Cisco Systems enables people to make powerful connections-whether in business, education, philanthropy, or creativity. Cisco hardware, software, and service offerings help create internet solutions that make networks possible-providing easy access to information anywhere, at any time. Cisco specializes in routing and switching and advanced technologies like home networking, IP telephony, optical networking, security, storage area networking, and wireless technology. In 2015, they generated $49.2 billion in revenue and employed more than 70,000 people.

Cisco has made considerable investments in its learning capability and in growing a culture of learning and intellectual curiosity. Karen Sanders is at the forefront of that shift. Sanders is helping to transform how the company approaches product management while keeping the company as relevant, innovative, and forward thinking as possible in a rapidly changing technology landscape. Cisco learns constantly from its customers and business partners about how to do what they do best, and they rely on outside expertise to form their opinions by strengthening their understandings. Product managers in Cisco's Enterprise Academy have direct access to GLG to gather, understand, and synthesize new information for the company's engineers. Adding unexpected insight from outside perspectives illuminates Cisco's needs and opportunities - for engineers and business decision makers.

I'm Karen Sanders. I am a director in our Enterprise Strategy Group at Cisco. Cisco is not only an infrastructure company. It's the pipes and the tubes and the waves that allow us to communicate how we do on a regular basis. If you are using your cell phone, if you are using your computer at work, chances are you are using a Cisco network somewhere along the way.

My job is helping build the capability of our product managers and help find the right people to join our organization,

And one of the things that we aspire to is a culture of intellectual curiosity that fuels innovation.

We have 10,000 plus engineers working on our portfolio on a daily basis. Fingers on keyboards is what we want from those engineers, which means our product managers have to go find those nuggets of information about our portfolio and arrange it in a way that makes a lot of sense for us to get maximum value out of that portfolio.

We employ a ton of people who have a ton of conversations with our customers every day. We have a huge partner ecosystem.

The conversation with GLG started as part of our Enterprise Academy. It's about making sure that our product managers have direct access to GLG and GLG has direct access to them.

For us learning is about examining the whole landscape of possibilities.

It's helping us take that very narrow margin of having a leg up on the competition, or the industry, or the trend. It's allowing us to operate in that margin a hundred times better than we could do on our own.