Cisco’s chief will terminate a meeting if you use certain acronyms in his presence—he says new hires ‘feel too stupid to ask’ what they mean
“They don’t know all the colloquial acronyms that we’ve come up with, but they feel too stupid to ask because they don’t want to be intrusive and invasive in a meeting,” he explained.
Key points
- “And so, what ends up happening is they don’t know, so they’ll just keep quiet.” “So now people are talking past each other, and you’ve got a third of the population that does not feel comfortable asking what that means, and the two-thirds that are using the acronyms feel like that’s superbly efficient.
- “You have to be able to speak in easy enough terms that everyone can understand.” Cisco’s president isn’t the only CEO with meeting rules—Jeff Bezos has no PowerPoints and Jamie Dimon says no emails Jeetu Patel isn’t the only boss with firm views on how meetings should (or shouldn’t) run.
- “I don’t like acronyms, especially Cisco-manufactured acronyms that happen at runtime,” Cisco’s president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel told Fortune at a small roundtable dinner.
“If there’s a meeting and there’s acronyms that are used, there are times that I’ve just terminated the meeting.” Patel jokingly pointed to a time he noticed staff saying “you have to get JP to approve”—without knowing they were referring to him.
Additional details
- But use the wrong acronym in front of Cisco’s president and your meeting could be killed—especially if it’s one that nobody outside the building understands.
- “But you’re not going to read slides to me.” AT&T’s John Stankey similarly wants staff to do the homework before the meeting and come ready with ideas to share—or not come at all.
- workers between 2024 and 2025 was even higher at 13%.) By Patel’s estimate, 5% to 10% attrition at Cisco’s scale would mean about 9,000 new people a year—or 27,000 in three years.
- Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has long run what he calls “the weirdest meeting culture you ever encounter” —including no PowerPoints.
- And for senior leaders like himself, he thinks if you can’t make yourself understood by everyone, “you don’t deserve to be in the seat that you’re in.” “I’m a big believer in that,” he added.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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