Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
This week on Culture Leaders Daily, we bring you my conversation with Dr. Guy Diedrich, senior Vice President and the global innovation officer at Cisco. Guy is in charge of the departments where Cisco puts its money, where its mouth is in terms of fulfilling the company’s mission and purpose. He serves on the board of directors of the Cisco Foundation supporting nonprofits and NGOs, and oversees Cisco’s country digital acceleration program, which partners with countries across the globe to bring their citizens into the digital age. As a former academic and college administrator, and as the head of Cisco’s Networking Academy, he has a lot to say about the future of higher education and how we’ll prepare young people for the AI age, the quantum age and beyond. It’s a fascinating conversation. I think you’ll get a lot out of it. Please welcome to the podcast, guy Dietrich. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. I can’t wait to hear what is your why?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
Well, my why actually, there’s several different whys, right? But I would jump to what I’ve done my whole life, and it seems like the job I’m doing now is a direct result of everything that I’ve done up to this point. It’s almost prepared me for it. The why is consistent with Cisco’s purpose, which is to power an inclusive future for all. And it’s why I’m here is I believe why I started a company when I was out of school and why I joined academia and why I left academia to join Cisco. All of those experiences have culminated in a unique perspective that I think I can bring to this job and to this role. And it’s what gets me up in the morning. Put it this way, it’s the sort of job that doesn’t keep you up at night worrying about it, but it gets you up every morning, charged and ready to go.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
I love that. Oh, that’s a good line. I’m going to steal that. So tell me what about the Cisco mission statement really resonates with you and your why? Is it the inclusivity part of it, or what specifically?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
It’s the comprehensiveness of it, and it is interesting because mission statements, purpose statements, sometimes they are just there to be looked upon. And in fact, this particular statement, this purpose, each word has a group behind it. So power, inclusive, future and all. We are very much the all part of that. So I run a program that stretches across 50 countries where invest directly in pilots and proofs of concept to help them accelerate their national digital agendas. It’s called Country Digital Acceleration. And we have the privilege of working with presidents and prime ministers and ministers all over the world to help them do that. I run another program called the Networking Academy, which is in 190 countries around the world that is there to skill up those that want to learn more about technology, that want to change a career, that want to change a life. And so the all part really gets me because there’s still 30% of the world’s population that’s not connected to the internet in any meaningful way. And it’s a real frustration because there’s no reason for that. There’s no reason they’re unconnected. We’re in the digital age. We have the capability of connecting everyone, and yet we haven’t. And if we connect that 30%, we would instantly lift 50 million people, sorry, excuse me, 500 million people out of poverty.
And at the same time though, we would contribute 6.7 trillion to global GDP. So it’s not just the right thing to do, it’s also the economically prudent thing to do, and that’s what I get to do every single day.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So let’s break this down for the listeners. Your job is so interesting. You essentially are in charge of the departments where I think Cisco puts their money where their mouth is, right? I mean, these are the programs where Cisco invests in order to advance their mission. And so one of them, CDA is where you work with governments that want to do something to improve the quality of life in their countries, and they could use your help and you help invest in those projects and give them direction so that they can, let’s say, improve their healthcare system or improve their whatever it is, right? Working with the prime minister or the president with the ministry leads with the academic institutions and helping them translate this vision that they have into reality. Is that a fair description?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
It’s a great description. I may steal that from you. Great. Take it.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
I stole it from you. So we’re just going back and forth here. That’s collaboration in action. I mean, I’m so curious about your perspective on culture because you’re dealing with so many different dimensions of culture, right? There’s the workplace culture, then there’s international culture as in nationality culture. Then there’s the culture of academia versus government versus industry, but cultures of the different partnerships and the industry partners that you bring in. I mean, I feel like your job is culture wrangler almost across this matrix of probably so many competing interests, but also aligned interests. So how do you define culture? What is your perspective on what it is or how to activate it?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
Culture to me, and again, I don’t know if this is a standard definition, but I view it as the way people perceive the world,
Not just the world around them writ large, but their micro world as well. And so you’re right, we deal with so many different cultures, and what you learn is that you have to leave your opinions and politics and your experience that you may or may not think is right. You have to leave it at the border. You have to leave it at the door when you’re walking into a room because not everybody thinks the way your culture thinks. Not everybody wants to adapt to your culture. And so that’s been the most fascinating part about bringing on 50 countries. I mean, we have seen such dramatic changes in places like Saudi Arabia where they’re moving in the right direction. We’ve seen so many changes in other parts of the world where they have faced challenges. They never thought in a million years that they would. Ukraine is one of our country digital acceleration or CDA program countries.
When we first approached them, they weren’t at war and then all of a sudden they were invaded and the world changed for them. What’s nice is that the program’s so adaptive, we can instantly pivot to what their priorities are. When we walk into a country, they invite us in. Cisco is already there. We’ve already been selling there for some time. We already have a presence. What’s new is a national digital agenda that the country has come up with, and usually they’ve paid a Deloitte or a McKinsey or a PWC to help ’em develop that. And they have a very good basic structure, but they don’t have an execution plan. So we come in, we develop an execution plan, budgets, individual projects, and then we invest directly in those proofs of concept and pilots to show that leader of that country the power of digitization, the power of connecting the unconnected, the power of connected healthcare, connected education, access to government services and the like, whatever their priorities are.
And in doing so, we learn so much, but we also get to innovate in ways that maybe Cisco wouldn’t normally innovate because we’re being driven from the outside in. We’re learning from that culture and we’re creating a solution to a challenge that they have that is appropriate for that culture. So really no two projects are alike. And we’ve done over 1700 now in the 50 countries around the world, 1700 individual digitization projects, each one intended to power an inclusive future for all, each one intended to help lift up the population and to help accelerate to the value of digitization for that country.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So let’s walk through an example and let’s talk about Saudi Arabia since you brought that up. And that’s also one of our clients. I’d be interested to see how you were working with them and talk about how we were working with them just to bring this to life for people who aren’t in this world. So Saudi Arabia came up with Vision 2030. Is that where you came in after that announcement?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
You got it then. And the NTP, the National Transformation Plan, both of those happened simultaneously. One was sort of a subset of the other, but yeah, vision 2030 is our guiding document in Saudi,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Right? That was ours too. So Vision 2030 is the modernization of the country, and it was the idea that they want to diversify their portfolio, so to speak, not be so ultra reliant on oil money, but to move into other industries and to expand, but also other cultural changes that they wanted to make being more gender equitable and to have more women in power and to do different things that they think will kind of bring Saudi Arabia into the next iteration of its evolution, so to speak. And they saw this as a culture challenge. There’s obviously also a digital challenge, and so we got brought in by one of the ministries. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say which one, so I won’t just talk about how do we get people to, if you defined culture as the way people perceive the world, it’s how do we get them to perceive the world differently because it’s new from the way that we’ve been doing things around here, which is what we do when we go into companies and help them with that. So was there a cultural shift you had to sell them on in the work you were doing in digitizing and the networking or were they already on board with that?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
They were already on board. When we read Vision 2030, you could see that it was a sea change. It was a seminal moment in the evolution of their economy, in the evolution of their culture. It was so wonderfully

