Connecting the Dots: Leadership Lessons in a Start-up World

What excited me was Cisco’s potential. I didn’t see a manufacturer of routers. I saw a pioneer at the forefront of a tech revolution that could change the way people work, live, play, and learn. In such a small operation, I could help create a culture that would not only embrace change but seek it out. Freed from the demands of entrenched interests, we could be the disruptors instead of the disrupted. Despite our modest size, we weren’t alone in spotting opportunities in connecting people online. There were about 50 companies in the networking business in the early days of Cisco. Today, all of them have either collapsed, exited the business, or been acquired. Cisco faced many daunting competitors over the years, all of which were purported to signal the end of Cisco and most of which disappeared in relatively short order: Nortel, Lucent, Wellfleet, SynOptics, IBM, DEC, Cabletron, Alcatel, 3Com, and many more. Many were bigger, or more established, than Cisco at one point. I’d like to believe they just couldn’t keep up, but the truth is that many stumbled because the world changed faster than they did. While each company had its own unique set of circumstances, they all failed to catch one thing: a market transition. Some became so focused on winning the game they were playing that they didn’t notice a new game was starting on the next field. Others stopped listening to their customers. They focused on improving products that were becoming obsolete, diversified into the wrong business, or picked the wrong partners. They held fast to analog technology as the world went digital. They didn’t disrupt, so they were disrupted.

Cisco not only survived, it thrived. When I stepped down after 20 years as CEO in 2015, the company had become a $47 billion-a-year tech giant with over 70,000 employees. We moved from having a single product to 18 different business lines, with a No. 1 or No. 2 market share in all but a few of them. From the TV programs that stream into your home to the data being generated by a smart grid, we’d helped millions of people connect and protect their data across the network. We did it through building great technology and teams, through listening to customers and partnering with innovators. We acquired 180 companies over the course of two decades and developed innovation playbooks that could be replicated across the company and beyond.

But it all starts with what I learned from West Virginia: the need to stay ahead of the next wave. It’s a lesson that applies to every individual, every business, every state, and every country today. If disruption isn’t at the core of your strategy, you’ve got a problem. A market transition is not a threat. It’s a period of movement from one state to another, when the skills needed to do your job change, when your customers move on to a new technology, or when an economy shifts to new model. It can happen on its own, or as part of a wider trend. What matters is that you recognize it’s both a reality and an opportunity. Those who ignore where the market is going or waste a lot of money in trying to fight it never get very far. They might try to fall back on familiar tactics or pick an easy fight with a traditional rival. When you compete against another company, you’re looking backward. When you compete against a market transition, you learn how to see around corners. Growing up in West Virginia taught me that no one is immune from disruption. Those lessons apply whether you’re a small business that’s looking to grow or a multinational that’s trying to shift to a new model. The ability to figure out what change will look like three to five years before it happens—and then act on it—is how you’ll win.

I’m not wringing my hands over what happened to the minicomputer industry in Boston. As with coal mining in West Virginia, the disruption of an industry doesn’t mean the people and places that once depended on it have to be left behind. We all have choices. They might not be easy choices, but the message here is a positive one: Those who embrace change are about to experience one of the most innovative—and potentially lucrative—periods in human history. Digitization will transform every industry and interaction. For the brave, there will be opportunity. For those raised on a foundation of strength and family, like the people of West Virginia, there will be a chance to lead. This isn’t a Hillbilly Elegy that views those who’ve been disrupted as a lost cause. You can reinvent. I am investing in business education and entrepreneurship through West Virginia University for the same reason that I’ve invested time in writing this book. I believe the next wave of innovation will connect and empower people on a scale never before seen, giving everyone a chance to compete.

Who will win in this transition isn’t clear. I lived in Pittsburgh in the 1980s, when steel companies kept announcing job cuts and there seemed to be nowhere for ambitious young people to go but away. Today, Pittsburgh has become a model of entrepreneurship and innovation. You can feel the excitement and see the results. Silicon Valley, in contrast, has gone from being viewed as a place that helped the world solve its problems to one that’s also causing problems, from a job creator to a potential job destroyer. When I first came to Silicon Valley, a lot of the leaders had strong ties to other parts of the country: Netscape’s Jim Barksdale grew up in Mississippi, Larry Ellison hailed from Chicago. Now the Valley seems a little more inbred and out of touch with the average person in America. Silicon Valley is becoming less a magnet for top talent than a target that many of them want to beat. I think Silicon Valley will adapt, but nobody can take success as a given.

So don’t write off West Virginia. I’m betting on the Mountaineers and believe my home state can become a startup state if the university, business, and public sectors come together to support transformative innovation. We’ve seen companies like Cisco, Microsoft, and Apple, industries like automotive and energy, and countries like India and France reinvent themselves. They don’t focus on preserving old industries or an old way of life, they understand that sticking to a current course is their biggest risk. Your ability to understand and get ahead of market transitions will determine whether you stumble or rise above the rest. In the next chapter, I’ll share some of the techniques that you can use to connect the dots and get a better sense of where the world is going.

For me, though, it all starts with confronting the realities of the world that we’re in and the urgent need to adapt ahead of change. There were times in human history when the job you inherited from your parent was pretty similar to the one you’d hand down to your child. We don’t live in those times. Most of us understand the disruptive power of technology and can feel the accelerating pace of change. If you didn’t, you probably wouldn’t be reading this book. At the same time, though, there’s no reason to panic or underestimate the strengths you already have.

