Connect the Dots

Leadership Lessons for the Future

John Chambers

• Publisher: Harper Thorsons
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780008297039
• eBook ISBN: 9780008297060
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Imprenditoria
• Index: Business

From one of the world's greatest business pioneers comes a profound analysis of what makes an outstanding leader, guaranteed to inspire frontrunners of any enterprise for years to come. From one of the world' s greatest business pioneers comes a profound analysis of what makes an outstanding leader, guaranteed to inspire frontrunners of any enterprise for years to come. In Connect the Dots, Silicon Valley legend John Chambers reveals his philosophy for reinventing himself and his company through offering a set of timeless lessons which can be put into practice right away. Using anecdotes and insights from his career, Chambers shares his strategies on how to act before the market shifts, grab people's attention, and find the right people to build the best team possible. In Connect the Dots, Silicon Valley legend John Chambers reveals his philosophy for reinventing himself and his company through offering a set of timeless lessons which can be put into practice right away. Using anecdotes and insights from his career, Chambers shares his strategies on how to act before the market shifts, grab people' s attention, and find the right people to build the best team possible. The digital era is no walk in the park for start-up companies, with businesses moving from zero to a billion to bankruptcy in a matter of years. However, Chambers poses a unique mode of thought proven to attain success; it is not the biggest or richest players who win, but the ones which are able to anticipate trends and connect the dots. The digital era is no walk in the park for start-up companies, with businesses moving from zero to a billion to bankruptcy in a matter of years. However, Chambers poses a unique mode of thought proven to attain success; it is not the biggest or richest players who win, but the ones which are able to anticipate trends and connect the dots.

I

THE CONNECTED LEADER
(THE MINDSET FOR
LEADERSHIP SUCCESS)

Chapter One

THE LESSONS OF WEST VIRGINIA

(Disrupt, or Be Disrupted)

I’ll never forget the day I almost drowned. I was about six years old and my dad had taken me bass fishing at Elk River near our home in West Virginia, when I lost my footing on a rock and fell in. As I was pulled under by the current and dragged into the rapids, all I could hear was my dad shouting, “Hold on to the fishing pole!” It wasn’t an especially nice pole, but Dad clearly wanted me to protect it. Every time I came to the surface, sputtering water, I’d see him running beside me on shore, repeating those same instructions: “Hold on to that pole.” Not wanting to disappoint my dad, I tightened my grip and could think of nothing else but the pole. Finally, we got to a spot where Dad swam out and pulled me out of the rapids, pole and all.

We sat for a few minutes to talk about what happened. My dad was a great teacher, who always explained the thinking behind why he did things. He wasn’t angry that I’d gone too far on the rock and fallen in. Accidents happen. He wanted me to know why it was so important that I held on to the pole. As long as I stayed focused on doing that, he explained, I was less likely to panic and fight to get out of the water, which is one of the worst things you can do when you’re trapped in rapids. You have to go with the flow and look for opportunities to get out. I was too young to get myself out, so his goal was to help me manage my fear until he could find a place to rescue me. You couldn’t stop the fear; you just had to manage it.

After we talked, my dad put me back in the water to swim near the area where he’d pulled me out and then we went back to fishing where we were. It was a lesson that stayed with me my whole life and one that was reinforced a little over a decade later, when I went with my youngest sister Patty to a viewing of one of her friends. He’d apparently drowned in the exact same spot where I’d fallen in the river at the age of 6, only he was probably about 14 at the time. As I walked by the coffin, I was struck by how much he looked like me. I remember his face like it was yesterday. He would have been much stronger than I’d been at 6 and certainly a lot more savvy about how to get himself out of the rapids. I don’t know the exact circumstances of his death, but I suspect he died because he panicked. Nobody was there to remind him to hold on to the pole.