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Aspirational

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
That we couldn’t help but sign up. And so we started working with them in cybersecurity and in education. So give you a quick example of a project so it’s more meaningful. They were short 2,500 teachers throughout the kingdom,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
They wanted to connect the schools so that those very best from Riyadh and Jetta and some of the larger population centers could be available to the more rural regions. And by the way, it’s not just Saudi Arabia. Every country has that same challenge, but this one was pretty profound. And so we were able to come up with a way where we could show them how they could have an interactive environment in the most rural regions. And those students, because of the technologies that’s in that classroom, they could have access to the very best instructors Saudi Arabia has to offer. We did the same around healthcare. So if you can imagine when we started working with them eight, almost nine years ago now, if a woman fell ill in a rural village in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, back then it would be required that a male member of the family, be it a husband, a brother, a father, would need to travel with her to say, Riyadh, to go to one of the population centers to get treatment. Maybe it’s a 30 minute doctor session. Well, that’s a day of travel, a day in Riyadh, and then a day home. So it’s three days to just maybe transact for 30 minutes with a physician. They wanted to make that much more efficient. And so we were able to create health pods that would allow them to connect from their village directly to that doctor in Riyadh without ever having to negotiate travel. Now, all of that part of the culture has changed. Now,
I know it sounds different for certain parts of the world to hear that women didn’t drive eight years ago in Saudi Arabia, and now of course they do. And what they’ve done in such a short period of time as they’ve literally unleashed the power of women in Saudi Arabia to join the workforce, to be productive, to contribute to the economy in ways that they weren’t able to before. So we’ve been able to ride the crest of that wave with them all along the way, and it’s really fulfilling to see, and it is really fulfilling to be a part of.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, that was what I noted was how quickly the change has happened in Saudi Arabia. I mean, their covid response was led by a woman. The government covid response team was led by this powerful woman leader that was instantly elevated in a moment of crisis and empowered, given that trust that she needed and the resources to manage through that. What was interesting, when I went there, it was my first time in Saudi Arabia. I was doing an event in Jetta, and I brought a bunch of headscarves because I was just assuming that I was going to want to wear headscarves to be honoring their culture. And so I showed up the day before. It was a three day event that we were doing. I was managing day two. So I showed up on day one wearing the headscarf just to see the crowd and get to know everyone before I went on stage. And one of the women pulled me aside and said, oh, you don’t have to wear that. It’s okay. And I said, no, no, it’s okay. I want to wear it. I want to be respectful. And she said, let’s go get some coffee. I said, okay, to the coffee bar. And then she says, take off the headscarf.
It’s like, oh, really? Why? She’s like, we’ve hired you to come show us the way of the future. We don’t want you to make us go backwards. I love it. Wow. So I took off the headscarf and did the workshop from the stage without the headscarf. I just thought that was so interesting that we say it. Culture partners, culture doesn’t give up without a fight. And so there’s this interesting dynamic when you’re shifting from one to the other.

