work life balance

Prior to working at Cisco, I couldn’t imagine a life where (from my office in Raleigh, North Carolina) I could ask my manager on a Monday to work part of Tuesday from the road and all of Wednesday from St. Louis ahead of a holiday weekend. I mean, I could ask – but I’d probably get some very bizarre…

I didn’t start my career in marketing – or at Cisco.  I used to be a full-time civil litigator and a part-time adjunct lecturer.  By day, I picked apart multi-million-dollar insurance contract language.  By night, I picked apart graduate student essays (in all their handwritten glory). So, you coul…

Yes, I brought a baby to Cisco Live Melbourne. And no, to answer the #1 question I received throughout the 5 days I spent in Melbourne for the Digital Summits (a side event to Cisco Live) it wasn’t just some random baby I found in the convention center. A year ago, I reluctantly missed out on the ch…

Co-authored by Ken Daniels   Work hard, play hard. Sleep when you’re dead 😵. We’ve heard the same clichés at Cisco, and from our partners. Hard working professionals can find endless ways to excuse maintaining an overly stressful and unsustainable approach to work. We often need to be b…

Time is our most valuable asset. We never seem to have enough. Whether helping family, colleagues or our communities, we always seem to come up short. But what if there was a way to add a little sand to the hour glass? Well, there is. Thanks to a generous volunteer program, flexible working environm…

I always saw myself as the climb-to-the-top office type.  But, after I graduated college, there were no ‘remote’ opportunities or flexibility in the workplace by any means. So I dove in – all in – to the corporate life, and I became a self-proclaimed workaholic. Years later, in a leadership role at…

Starting a family isn’t always an easy path. My journey to becoming a mom was a bit more of a bumpy road. Just before I became a part of Cisco, just before the company I worked for was acquired and folded into the Cisco family, I started fertility treatments (IVF.) I had a beautiful daughter, but it…

You know what’s great? Finding new things I love about my job at Cisco, even two years into being a field SE on the Global Service Provider team. Most of my career prior was built using Cisco technologies, but it never dawned on me during my many visits to the Cisco campuses that I could be working…

520 weeks. 120 months. 10 years. A decade is a long time, a time worth celebrating. That’s what I’ve just done – celebrated my 10th Ciscoversary! And as I reflect on the road that’s led me to here and now, it has truly been a wonderful journey. My parents immigrated to the United Kingdom from one of…