The importance of staying calm under pressure was reinforced by both my parents when I was growing up. I suspect the fact that they were both doctors came into play. I was a kid who liked to race bikes, jump off bridges, take up dares, and chase down adventures wherever I could find them. I’ll never forget running home after colliding with a metal pipe near the same river where I almost drowned. I had to run half a mile with blood gushing from my head. As I came in, literally dripping with blood, sweat, and tears, my mom put her hand on my head and told me I only had a puncture wound. “It probably won’t require any stitches,” she said. “You’ll be fine.” With some soap and water, a bandage, and a hug, I was probably sent back out the door. If any of you have parents in the medical profession, my mom’s reaction might sound familiar. When you deal every day with people who are injured, sick, and often scared, you learn the importance of staying calm. Panicking over symptoms does not help you diagnose the disease. As a result, I’m usually at my calmest in a crisis. To this day, when a friend, a startup, or even a competitor has a problem, they’ll often call me up to ask for advice because they know that I’ll help them separate emotion from the facts in deciding on next steps. My two sisters are the same way.

What I learned at Elk River has been critical in helping me stay focused and calm through crises such as the 2001 dot-com crash. That wasn’t a raging river but what I described at the time as a “100-year flood,” a stock market plunge that wiped out a quarter of our customers and 80 percent of our stock price. Many of our competitors died and, to be frank, I would describe that time as a near-death experience for Cisco as well. That said, I never worried that we wouldn’t make it. Not once. People find that hard to believe, but it’s true. Don’t get me wrong, the layoffs we had to do haunted me and I still cringe when I think of some of the headlines. I made some mistakes, but I never doubted that we’d make it. I believed that our fundamental strategy was right and I held on to that pole the entire time. I knew if we focused on what we needed to do, we wouldn’t drown. I’d learned that lesson in West Virginia.

Most people associate me with Silicon Valley, where I was at Cisco for 27 years. I still live in that part of California and find it’s an energizing and special place to be. Still, nothing can match the heartache and the hope that I feel for my home state. West Virginia is a place that a lot of people hear about but very few people actually know. Some might know of its beautiful scenery, rich history, coal mines, and hardworking, friendly people. Others associate it with hillbillies and communities torn apart by addiction and the despair of chronic unemployment. Like everywhere else, it’s a place that’s been dealt winning and losing hands over the years. We’ve all heard about the problems afflicting West Virginia, from the long-term decline of coal mining and lack of industry in once-vibrant industrial towns to low education rates and high addiction rates that some blame, in part, on the injuries that come with manual labor.

I grew up in a suburb of Charleston, but in some ways my first hometown was Ravenswood, West Virginia. It’s about an hour north of Charleston, where Sandy Creek meets the Ohio River, built on land that was once owned by George Washington. The then-future U.S. president chose the property in 1770 as part of his compensation for having helped the British win the French and Indian War. While he took note of the area’s rich soil and abundant wildlife in his journal, what he really liked was its location at the intersection of two waterways. Every day, pioneer families were loading their possessions onto flatboats and making one-way trips down the Ohio River to find new homes out West. It wouldn’t take much, in Washington’s view, to turn this 2,500-acre piece of land into a profitable hub for settlers heading to a new frontier. He was right, in 1770.

Washington didn’t get a chance to develop the area. He soon had his hands full with leading the American Revolution and becoming the nation’s first president. By the time his descendants got around to building there a generation later, the market had moved on, and the opportunity that Washington identified had gone with it. The land around the Ohio River Valley was settled and pioneers were pushing farther West by rail or road, neither of which connected to what became the city of Ravenswood in 1852. If Washington had created a place to stop for provisions along the river, Ravenswood might have been well positioned to become a transportation hub. Instead, developers bypassed it, extending their rail lines and roads through nearby towns. When it comes to getting market transitions right, timing is everything.

By the time I got there in 1949, Ravenswood was a quiet community of 1,175 people. Its natural beauty hadn’t diminished since Washington first set eyes on it. As a land of opportunity, though, it fell short. Many of the residents were older and getting close to retirement, including Walt and Myrtle Ritchie, and Pierce and Lenora Chambers. I knew them as Grandpa Bood, Grandma Myrtle, Grandpa Pierce, and Grandma Lenora. The two couples lived about three blocks apart, which was very convenient for shuttling a baby back and forth.