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
Imagine though how many coffees were had during that period that were identical, and that is the power of community. It’s the power in the case of women in Saudi Arabia, it’s the power of literally unleashing innovation and creativity and productivity and engagement. And it has completely changed the culture, and it’s a wonderful place to visit

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Now. Yeah, absolutely. So can you talk about this idea of shared vulnerability that I think you’ve said made your program so successful? I love that idea. Tell us about it.

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
Sure. So my career path was from starting up a software company to academia and then on to Cisco. And that intervening bit is what’s relevant, the academic part, because when I went to, we were very fortunate, we were able to sell our software company back in 1998, and that freed me up to go back to school and do a master’s in PhD. And my area of study was the economic value of trust in organizations. I was fascinated by how we would walk into a small 130 person software company and compete against IBM and other very large enterprises. And we would win and we would win for reasons other than size and scope and reputation. And it was because they trusted us. They trusted that this small outfit would deliver. And so I wanted to explore that as an academic. And one of the things you quickly learn when you delve into understanding trust in a business environment is that it all starts with a voluntary shared vulnerability that I am going to make myself vulnerable to you. You make yourself vulnerable to me, and we won’t let each other down. And with each interaction where we don’t let one another down, we build a bit of trust. And over time, that trust can be a very powerful thing.
Alan Greenspan referred to it as the lubricant of efficient markets. You don’t have to have 30 pages of safeguards built into a contract because there’s fundamental trust there. And as a result of realizing the importance of shared vulnerability and symmetric vulnerability, we allowed CDA this country digital acceleration program to be born on that premise. So when a world leader chooses Cisco to help them digitize their country, when they choose us to help them make some, help ’em make some of the most important decisions they’ll make for their countries in the next 20 years, there’s a vulnerability there. And so we needed to create an equal vulnerability, a symmetric vulnerability, and that was in our case, was direct investment. We’ll be first money in without any promise of return. We’re doing this for the right reasons. We want to show you the value of digitization. And if that ends up benefiting Cisco, terrific.
If it ends up benefiting our whole industry even better. But if it ends up benefiting the country, that’s the goal. And so we went in with a shared vulnerability, and I’ll tell you, with almost 10 years on with the program in 50 countries, we haven’t had a single breach of trust in either case. So we have built up tremendous amounts with these leaders around the world, so much. So importantly, Jessica, that we don’t succumb to election cycles or changes of administration. The program transcends electoral cycles and changes of administration because the outputs are important regardless of your political orientation. And that’s TDP growth, jobs creation, and investing in a sustainable innovation ecosystem.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That’s interesting. So help me understand that because when you Cisco elects to consider a country, right? And then the country has to elect to consider Cisco back, it has to be a mutual agreement. And I’ve heard you talk about there being some qualifiers. One qualifier is that the prime minister or the president must be on board, the top leader has to say yes. So then when there’s an election or a new Prime Minister, do you have to reestablish buy-in from the new leader, or is it always just a seamless transition? I mean, how do you make sure that they’re still on board?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And it was a learned practice within our program. You mentioned the first criteria that the president or Prime Minister has to be the key sponsor of our engagement. Secondly, they have to have an agreed national digital agenda that they’re prepared to invest in. And third, at the very start of every project, we must have industry, academia, and government all at the table as we’re agreeing through a workshop, what we’re going to focus on, and what that allows us to do quite quickly is to build a broad landscape of stakeholders and then we can go deep. So it’s very much a land and expand sort of strategy, but then we go very deep because the actual people that we work with day in day out are those that have committed typically their lives to government service, and they’re the ones that deliver on the program.
And so regardless of what happens in an administration or in a leadership, those people remain. And so you’ve got that foundation of continuity. The other thing that we do is that we spread very quickly into the private sector as well. We usually start, well almost always start in the public sector because we’re orienting to a government national digital agenda. But you can’t do that in most countries without bringing in huge swaths of the private sector. And Cisco’s very fortunate because yeah, we operate in 80 countries around the world with a physical presence, but we have over 30,000 partner companies around the world with whom we work. Either they’re resellers of our equipment or they’re partners that bring things to the table that Cisco doesn’t offer, and we bring them into the fold. Our first layer of inclusion in terms of the private sector are local companies.
