Name: How Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins' Leadership Style Shook up the Company
Uploaded: 2016-06-28
Duration: 4 min 1 s
Description: After only one year at the helm

Chuck, I guess it's not easy to take over from a very popular, iconic CEO, like John Chambers, who dominated Cisco for 20 years, and yet here we are a year later. You've established your leadership stamp on the company. How did you do it? Well first of all I think you have to be true to yourself, as a leader. And in taking over Cisco, I had things that I knew that we needed to do, or I felt strongly that we needed to do. And you have to be who you are. You can't be someone else. And I think that's the first and most important thing that you have to do. You have to follow your convictions. You need to build a leadership team that you trust and that together actually are better. Based on the diversity and the different thinking that they bring to the game. And you have to just have a willingness to take accountability and make decisions and move quickly. Were you nervous about making that, those big decisions? Probably early on. One of the things I've learned in this job is that Any decision that gets to me is inherently not an easy decision. There are no easy ones, because if they were, somebody else would have already made them. And so once you come to that realization, then you're more comfortable that hey, this is just the decision that I have to make and that's part of the job. You're making a lot of changes at Cisco, how do you get people on board to follow your vision? I think you have to, first of all, when you're making big decisions, to the extent you can, the more you involve people in the decision process, whether they agree with the ultimate decision or not, they tend to be more okay with the decision if they feel like they had input, so that's one of the key tenets that we try to implement with our leadership team. The other I think is just communication, communication, communication. You have to over communicate because the pace at which things are changing in the world whether it's the macro environment, the economic environment, the technology transitions, if you're gonna move with speed you have to have transparency and very frequent communication. And as long as people believe they understand where you're going Then they know what they need to do everyday to help us get there as a company. I think those are two of the most important things. You've had to make some unpopular decisions, some messy management changes, you came out okay. What would you say is the most important thing you learned as a CEO from that experience. You know first of all you have to be willing to make the tough decisions regardless of What the press might say or what's gonna happen. You have to just do the right thing for the company. And you have to make the right decisions honestly thinking about three years out and there's such a pull for this 90 day window and what's gonna be important for the next two to three months. And you really have to stay balanced to make sure that your decisions are the right ones for the long term. You're making some big bets on Cisco and its future, so I'd like to get your view on making mistakes, taking risks and even failure. Well, first of all I think that if you're not making some mistakes then you're probably not taking enough risks. I think the The world we live in is moving so fast that you're never gonna have a hundred percent of the information. So, my view is, you get to the best decision you can and then you go, and you have enough initiatives in play that you actually hope some of them fail. And so-- Why is that? Because you know you're pushing, the cut, the leading edge if you have some stuff that's failing, right? We have people who have great ideas inside the company and if seven our of ten turn into something great that's phenomenal. But part of what's made Silicon Valley great and what's made Cisco great is this acknowledgement that it's actually okay to fail because you have to get out there and try. In some countries around the world this is actually One of the cultural dynamics that actually prohibits them from having a real active startup and entrepreneurial spirit is because there's such a cultural opposition to failure. So I think it's an important characteristic of the organization that we don't wanna lose. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]