John T. Chambers

And so mastering the art of change management, having this growth mindset earlier, like the sooner the better, is something that is skill in and of itself.

John Chambers, who I have, uh, so much respect for, former chairman of Cisco and CEO, said that when he started his work at Cisco in the two thousands, he saw that people needed to reinvent themselves every seven to ten years.

And then I heard him, just around the COVID timeframe, say, "Well, that timeframe is no longer seven to ten years, it's three to five years." And if I was gonna take a guess at it today, I would say it's probably like maybe two years.

Yeah.

And that's usually a death knell for a company when you get used as a case study in Harvard, because that greatness, which drove them from 90 to 99, essentially almost destroyed them.

John Chambers, same CEO, same management, you could see how the strategy turned on its head as the company going from 4 billion to 400 billion.

Acquisition-based strategies don't scale up well.

And you can see why, right? As you get bigger, you got to do bigger acquisitions or more acquisitions just to get the same growth rate.

And I'll give you one quick example, Kevin.

I admire John Chambers greatly, who was the CEO and Chairman Emeritus of Cisco Systems.

In 2009, he bought a company that made the flip video camera.

It was the hottest camera at the time, $590 million of stock used to purchase that company.

Cisco was down 64, excuse me, 40%, uh, from March of 2000 to December of 2000.

John Chambers said in, in early 2001 that he went from s- his order book went from 70% growth in December of 2000 to -30 in January of 2001.

That's how fast the ordering evaporated.

Literally, people were double and tripling orders.

It's a

huge nod to John Chambers.

who was the CEO of Cisco, who hated to stay on the stage.

And so we would all be facing towards the stage, and John would walk off the stage and walk into the audience, and I was like, whoa.

And I'm like, I have to learn how to do this and train everybody to be a John Chambers.

And one of his key executives, who I was very close with, who's since passed on, Rick Justice, then became kind of the second CEO Acolyte to kind of come off the stage with John and I'm like, whoa, if he can do that, we can get everyone to do that.

And then the one pivot is you may see we do more of a theater in the round because we don't really want to be a patriarchal structure in the room.

All right, Laura.

No, well, I mean, first, West Virginia is sort of special to me because my mentor came from West Virginia, John Chambers, who was the CEO of Cisco.

And I'll tell you, I would not be a CEO without him, without seeing his leadership.

And then his successor, Chuck Robbins, who does an amazing job as well.

When we enter the workforce, we're really at the rise of the Internet.

And I remember I was working for Cisco at the time, and John Chambers said the Internet's not just going to change what people learn, but it's going to change how people learn.

Because before the Internet, there was value in holding and retaining knowledge.

But over time, what we've seen with the growth of the Internet is that knowledge is at your fingertips.

Why? Because I remember in...

I, I remember listening to an interview from John Chambers, who was Cisco.

Uh, he was the former CEO of Cisco, and he told a story about Canada.

He said, "You know," this had nothing to do with South Africa, but he said, "You know, when you go to Canada and you wanna do something, the Canadian government comes back to you and says, 'How can we help you make your business a success?' What happens in South Africa? You get a rule book.

And

we gave the example of a CEO, John Chambers, who was known for this, that he wanted to know any time that somebody was having a problem and he would move heaven and earth to make sure that they responded in a way where it might be paying for costs.

It might be delaying all kinds of things to make it possible for that team member.

And that actually didn't lessen the fact that he still was the hard driving leader that wanted results and was always pushing mergers and doing all kinds of huge things to build his organization.

And if it wasn't for Chambers pushing on it,

calling on connections, bringing in experts, all of that, things really kind of came together.

So now, whether you're John Chambers, whether you're Barbara Beck, or we can talk about the other two case studies in this field note, how do you operationalize this in a way so that these aren't just like Because some people would be like, you know these stories are going to get around.

Is this selfless or is this just CEO showing off? What's the consistency that makes it authentic? And then how do you do that in a way that somebody is like, well, my crisis didn't get talked about.