Page 240 - DMGT304_EVENT_MANAGEMENT

Unit 10: Leadership

Introduction: Cisco Strategic Leadership Offsite (SLO) Notes
Cisco's annual Strategic Leadership Offsite (SLO) is one of the most important events for
Cisco's senior leadership team (directors, vice presidents, and above). Its primary focus is
on communicating the updated vision, strategy, and execution plans for the coming fiscal
year. Its overarching objective is to collapse the time to alignment, and thereby enable
speed, flexibility, and effectiveness in execution. Additional business objectives include
enabling leadership development and providing networking opportunities.

Challenge
Traditionally, SLO was held as an in-person event at an offsite conference center near
Cisco's San Jose headquarters. Leaders from around the world would fly in for this two-
day event, incurring significant travel costs and lost productive time. The event format
included several general sessions attended by everyone (2,000+ people), smaller breakout
sessions organized by market area or customer segment (100-300 people), and highly
interactive sessions where groups of 20-30 directors and VPs would discuss strategic issues
with Cisco's senior leaders. There was also an informal evening dinner that provided
extensive opportunities for socializing.
For our fiscal year 2010 event held in May 2009, the leadership team decided that incurring
the expense of a traditional in-person meeting would not be prudent in the face of the
downturn. We began to explore conducting SLO as a virtual event to respond to the need
to cut travel costs, demonstrate the power of collaboration technologies, and reduce
greenhouse gas emissions. We realized, however, that we faced a serious challenge because
we had never attempted to hold an event of this scale, complexity, and duration via a
virtual approach. Thus, significant effort was required to plan and implement this first-
ofits-kind virtual event.
New Approach: Adding Virtual Capabilities
As we began planning for the event, we realized that rather than replicating the format of
the in-person meeting, we had the opportunity to adapt the format to take advantage of
virtual capabilities. Key enhancements included increasing the number of session options,
providing more content (documents and videos), and making much of the information
available prior to the event.
Figure 10.8: Places in the SLO Virtual Environment Emulate a Physical Conference Center

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