We always go to them first. And in fact, we even prefer startups, very innovative ones where we can introduce a new technology into one of our solutions. That’s a local one. So those local smaller companies, small and medium-sized enterprises can contribute to the economic development and digitization of their own country. So it’s a very inclusive ecosystem that we build. Cisco does what it does very well. We connect the world securely, but we’re not all things to all people. And we need things like sensors, which we don’t make, but we have a lot of partner companies that do. The example I use is when we do a smart city and we’re going to be putting up smart lighting poles, we don’t pour the concrete for the base for that lighting pole. We don’t make the pole, we don’t make any of the wires that go through that pole. We don’t make the light bulb that goes into that. We don’t make the cover over that light bulb. What we make is the wifi and the cameras, the tech that sits on top of it all. So in order for us to be able to do that, takes a lot of partner companies to pull that off, and we’re very fortunate to have those great relationships around the world.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So you’re investing tens of millions of dollars a year in this program. Is there an ROI? Are you measuring the ROI?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
Of course. Yeah. There’s this funny notion around purpose, that purpose can’t be combined with profit because it somehow taints the purpose. And I take a very alternative view to that, that I’ve sit on the Cisco Foundation Board, that’s pure philanthropy and it’s very different from what we’re doing. What we do is invest in countries that are prepared to invest in themselves. And yes, we certainly hope that they work with Cisco and we certainly hope we put ourselves in a position to earn their business as we go through these projects, as we show them the benefit of digitization. At the same time though, we want to build a relationship with them that truly does transcend the transaction. We don’t just want to be a box seller. We want to be a trusted technology advisor and partner for the digital age, for the AI age, for the quantum age, those actually aren’t ages, but we’ll talk about that in a minute if you like.
But these evolutions in technology, Cisco’s always going to be at the forefront of those. That’s what we do. That is how we make our living as a company. And so through partnership, we’re always able to bring the governments along with us and keep them at the forefront. So it is, we certainly love the fact that we can keep this program sustainable because we do make money at it, but we earn that, believe me, we earn that. And when we make those initial investments, there is no promise of return. It’s just the output is so valuable that it gets scaled up and replicated.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So where do you meet resistance and how do you overcome it?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
So resistance comes in the form of geopolitical strife.
And by that I mean you’re moving along in a country like Russia and things are going really well, and all of a sudden they decide to invade Ukraine and all of a sudden they’re not a part of the program anymore. They’re not a customer anymore. Cisco completely pulls out of Russia, absolutely the right thing to do. There was never a question. It was a very easy decision for us to do, but that was a huge book of business for us. But you can’t always go on the p and l, you have to have a moral compass. And so that’s where it can get difficult as you are sticking to your principles. Lemme just describe the process in hopefully identifiable terms. So there are all of these activating events that are happening around the world.
They filter through your beliefs and your values as a company, and the result coming out the other end of those filters is some consequent behavior. As long as those beliefs and values remain rock solid and you don’t question them, you don’t alter them, people are going to be able to predict how you respond. They may agree with it, they may disagree with it, but what it allows us to do is a program, because Cisco is so rock solid in its beliefs and value system in its purpose, that regardless of what happens in the outside world, all of those different activating events that we have no control over, those belief systems determine our consequent behavior and it’s predictable every single time. So there’s so much comfort in that with all of the, again, the geopolitical strife, all of the challenges that are happening around us. It’s those beliefs and values that we have as a company that allow us to prosper.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Do you have explicit belief systems written down, repeated part of the regular vernacular that you’re sharing on a day-to-day basis? Internally?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
Certainly we have our vision, our mission, our purpose, but I love the way Chairman and CEO puts it because it’s so simple and we all can buy into it, and you can put it on a T-shirt if you want. It’s that easy. If we do good, we’ll do well that simple. And in other words, if we’re helping lift up our communities in which we work, if we’re helping people, connecting the unconnected, serving the underserved, but also meeting the needs of our largest customers and helping them innovate, if we do good, we’ll do well. If we do the right thing, the company will continue to grow and prosper over time and we live by that.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And part of why that’s probably particularly true for you is because of the stories that come from the work that you’re doing. And you’re such a good storyteller. I’ve heard you tell these stories before and inspire because you connect this. I mean Cisco, I worked at Oracle for 10 years. Try and explain what Cisco or Oracle does to a non-technical person is almost impossible in a compelling way. But when you tell, I’d love for you to tell the story about foster children aging out the system in Houston, Texas and how you impacted them with the academy, which we haven’t even started talking about, the academy, the other half of your job. That story brings it to life in a way that the doing good does lead to doing well because everyone’s hearts and minds can get on board with that.

