If you're the VP of engineering for a product, and your product universally sucks (and you're fully aware of how bad it sucks), what's wrong with the company structure that prevents you from fixing it? That's a better question.
That's a rhetorical question, right? In any company, employees don't get to capture any value. In Cisco, even if he turned his unit into a $50 billion business, he would be lucky to get $50 million and a promo to SVP. Even Google's CEO gets "only" 200-400 mils and I suppose that a VP at Cisco is a much smaller role.
Your job in that role is often to ensure your engineers do exactly what they are told. Often it's not to set tasks yourself.