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: EMERGING STRONGER

How we handle the economic downturn? It’s a classic casebook out of one of your sports teams. We have a playbook of plays we can run, we have developed that and done the same approach in 1993, 1997, 2001, 2003, 2008, 2009. We just adjust the playbook for the game plan we’re after. What’s our opposition? What is the uniqueness of it? And every time we’ve gone into an economic downturn, we come out of it dramatically stronger, a higher percentage of market share, moved into new market adjacencies, and gained a large percentage on market cap on our peers. 

As basic as that sounds, that is, go back to the basics. A vision, don’t worry about next week, next month, next year. Paint the picture where you want to be when it comes out, assume it will be deeper and longer than you think. What is your sustainable differentiation? We took 10 percent of our expenses out, reorganized our company structurally, put in new business models, moved into 30 new market areas, and we’re gaining share in almost every single one of them, and became our most profitable quarter we’ve ever had last quarter in growth.