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
Yeah, it is. When we talked about the why at the very beginning, that’s one of the whys. It’s one of the reasons you get up every single day and can’t wait to start doing what you do. And to quickly touch on the Networking Academy to provide context, the Networking Academy was started 26 years ago. It is Cisco’s way of training up people on all things networking and cybersecurity and programming. It’s completely free. We originally did it because we invented networking back in 1984, and we needed to teach people what it was, how to install our equipment, how to maintain our equipment, how to innovate using our equipment. So you could say it was sort of self-serving initially to help us grow our business and the population of people around the world that consume our products.
The Academy has turned into something so much bigger than that now because it is free. It is available in 190 countries around the world, I believe. And then someone out there will probably correct me, but I believe there are 194 flagged countries in the world. So it’s basically a global program. We’ve trained up almost 25 million students around the world during that time. And this isn’t everything from basic networking and introduction to cybersecurity programming and now AI from basic all the way up to the highest level of certification, which for us, we have C-C-N-A-C-C-N-P-C, Cisco Certified Networking Professional, CCIE, which is sort of like the equivalent of a PhD in what we do. It’s incredibly hard to get, they’re very rare, but they’re the best of the best. And we have the full range, the full breadth. So you can take somebody from an introductory level of this is my first intro to tech all the way up to some of the highest paid, most accomplished professionals in the world. Now, I lay that out because that was the foundation for the project in Houston.
I was approached by someone that I had known from academia who was helping out the University of St. Thomas in Houston, a inner city university, and they had an association with a local church, and Pastor Rudy ran that church and Pastor Rudy made it his calling to help kids that were falling out of the foster system because Houston, like many large cities, has some pretty mean streets. And when you age out of the foster system, there’s no defined path and lots of times there’s no safety net. And so you fall straight through and you fall straight through to the streets. So young women would be prostituted, young men would be handed a gun and some drugs and put on a street corner. I mean, it’s the story that we all know that unfortunately happens in so many cities around the world. Pastor Rudy wanted to change that.
He wanted to be that safety net and grab those kids, but he also wanted to give them a path, a roadmap to a future. And so we partnered with him and came in and said, we’ll, set up a networking academy at the church and we will help you when these kids are brought in. We’ll put them through the Networking Academy program and allow them to earn their certification to where they would be eligible then for really good paying jobs. I mean, if you look at the security technician jobs that are available out there right now, there’s four and a half million open cybersecurity jobs around the world. 80% of them are technician jobs. In other words, you don’t need a four year degree, you don’t need a master’s, you don’t need a PhD. You can go through our cybersecurity course at Cisco, and at the end of a few months, in some cases, a few weeks of training, depending on how quickly you want to go through it, you can be qualified for one of those security tech jobs and they pay 50, 60,000 plus a year.
So it is life-changing, and that’s what we wanted to do for those kids, was to set them on that path. We had our first cohort come in and they made it through the program. Some of them today are working at nasa. Some went on to the University of St. Thomas who was our other partner, who opened up spaces in their cohorts coming into the school for those students. So imagine, here’s the distinction, Jessica, this is the difference. Imagine one life versus the other. Imagine a young person living the life of horror on the streets versus going to college or working at NASA and having a future. It is that distinct, and yet we’re able to bridge that, take ’em from one place to another quite easily.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, incredible. So years ago when I was at Oracle, we put together this focus group of deans of major academic institutions across the United States for the education vertical at Oracle. They wanted to know what was coming in the world of education. And so we did a two day scenario planning workshop where we got these top minds in academia to think about 25 years down the line, what will academia look like? And it was pretty incredible. It was this very complex process to figure out what the possible futures might look like, and not necessarily picking one, but picking matrices in which it could look like this. It could look like that. What would this mean for Oracle’s products and what they should do? What would that mean? And the one thing that felt just resoundingly true at the end of that two day workshop is most people agreed that the four year institution was probably going to go away.
The way that we teach people in university. It just is such an antiquated system. I mean, if Iba Crane walked into any class today, he would know exactly where to stand and how to teach because not much has changed, and yet the world is changing so quickly, and they posited at the time that it would perhaps be replaced by institutions like Cisco’s Academy or the Google University or Oracle ed, and that would be new way of educating the future of the workforce rather than me going to the University of Wisconsin for four years and taking voice and opera and whatever else I took that was probably of no use to me as a former. What were you Vice chancellor at Texas a and m?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
That’s correct.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Okay. As the former Vice Chancellor of Texas a and m and the head of the Cisco Networking Academy, do you agree that the four year institution is not long for this world and companies are going to take over educating our young people at a much broader scale than just what you’re talking about?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
It is such an important question, such a timely one, Jessica, because now I’ve been out of academia for over a decade, but I can tell you even 20 years ago, 15 years ago, we recognized that academia as it was progressing, was not a sustainable business model.
Because look at tuitions today. For most people, tuition is unaffordable. Now at some state institutions that are subsidized by legislatures and taxes, it’s more affordable. But so many places around the country here in the US and around the world, it’s just not accessible and not affordable. And if you do get in and you do pay your tuition, but you do it through loans, then you’re straddled, as we know, with student debt for the first 10, 20, sometimes more, 25 years of your working life. So it’s not sustainable, it’s just it’s too expensive. So they’re always going to be educational institutions that are going to serve a purpose. There are some that believe that they’re actually going to become the sort of four year vacation homes for elites. That’s a great, probably an unfair way of putting that, but that’s

