Today CRN announced the winners of their inaugural Inclusive Channel Leaders Awards to honor people who bring a particular focus on inclusivity to their channel leadership roles. This recognition shines a light on channel leaders who foster diversity and inclusion in their teams and whose individual contributions are helping drive change. It's encouraging to see an industry list recognizing leaders who are taking concrete actions to drive diversity and representation, something I've been advocating for all of us to do as an industry.

Please join me in congratulating Alexandra Zagury, Andrico Spates, Luxy Thuraisingam, Mark Murphy, and Ronnell Nobles for being the first in the industry to be named to CRN's Inclusive Channel Leader list. These leaders have positively impacted their teams, Cisco, our partners, and communities around the world by weaving inclusivity into the fabric of their organizations, from recruiting and hiring practices to building a more representative industry talent pipeline, to how they lead their teams.

Their accomplishments are too many to list here, a few highlights are featured below:

• Accelerating growth in black-owned businesses while increasing diversity in the Cisco partner ecosystem
• Engaging in and facilitating industry discussions to expose thousands of diverse candidates to job opportunities inside Cisco and across Cisco's channels
• Sponsoring and spearheading initiatives to advance underrepresented groups such as Women in Cisco and Women of the Channel, among many others
• Endowing scholarship programs for LGBTQ+ graduating seniors to remove financial roadblocks for individuals looking to further their education
• Establishing mentoring and sponsorship programs focused on coaching and developing diverse talent
• Designing inclusivity in through hiring practices such as forming interview panels that reflect the diversity of the candidate pool and eliminating 'degree required' on job descriptions
• Providing space for all people to share their views, input, opinions, and plans

I'm incredibly proud of these leaders for being the first recognized for their accomplishments and contributions to creating, hiring, and retaining a more diverse workforce and talent pool. It speaks to the type of people in Cisco and our culture of fearlessly tackling systemic barriers to power an inclusive future for all -our mission. At the same time, I also look forward to the time when this specific list is no longer needed, and these characteristics are instead embedded as criteria for recognition intoeveryindustry list.  I'm hopeful the work of these individuals -as well as the other industry leaders recognized on this list -will bring out the competitive spirit in our industry and motivate more people to take concrete action. If we, as an industry, apply the same energy and passion that we do to innovation as we do to representation, anything is possible. That's what we're doing in Cisco, and I can't wait to see what these leaders, their teams, and the Cisco community accomplish next!

Congratulations again to each of these leaders and to our friends and colleagues at other companies who also made the list.

See the full list of CRN 2023 Inclusive Channel Leaders

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