Cisco Systems is undoubtedly one of the most successful companies in the last 25 years. From the formation in 1984 Cisco has g
one to a yearly revenue of around 40 billion USD, has the No.1 or No.2 spot in all of the solution markets they are in and has an impressive track-record of very successful acquisitions (around 130 to date). The current market-cap of 100 billion USD is only at fifth of the all-time high on April 11th 2000 when Cisco hit a market-cap of 503 billion USD and made the Guinness Book of Records for the highest market-cap ever of any company.
It all started with a cat!
There are many stories about how Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack founded the company and the central character in the story told at Cisco’s new hire training I attended back in 2001 is a cat. The cat of Sandy and Len.
Sandy and Len were a couple and both worked at Stanford. Life must have been pretty good but they had one major challenge complicating their life – remembering feeding their cat (the story doesn’t give a name to the cat). This little shore was further complicated by Sandy and Len working in different parts of the campus so figuring out if the cat had been fed or not was often difficult. Both Sandy’s and Len’s departments’ had email services for their respective Local Area Networks but the two LANs were operating different protocols rendering them incompatible.
This little conundrum spurred the cat-loving couple to modify one the switches to operate with multiple protocols, bridging the two LAN technologies and allowing for emails being sent between the two.
Another story which may be closer to the truth involves the inventor William Yeager from which Sandy and Len licensed the code with which the built the Cisco IOS. Sandy’s and Len’s accomplishment was not has inventors but rather in seeing the commercial potential of the packet-switched multi-protocol router.
The Beatles
It took Sandy and Len a lot of knocking on doors be fore they had convinced anybody else of the potential of the router. They may have sought inspiration from the success of the Beatles who where refused by numerous record lables before finally signed to EMI by George Martin.
In 1986 Cisco finally managed to raise funding of $2.5 million from Sequoia Capital after 77 unsuccessful proposals to other venture capitalists. Cisco went IPO on Feb 16th 1990 for USD 18, closing at USD 22.25 on the first day of trading. Since then the share has split a few times and one original share has turned into 288 shares. If you had bought one share at the IPO for it would have been worth around USD 23000 at the peak during the Internet boom and around USD 4900 today.
Is JC going for a new Guinness record?
According to BoozAllen the average tenure of a North American CEO in 2006 was 9.8 years. John Chambers has already beaten that by far. He has gone from clarity to clarity during the over 14 years in the role and successful navigated Cisco through both recessions and hey-days. Moreover, when JC speaks the world listens. Cisco’s peers and competitors watch every move he makes and the governments take his advice.
He has received recognition for his leadership in magazines such as Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People,” one of Barron’s’ “World’s Best CEOs,” the “Best Boss inAmerica” by 20/20, one of BusinessWeek’s “Top 25 Executives Worldwide,” “CEO of the Year” by Chief Executive to name a few. In addition Cisco is one of the top 10 companies to work for in US, UK, Germany, France, India, Australia and several other countries.
The secret to success unveiled
Not really, but the interview with the Washington Post clearly shows two of his key traits – learning agility and the thrive to continually improve. JC talks about leadership, the difficulties of moving such a large corporation from a command and control leadership style to one of coaching, and about his own thrive to become a better leader.
Be inspired!