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Totally accurate. That’s exactly how I would describe my college experience.

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
But it is an opinion, and it is a valid one because you have to have a certain socioeconomic status in order to be able to get in, unless you are heavily subsidized through some sort of giving program from the institution or elsewhere. Then you have community colleges and junior colleges where just sort of that interim status. They’re usually two year institutions. You get your associates and that’s of value depending on what you want to do. And then you have the likes of the networking academy or what Google puts on, or Oracle, which are very much oriented in our cases as an industry towards tech. And you can qualify for free in most cases for very, very good job based on the certification that you earn from a few weeks or a few months of self-education. You might have to go into a classroom once in a while. You might have to go into a junior college and do some hands-on stuff. But the bottom line is you can do it very rapidly and very inexpensively. What I’m suggesting is, is that all three are valid.
There’s certain jobs that universities are going to be required for those four year institutions. And talking about professional engineers, medical doctors, certain jobs where having an on-campus presence and instruction are going to be critical, but then there’s this whole other slate where they’re just not. And I think that the more options that we can give to people, the better we’re going to be able to serve them. And I would suggest that the four institutions aren’t going away. Some certainly will because they can’t afford to stay open. But you’re always going to have the University of Wisconsin, you’re always going to have the Texas A and s and the others that have 40, 50,000 students and are subsidized by state legislatures and the like.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah,

