The rise of Webex gives Cisco a new way to mix business with social responsibility. Growth of video conferencing and telehealth can not only reduce the carbon footprint of business and healthcare, but also enable more equitable distribution of services to disadvantaged communities.

In other words, it may be hard to displace Cisco Systems Canada from the top of Corporate Knights’ list of Canada’s Top International Corporate Citizens – a title it has now earned two years in a row.

The list comprises non-Canadian companies on the 2020 Global 100 ranking of the Most Sustainable Corporations in the World that derive at least $1 billion of their revenues in Canada.

Cisco was founded in Silicon Valley in 1984 by Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack, computer technicians at Stanford University. Their goal of developing new hardware to help computers communicate peaked at just the right time. Today Cisco is a $50-billion-a-year giant in networking, software, cloud computing and collaborative work platforms.

Branding itself as a bridge to the future (its logo is the Golden Gate Bridge), Cisco is a strong supporter of social responsibility. CEO Chuck Robbins wrote in the company’s 2019 corporate-social-responsibility report: “We see massive opportunities for our innovation, expertise, and culture to play a role in finding solutions to some of society’s biggest challenges . . . including partnering with governments to accelerate digitization goals, advocating for data security and privacy, and empowering the next-generation workforce.”

Cisco’s first-place ranking stems from various achievements, including the highest clean-revenue score in its industry peer group, growing investment in innovation, and a high ratio (42%) of women in executive management.
In a CEO community still dominated by white males, Cisco Canada president and CEO Rola Dagher is not just a woman, but a refugee whose family left war-torn Lebanon 30 years ago. She too is a bridge: Dagher heads a career-development group called Connected Women that helps young female employees feel that they belong at Cisco and can help make a difference.

Cisco has responded proactively to the pandemic. To support remote workers, it made Webex services free to businesses. It also allocated $8 million in cash and $210 million in in-kind products to support medical facilities, education, and government response efforts.

While video conferencing has been around for two decades, it’s finally reaching its potential. Case in point: in March, the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) deployed Webex technology across the organization for use by more than 400 CAMH clinicians. From March to April alone, “virtual-care” patient visits across Ontario rose from 350 to 3,000.

“Cisco understands how critical technology can be in bridging gaps, breaking down barriers and connecting the unconnected,” says Dagher. “This pandemic has fuelled the digital revolution in mental health services – it’s been a catalyst for delivering remote care at scale and helping those in need get access during a difficult time.”

Who are this year’s top international corporate citizens in Canada? They include companies that earn over $1 billion in revenues in Canada, are not listed or headquartered in Canada and have the highest scores on the Corporate Knights Sustainability Rating methodology employed for the 2020 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World.

The post Top International Corporate Citizen: Cisco Canada appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Born and raised in a small village near Sidon, Lebanon, Dagher immigrated to Canada a little over thirty years ago during the last few years of the country’s crushing civil war. When she arrived in 1989 as a 17-year-old new mother, she was fleeing political strife and a challenging arranged marriage. She didn’t speak a word of English.

“I’m incredibly proud of all the hardships I’ve gone through from being born and raised in a war zone and spending most of my early life in a bomb shelter to coming here and learning everything from scratch.”

Dagher had studied accounting and finance in Lebanon at Middle East College, but finding a job in Canada was initially challenging. Her earliest role in telecommunications was as a Bell telemarketer. By the end of her fifteen years there, she had climbed through the ranks to a director post.

“I don’t have a master’s degree in technology or engineering or anything like that, I was just determined to succeed no matter what.”

Dagher left Bell to take an executive sales director job at Dell Canada before eventually becoming vice president of the computer firm’s data storage division. In 2019, she joined Cisco Systems Canada—the networking hardware and telecommunications equipment and service provider—as president.

“I got to where I am today because of my determination and the passion I have for technology and people,” says Dagher.

This passion for people shows up in her leadership. “My style is very simple,” she remarks, “it’s servant leadership.” She believes in empowering her team and is adamant about the importance of building and supporting the people she works with. “People join organizations, but people leave people,” she says matter-of-factly.

But she agrees that it’s not that easy for women to succeed in the tech sector. While it’s even more challenging for someone with her earlier history, the industry has a long way to go. Dagher’s three-pronged recipe for success for women in the corporate world: advocate for yourself, find a mentor and raise your hand.

“I’m incredibly proud of all the hardships I’ve gone through from being born and raised in a war zone and spending most of my early life in a bomb shelter to coming here and learning everything from scratch.”

She also stresses the importance that failure had in her life, clarifying that she was always keen to learn from it. “Giving up,” she goes on, “was never an option.”

Dagher likes to pay those lessons forward. Case in point: She heads a Cisco career development group called Connected Women that makes sure young female employees and interns feel like they belong and can have influence within the company.  “Our summer internship program is very well paid and we’re very proud of it. We fly them out to San Jose [Cisco headquarters] for a week or two of training and they actually work on innovative challenges,” she explains. The competitive program last year saw 700 applicants for 22 positions.

And with her own experience with forced displacement, Dagher made it a point for Cisco Canada to be involved with Lifeline Syria—a not-for-profit organization that assists in sponsoring, welcoming, and resettling Syrian refugees in Canada—by training and hiring refugees in the tech sector.

These days, the private sector’s foot-dragging on environmental issues is what worries her most. “We’re not moving fast enough. Not enough companies are jumping on it, and a lot are still parking it in the back.”

In an era of accelerated progress, technology is at the heart of every industry disrupting business as usual. If, as a tech corporation, you’re not thinking about the environment and sustainability in relation to your technology, Dagher argues it will be very difficult to succeed.

“At Cisco we take a lot of pride in ensuring we are part of giving back from a responsibility perspective.” For one, Cisco’s Bridge to Possible campaign highlights all the ways in which the company aims to connect people, places, ideas and things through a secure network, and to minimize emissions generated by transportation. That includes enabling workers at companies around the world to work from home and call in through WebEx technology instead of driving into the office.

“We’re not moving fast enough. Not enough companies are jumping on [sustainability], and a lot are still parking it in the back.”

Cisco’s sustainable procurement practices aim to eliminate one million tons of greenhouse gases from the company’s supply chain by next year. Circularity, like for other tech companies, is also a critical point. The company’s products are designed to be maintained and upgraded, ensuring that they remain within the market and away from landfills. Nearly 14,000 metric tonnes of those products were returned and recycled last fiscal year.

Dagher’s achievements are hard to miss. She was named 2019’s Woman of the Year by Women in Communications and Technology—a national association that provides opportunities for networking and professional development for women in these notoriously male-dominated industries.

She is the kind of successful immigrant that Canada loves to embrace. She worked tirelessly within the challenging corporate system to rise to the top and now makes sure to help others in return. “I’m a very proud Lebanese and a grateful Canadian,” Dagher likes to say. As an Arab immigrant woman myself, Dagher is a role model. I tell her that I recently obtained my Canadian citizenship and that interviewing her is moving for me. “Ahlan wa sahlan ou alf mabrouk [welcome and congratulations in Arabic]” she responds warmly.

“You can be anything you want to be here if you have determination.”

The post Women in leadership: Cisco’s Rola Dagher says giving up was never an option appeared first on Corporate Knights.