That baby was me. Both my parents were in medical school at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University when I was born, so my grandparents took care of me in West Virginia for a period of time to let mom and dad finish their studies. If they hadn’t stepped up, I could have derailed my mom’s career before it even started. For a lot of young women after World War II, having a baby put an immediate end to any hope of having a career. The ads that had encouraged women to work in factories during the war were being replaced with the message that they should give those jobs back to the men and go home to raise kids. My mom wanted to raise kids but she also wanted to be a doctor, and my grandparents supported that dream. They’d all gone to college in West Virginia. In fact, through four generations, every single member of my family has earned a college degree, including every aunt, uncle, and cousin. It was understood by each member of my family that after high school, you’d go on to college and get a degree. My sisters and I never questioned that we’d do the same.

You’ll find Democrats and Republicans in my family, along with vegetarians and meat-eaters, and plenty of other differences that can spark a fun debate, but there are two things that all of us share to our core: a deep love of West Virginia and an unwavering belief in the power of education. We were taught that your best weapon in life is your brain, so you’d better sharpen it. Education was the great equalizer. You didn’t have to be born into privilege to get the skills to compete, and no amount of privilege would help you if you didn’t invest in building your skills. How you’d use those skills would depend on what the market needed. An education gave you something that no one could take away: flexibility to do what you want and the process for continuous learning.

That philosophy shaped how my family responded to the ebb and flow of West Virginia’s fortunes, and it would also shape how I ran Cisco. Education enabled my grandparents and their children to move from a contracting industry to a growing one. My family didn’t work in the coal mines that came to dominate West Virginia’s economy, though I knew a number of people who did. Instead, Grandpa Bood built a successful road construction company while Grandpa Pierce ran a bank. Grandma Myrtle and Grandma Lenora were both active in the community and pushed to improve education throughout the state. I learned early on that to have transformative change, groups had to come together, whether it was government and business or workers and managers. You had to find common ground and shared goals to get things done. I can still vividly remember the exciting, emotional debates that would occur around my grandparents’ and parents’ dinner tables when they discussed how education must change to create the skills needed for the jobs of the future. There was also, as you would expect, a healthy give-and-take about which political party was best equipped to do this. But the key takeaway was always that government and business leaders must work together to position the nation, state, or county for the future. I have said many times before that the two greatest equalizers in life are education and the internet. I believe that now more than ever. It is why, over the last 25 years, one of the ways I have tried to give back is to help spur this discussion with government and business leaders that the current education system is letting us down and will continue to do so. The K-12 system in the United States is broken and in need of dramatic repairs. I believe that, regardless of political party association, once again government, business, and community leaders must come together and have the courage to reinvent education for a new era, or future generations will pay a steep price. This was true in West Virginia but now it’s true across our entire country.

I’m lucky to come from a family of optimists. I never heard my grandparents complain. Even in tough times, they talked about opportunities and were motivated by curiosity, the excitement of a challenge, and a desire to help. My mom and dad acquired those values and passed them to us. They’d been married 57 years by the time mom died of Alzheimer’s in 2005. They didn’t just love each other; they respected and supported each other’s dreams and aspirations, too. My dad was an obstetrician and an entrepreneur who delivered 6,000 babies over the course of his career, about a fourth of them for free. He worked all hours while my mom kept a more regular schedule as an internist and psychiatrist. My sisters, Patty and Cindy, and I were all expected to work hard, treat others like family, and never stop learning about the world.

For a lot of families in West Virginia, education was something you did through the end of high school. You didn’t need a college degree to make a decent living in the coal mines or in a chemical plant. You’d learn on the job. While the benefit of spending four years in college might not be clear to families who’d worked for generations in the mines, the cost in tuition fees and lost wages sure was. For a lot of them, that kind of investment just didn’t make sense. It’s an understandable economic calculation and one reason West Virginia still has the lowest percentage of college graduates of any state in the nation. The people were ambitious and hardworking. They’d just tied themselves to one way of making a living.

