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: A MAJOR FUTURE CHALLENGE

A lot of unchartered water here and I’m sure we’re going to go off the road a couple times in the process, but this is the future of technology. It enables what our kids invented and video-driven, all the way around collaboration, to move with speeds that haven’t been done. And while I’d like to tell you the major challenge here is technology, it is not.

The major challenge is changing process, whether it’s in health care or education, whether it’s insurance, whether it’s in technology itself, manufacturing. Because technology without process change only gets you about a fourth or a fifth of the productivity. And that after we shake our heads we agree it’s process, which was hard for me to learn, it’s culture. It’s how do you change the culture? It’s the people that resist it. And so you’ve got to move on all three fronts at the same time when you say how do we change a state or how do we change a country or how do we change a manufacturing organization globally?