Name: How Cisco survived 5 leadership transitions
Uploaded: 2015-03-12
Duration: 4 min 23 s
Description: Fortune’s Susie Gharib asks Cisco CEO John Chambers what a established company should do to maintain effective leadership.

What does leadership mean to you? Leadership means, and let's start at the CEO level. My job as a leader, the CEOs, is that the vision, the strategy for the company to develop, recruit, and retain the leadership team to implement that vision and strategy, and to drive the culture which clearly, 20 years ago when I became CEO I didn't realize how important the culture was. And then communicate all of the above, walk the talk if you will. From a positive or negative perspective, companies get in trouble for three reasons. Number one because they mismarket transition, such as this digital transformation which we'll probably talk about later. The second thing they do is they keep doing the right thing for too long. In other words, they don't change. And third reason that companies fail is that a failure to reinvent themselves either as leaders. Or within the company. Cisco's been through probably five transitions. Leadership to me is about leading our company through those. So how do you create that culture of leadership in your organization? Such a big company? I think you have to walk the talk and you start with communications. I meet with the employees throughout the year on a regular basis. Our Cisco family. I've [ UNKNOWN ] every illness. In the company, that's life threatening for any employee, their spouse or their children. We're there for them like no one else. You have a huge company. You are in touch. 75, 000 people. You're in touch with all of those employees. I get briefs on everyone that's serious. I call lots of them. Spend a lot of time. On the one hand, it's sad. On the other hand, we, at times, literally save lives. But the key takeaway here is if you're gonna lead, you're gonna listen. You gotta listen to your employee team. You gotta listen to your customers. You gotta get market transitions right. And you've gotta have the courage to see things coming and make changes before it's obvious to others. You've been at Cisco as CEO for 20 years. Mm- hm. How has your leadership style changed and evolved over that 20 year stretch? Well, something that I didn't realize when I first went into the job. You gotta not only get market transitions right. When a transition occurs, for example, everything moving then in that, originally data. Then voice, then video. Now all applications, all electricity. You have to have the courage as a leader. And leadership style has to be able to reinvent themselves. And to have the courage to make changes. Even for the times is goes against what made you strong before. And, and you have been reinventing Cisco even most recently. Because you made this radical change in your switching devices. You disrupted this very core business. How do you manage a company when it's going through such rapid changes? What you have to do is you have to communicate. Whether to your. Employees, to your customers, and your shareholders and your partners what you're doing and why. You then got to have the courage to drive through it, because when we changed our high- end switching and routing, everybody said, well, Cisco is in trouble, they aren't gonna come back. We just grew 11 % this last quarter on switching, we're taking market share versus everyone. But we disrupted ourselves, and there is some pain that goes with that. People are afraid of change. We know this, their human nature. Yes, they are all the time. So what do you do, what is your gift, that you can motivate people to change with you? Well, part of it might be a, a weakness at first. I was dyslexic. And because I had a teacher in the 3rd and 4th grade who understood learn, learning disabilities. She taught me how to read differently and how to take a weakness and make it a strength. She taught me how to go A, B, Z, remarkably quickly. Mh- hm. So it's the understanding that if you don't change not only will you miss the opportunity, you won't survive. So you share with your constituencies why you have to change, your logic behind the change, and then you paint a strategy to get there. And then you hold yourself accountable and as the CEO, you've gotta walk the talk. John, you've had so many mentors in your very long and successful career. What's the best advice you ever got? It would be Jack Welch. He said, John, you have a very good company. I said, all right, Jack, how, I'll bite. What does it take to have a great company? He said a major setback and I said, I did. 93, 97, major setbacks. He said, no, a near- death experience. What's the message here? The message is, once you go through that, you learn more from your setbacks than you ever do your successes. And you will never be a great leader or a great company without setbacks and getting stronger. And a lot of companies don't get that, they think you're, you're future is determined by your [ UNKNOWN ] as well, it isn't. It's determined by how you handle your setbacks, much like we teach our kids. You know, it is the setbacks, even though they are very painful, that give us the inner strength to be able to make changes

Fortune’s Susie Gharib asks Cisco CEO John Chambers what a established company should do to maintain effective leadership.