Things change—that is the only real constant in life after all. Ravenswood didn’t remain a sleepy little haven. Soon after I arrived on the scene, in fact, the town tripled in size. I’m all about driving growth, but I can’t claim any credit for this! I was about five years old when two major events hit Ravenswood: a state road that had stopped 30 miles short of town was finally extended and a shipbuilding industrialist named Henry J. Kaiser decided to build the world’s largest aluminum refinery about six miles away. All of a sudden, our quiet community became a boomtown. With jobs and development came new families and kids and bulldozers and buildings. Ravenswood needed traffic lights, roads, sewers, homes, services, and bigger schools right away. Grandpa Bood stepped up to meet some of those needs for new roads while Grandpa Pierce helped with financing and planning for an unprecedented degree of disruption. The downtown became the “old town,” and new development was built around it. Kaiser Aluminum built the new elementary school and leased it to Ravenswood for a dollar a year. Everything seemed to be happening at once. For a kid, riding your bike past rows of trucks and bulldozers was exciting. It felt like the future. I loved it. For people who’d lived in Ravenswood their whole lives, it must have been a shock.

When Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation opened its plant in Ravenswood in 1957, it was hailed as a state-of-the-art facility that would help transform the state of West Virginia. It certainly altered the landscape and created a lot of jobs. But Kaiser’s glory days lasted barely a generation. About two dozen years after it opened, Kaiser shut down the last of its aluminum production lines as demand for aluminum cans slowed. It eventually sold the facility to Century Aluminum, which idled the plant in 2009 before permanently closing it in July 2015. Among other things, the company blamed cheap aluminum imports from China. As production moved to lower-cost centers, the company struggled to reinvent itself, to develop new talent and areas of expertise. Not only was the company reeling but also the community that had sustained it. Without a major commitment to innovate and train people for a new era, Ravenswood got left behind. People moved away. Businesses closed. Once again, the town grew quiet and starved for opportunities. As the coal industry faded amid competition and a switch to new forms of energy, that pattern would be repeated in towns across the state.

I wanted to stay in West Virginia when I graduated. Instead, for West Virginians like me and a vivacious speech pathology major named Elaine Prater who stole my heart in high school, the opportunities had dried up. After two years at Duke University in engineering and then completing an undergraduate degree and law degree from West Virginia University, I married Elaine and moved on to get an MBA from Indiana University. We never moved back. I still feel a little wistful when I think about it. My sisters and their husbands also moved away after college. One brother-in-law, Gary Park, runs a large hospital system in North Carolina and my sister Cindy builds houses there. My other brother-in-law, Vince Anido, has been CEO of multiple successful pharmaceutical companies and lives in Florida with my other sister, Patty. I think all of us would have stayed in West Virginia in a heartbeat if the opportunities had been there.

My state used to be a land of opportunity. After my brief early stint in Ravenswood, I grew up in Kanawha City, a middle-class neighborhood just across the river from downtown Charleston. In the 1950s, West Virginia’s Kanawha River Valley was the chemical center of the country, if not the world. It was home to companies like Union Carbide, Dow, Monsanto, and DuPont, a place that attracted brilliant chemists and engineers from everywhere in the world. If you were in Kanawha City or Charleston back then, you felt like you were sitting in the engine room of the next industrial revolution. We were producing the fuels, the cutting-edge polymers, the disease-resistant seeds, and many of the other materials that an optimistic and fast-growing nation was hungry to consume. West Virginia was on the cutting edge of change. You couldn’t imagine a day when that would change. But the same pattern that had played out in Ravenswood almost 200 years ago played out in Charleston. The market shifted and West Virginia was left behind.

