October 19, 2023
John Chambers, Chairman Emeritus, Cisco, CEO, JC2 Ventures
Lessons From The Internet’s Top CEO
Listen on:
When looking for answers on moving forward, a look back on how top leaders led can be pivotal to your organization and career. Few leaders provide life lessons about their successes and failures that can help us personally and professionally. One CEO, who can see around corners about what’s next, with more muscle memory lessons from building The Internet under his belt than most, is silicon Valley’s John Chambers. The most thoughtful leader I know, John has timely advice for leaders of organization—from Fortune 500’s to startups—about where to focus, how to scale and countries to engage with, like India and France, or avoid, like China.
A friend and industry colleague, John led Cisco at a record pace, exceeding expectations for 40 straight quarters, growing from $1.9B to $49.2 billion in annual revenue, while expanding from 400 to 75,000 people—10,000 of which became millionaires from Cisco stock. Listen in to this action packed episode of The Reboot Chronicles and hear about where we are going in the digital future ahead, and how John is helping 21 global startups—9 that are unicorns—create the next-generation of organizations and leaders at JC2 Ventures.
Looking Back To Walk Forward with Digital and AI
Chambers has been a successful CEO for decades now, and with that time he has some advice to share with other CEOs about how to prepare for the future, no matter the year. One tip is to look around you and see what emerging technology is so that you can incorporate it into your business. Although that may seem obvious, Chambers notes that during the 90’s “if you didn’t move to the internet, Fidelity as an example, wouldn’t invest in your company regardless of what your business model was.” This was during the time that those in the tech. world, including John and I, were still lobbying to not tax the “unproven” Internet, your welcome Amazon, among other battles.
“Big companies have to reinvent themselves. It’s hard. Their DNA is [to] just keep doing the right thing for too long.”
A Playbook For Build, Buy, Borrow Innovation
It is easy for companies to get stuck in a trend, it is comfortable, it works, and change could make or break a company depending on their situation. But if you want to have a chance at being around in fifteen or twenty years, you must innovate, and the best way to Innovate is to acquire startups. One example of this is the Postal Service in France, La Poste. Six years ago, La Poste saw that “their business model of delivering 18 billion pieces of mail going down to six billion.” So La Poste made a change, they shifted focus to AI, acquired three AI companies, and trained 230,000 postal workers on AI. All with the goal of future-proofing their company.
A soon-to-be example of this, on a larger scale, is the countries of India growing through startups. Chambers notes that most startups that come across his desk are from India and that they are doing very well to innovate as a country. It is a country that has 1.4 billion people and has “the fastest growing startup and unicorn engine in the world.”
You’re a Product Of How You Handle Setbacks—Get Back Up
Wrong choices and doubt are two things that everyone goes through, but those hardships bring forward answers, as long as you know the questions to ask. It is the same when you are working at a company. When you get into trouble “determine how much was self-inflicted. And how much was the market.” Then when you begin to learn where things went wrong, that is when you can start to work on a road map for the future. “You are a product of how you handle setbacks and your successes.”
