John T. Chambers

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Cisco Systems, Inc.

Excerpt from remarks to Boston College’s Chief Executives’ Club of Boston 

June 11, 2010

TAKE AWAY: CHANGE IS NECESSARY

It is so important to create a culture of changing. And when we don’t change, as Route 128 found out in high tech, we get left behind no matter how high quality the educational institutions are or how supportive the government is. So in the last five years, while most people would say "You’re on top of the Internet," we completely restructured our organization, changed our business models, [achieved a] different level of innovation, and I went from command to control to empowerment and teamwork, and that was a hard transition for me. 

Everything we do at Cisco is based around design for speed, scale, flexibility, and replication. You can argue is that right or wrong, but [we have] a very crisp understanding of where we’re trying to go. We break everything down to business models, thinking 10 years out in terms of what’s our vision, two to four years out, what is our differentiated strategy, and what are we going to do in the next 12 months? And we don’t discuss the next 12 months until we get the first two done. And as we do this, we changed our organization from a very hierarchical approach to one that has, instead of one or two priorities a year tops, it’s 70 of them.