What I learned from witnessing the shift in West Virginia’s fortunes wasn’t so much the challenge of dealing with a downturn but the perils of success. The state fed the world’s appetite for chemicals and coal for so long that it failed to recognize when its recipe for winning would no longer work. We did the right thing for too long. New competitors were coming along to beat us in many of the areas where we thought we were untouchable. As our resources were depleted, it became easier and cheaper to mine coal in western states than in West Virginia. Owners started to use machines that resulted in fewer injuries from mine accidents but also fewer jobs. Meanwhile, energy alternatives like natural gas, solar power, and wind became more feasible and therefore more popular. Antipollution regulations that targeted carbon emissions didn’t help matters much. What also killed those industries were the unions that fought to protect old jobs instead of working with companies to create new ones. Don’t get me wrong. I admire what John L. Lewis did to improve working conditions and pay as head of United Mine Workers in the 1930s. The union served a very important purpose. People were being mistreated. However, over time, union leaders lost sight of the bigger picture and became inflexible about protecting jobs, only to watch them disappear. Much like the businesses they fought, unions struggled to reinvent themselves to stay relevant.

Individually, none of these trends came as a surprise. Each of them has been discussed and debated for years. Some factors were blown out of proportion; others were underestimated. Together, they pointed to an outcome for West Virginia that was clear and inevitable. My brother-in-law Jeff Prater got a college degree in mining engineering and technology but then moved on to a different field for the reasons we discussed. The coal industry wasn’t coming back, nor were the aluminum and chemical industries—at least in their current form. Instead of facing that harsh reality and investing in new areas to adapt to it, as my brother-in-law did, a lot of leaders doubled down on a losing bet. They focused on trying to save old jobs instead of creating new ones. They blamed our hardship on outsiders instead of those who seemed determined to maintain an unsustainable status quo. These leaders gave false hope to good people who had worked hard, only to find they could no longer make a living. Instead of trying to stoke excitement and a shared commitment to prepare for a different future, they became wistful for the past. I can’t blame them. Government leaders are usually not rewarded for taking major political, economic, and social risks. Company leaders confronted a lot of challenges. There are no easy fixes for West Virginia, just as there are no easy fixes for the industries and communities being disrupted by technology today.

At the same time, I wouldn’t bet against my home state. In fact, I’m betting on it. If your car is ever stuck in a ditch and you must look for help in the middle of the night, I hope you happen to be in West Virginia. Knock on any door and I bet you’ll find someone who will welcome you in, fix you up a hot meal, and get you out and on your way in no time. If we come together to invest in startups, innovation, skills training, and digitization, there’s no reason why West Virginia can’t rise again.

Knowing the warmth, loyalty, and resilience of its people, I think the state can develop new centers of excellence and reinvigorate coal country in other ways. The key to this will be strong leadership from the public and private sectors and from educational institutions like West Virginia University, where I am sharing my time, money, and ideas to help develop the programs, partnerships, and people we need to nurture a startup culture. New technologies will transform everything from healthcare to tourism. With a strong vision for what’s possible, reasons to believe, and resources to help train and move people forward, the opportunities are there. The conditions for entrepreneurship are not limited to Silicon Valley. In fact, I believe Silicon Valley has become somewhat insular and risks getting left behind as entrepreneurs create new industries on the other side of the country, as well as the other side of the world.

The strategy that will enable West Virginia to come back, that enabled Cisco to come back in 2001, and that has helped me navigate every market transition is one that I first learned from my parents, Jack and June Chambers. As doctors, they taught us the importance of distinguishing between the symptoms and the disease, to look at the whole patient. The visible condition of any one person, company, state, industry, or country is always a symptom of a deeper issue. To address the real problem, you have to investigate the specific underlying issues and learn to step back to see the patterns and trends that point to the big picture. In short, you need to connect the dots.

I saw my dad take that approach in medicine, in business, and in life. Dad had this unusual combination of skills and instincts that enabled him to spot the opportunities amid disruption. Along with being an extremely successful doctor, he was a successful entrepreneur. Some of my earliest and most profound lessons in business came from watching how he capitalized on disruptive trends that some ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Acknowledgments
• Praise for Connecting the Dots
• List of Searchable Terms
• About the Publisher