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
We don’t know about some of the smaller liberal arts colleges. I think they’re going to struggle.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, certainly. Okay. Can we speak quickly before we wrap up on the AI and the impacts that AI will have on the future of work from your perspective?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
And I’ll position this as AI in the moment, because AI has been around, gosh, it’s been studied since the late sixties. It’s not anything that’s radically new in Cisco. We’ve had AI embedded in our networks, in our security for over a decade. It came to the public consciousness through chat, GPT and OpenAI. All of a sudden now, it was something that every consumer could use, and they saw the value in that. So all of a sudden, AI became a thing. Now we’re starting to see it spread rapidly, and we’re starting to see a lot of different values generated from ai, and I think we’re still scratching the surface of that. But here’s what I would suggest, that we’re in a moment in time that is fundamentally shifting everything. Innovation is happening at such a rapid pace. We’ve never seen this before. Remember, we used to have ages. We used to have the industrial age, right? Decades, the information age, decades, the digital age we’re sort of going on almost two decades now. We are in the AI moment, the AI micro age where AI is going to have, its three or four or five years of being the shiny thing that everybody looks to. But by 2028 or 2030, you’re going to have quantum coming in
And taking over everybody’s public consciousness because it’s going to do things that we’ve never seen before, just like AI is doing now. But that’s only about a six to eight year life before it gets replaced or before it gets augmented by something else. What it is is remember Moore’s Law?

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah,

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
Moore’s Law, the doubling of processor speed every 18 months with a having of the cost, applying Moore’s Law to our entire industry. Now maybe our entire world, but certainly our entire industry where every 18 months, Jessica, everything is churned. Whatever is there at the moment, 18 months from now will have churned out and been replaced by something else. And that’s going to require us, I’ll go back to skilling for a minute, to have skilling keep up with innovation. It’s why I’m the innovation officer at Cisco and why I have all of skilling within my office. Because as we’re innovating, we have to be skilling in concert. We can’t be laggards in terms of skilling because we will never be able to get the full value out of our innovations if we don’t have skilled people to be able to take advantage of those. So to me, the value of AI is tremendous. And again, we’re just scratching the surface of it, and the value of quantum is going to be even better, and the value of the next thing after that is going to be even better. But it’s all going to be happening so quickly. And what we have to have is an agile skilling environment that allows people like you and me to keep up with it and be able to ride the crest of those innovation waves rather than being sucked under and churned out every single time a new technology is released.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Brilliant. I think those technologies, quantum nanotechnology, I mean the brain digital interface, all those things, they’re not just going to change the way we work. They’re going to change the way we think about reality itself. And I’m not even ready to begin processing. That even means really,

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
That’ll be for a later conversation. Right.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Well, hopefully the academy, Cisco Networking Academy will be able to help me out with that.

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
Yeah, we certainly can.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Certainly can. Okay. Well, it’s time for the last question. This is my favorite question, and it is, what is something that you do not get asked all that often in these types of interviews that you wish you were asked more often?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
So the first thing that came to my mind was, so I travel, I mean, 25 different countries a year all over the world. And it’s a wonderful job if you love travel technology and geopolitics. And most of the time when I land in a place, be it, so I just got back from Melbourne last week and I landed at 11 o’clock and I was doing a keynote at 1230 at a conference. So I had an hour and a half to get from the airport to the hotel to get showered and shaved dressed and then micd up and going up. And I never get asked how that gets done. And so I would suggest that maybe the secret, at least for me is don’t drink alcohol on planes and try not to eat because the body does not digest food at 38,000 feet very well. And it’s why when we get off planes, we feel really lethargic and we’re not quick, and all we want to do is lay down when we’re changing time zones. I know that’s a little obscure, but no one ever asks that. And I actually think that works. It works really well. So anybody that travels,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That’s a great life tip. As a keynote speaker who travels a lot myself, well, I don’t drink, so that’s an easy one, but I did not know that the body does not digest food well at 30,000 feet. I never thought about that, and it totally tracks with my physical experience.

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
Experience. Oh, believe me. It’s a learned experience.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, indeed. Well, thank you so much for joining us, guy. It was such a pleasure to have you here. We’ve learned a lot and I’m so grateful for your time. If people want to learn anything else that they can about Cisco generally or just really about the programs that you’re in charge of, where can they go to learn more about the Networking Academy, for example?

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
Yeah, so you can go to cisco.com obviously and do a search on any of it. So Country Digital Acceleration Networking Academy. You can go to netacad.com. We also have an entire program called Cisco U or Cisco University, which offers all sorts of different technical training, but it’s all available right there and easy to find.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Wonderful. Thank you so much, guy.

Dr. Guy Diedrich:
Thank you, Jessica.