shape behavior in situations where individuals can jointly realize opportunities to ...