ABSTRACT
Reinvention is revealed as an intensely economic imperative from this angle, and no firm or corporation – no matter how seemingly successful – should cast itself as immune from the ongoing requirements of redesigning, rebranding, refinancing or changing its business model. If some corporate reinvention is geared to product and market refashioning, other companies extend the remodelling principle all the way down to the very fabric of organizational structure - and perhaps nowhere is this better dramatized than at Cisco. Lichtenstein, well-practised in the arts of corporate reinvention, set about instigating swift travel transformations including mandating use of non-refundable airline tickets; revising Cisco's preferred air, car and hotel partners; and encouraging use of Cisco-model virtual realities as an alternative to physical travel, especially web-conferencing. The exact spread and depth of the power of the reinvention platform at the level of corporations and organizational life is especially difficult to assess.