I’ve talked about how I learned to spot and move on transitions from my dad. I learned equally important lessons from my mom about the power of connecting emotionally with people and of genuinely respecting others, regardless of their status or stature. I’ve always considered my employees my family. From time to time, I’ve had different communications experts suggest “family” is inappropriate when talking about employees, wanting me to use “team” instead. I love the notion of teams and use it often, but I’ve also always considered my employees my family and have always tried to treat them accordingly. I think they’ve known that and it has made a difference in good times, but especially in challenging times. I couldn’t have gotten thousands of employees to move as fast as I’ve needed them to if they didn’t trust me, and trust comes from feeling valued and respected. I also don’t know any other way to operate.

The lessons and values that my mom and dad handed to me are similar to the ones that Elaine and I taught our son, John, and daughter, Lindsay. And bear with me, as a proud parent, when I tell you how I now see them live those values every day in their professional and personal lives. Lindsay wouldn’t be the leader in her field of residential real estate development and interior design if she wasn’t highly attuned to the changing patterns, preferences, and trends of her partners, clients, and industry at large. She’s always looked forward and dreamed big. And John has created a career helping disruptive companies like Houzz, Netflix, Walmart.com, and JC2 Ventures enter new markets, adopt new strategies, and understand changing customers. They’ve both achieved success while operating with the highest integrity, building strong relationships, and genuinely caring about people around them. Although my children didn’t grow up in West Virginia, they are also as proud of our family’s ties to that state as Elaine and I are. You don’t have to disrupt who you are to disrupt what you do.

I love West Virginia. There’s nowhere like it on earth. At the same time, the story of my home state is a cautionary tale in what can happen if you don’t make bold moves to get ahead of a market shift. You have to disrupt, or you will be disrupted. Like our own stories, this one is far from over. Nobody is too far behind to come back and nobody is so far ahead that they can’t be replaced. The strengths that you build can be deployed in a new way. It’s not easy but if you start by shifting your focus to the big picture and look for clues to what’s around the corner, you’ll have a head start on those who are focused on preserving the past.

I’m starting this book in West Virginia, in part, because it’s where I got my start in life. The bigger motive, though, is that I see a lot of parallels with what happened in my home state and what’s happening in every part of business, the country, and the world today. We all know that markets are shifting. Whether it’s Uber in transportation or Amazon in retail, no industry is untouched by the disruptive power of new technologies. We’re not just coping with new products and competition from places like China or Mexico. Every company is becoming a digital company. Every person on the planet has the potential to compete against a multinational—and win. With digitization, anyone can innovate and leapfrog the competition at a scale and speed that’s unprecedented. Once mighty companies have failed. America’s dominant position as a center of tech innovation is coming under threat as other countries start to move ahead. Even Silicon Valley’s position as the world’s leading hub for disruptive innovation is far from assured. As everything becomes connected, the rules for success start to change. How you adapt will determine whether you win.

It’s a mindset that shaped how I led Cisco. If you were to ask our customers what we did better than our peers, many of them would say that we moved quickly, with a sense of urgency, to get ahead of market transitions. We absolutely got knocked back on our butts a few times, but in each case, we came back stronger, as our competitors went bankrupt or got consumed. I’d like to say that we were smarter, faster, nimbler, more advanced, and perhaps even better looking than our rivals (you’ll get used to my sense of humor, or lack thereof, as you read this book), but the reality is that we recognized what was happening, responded, and learned to better spot what was coming and get ahead. We were one of the first companies to bet big on China in 1995. We were pioneers in outsourcing manufacturing because it made sense for our customers and enabled us to keep up with rapid growth. We’ve moved from selling routers to partnering with governments that wanted to transform their economies through digital innovation. A lot of people are scared by the next wave of innovation. They can see the threat. What’s less clear is how to respond.

It’s not unlike the challenges that hobbled West Virginia. The difference is that what I saw play out over the course of two generations there can now happen within a few years. I’ve been lucky to spend my career on the front lines of the tech revolution, seeing entire industries get disrupted and building a company that became the backbone of the internet. Now, I believe we are on the cusp of a revolution that will take the impact of the internet and multiply it—possibly by a factor of three to five—and play out faster than seems conceivable from the vantage point of today. The coming era of digitization represents an inflection point like no other in our history. The individual trends may sound familiar: artificial intelligence, virtual reality, Big Data, cybersecurity threats, drones, the Internet of Things, driverless cars, block chain technologies, and more. Put them together and the market shift will be profound. We’ve gone from connecting 1,000 devices to the internet when Cisco was formed to more than 20 billion today. Within a decade, some 500 billion cars, fridges, phones, robots, and other devices will be communicating online. The digitization of just about everything will force us to rethink all aspects of our lives—from our business models to our education system. If we don’t get it right, entire industries and even countries could be left behind. A few years ago, I predicted that the disruption would be so brutal that 40 percent of businesses probably wouldn’t exist in 10 years. I got a lot of pushback for that. In retrospect, I think I was being too conservative.

As I first learned in West Virginia, no person, company, industry, or place is immune from disruption and no one factor is to blame when it happens. And when it does happen, incredible opportunities are always created—both for emergent players and for incumbents. I’ve talked in these first few pages a lot about disruption from the lens of the incumbent. I am equally enthralled with the role that startups play in driving the disruptions and then growing, and the lessons they can take away to increase their odds. I believe that a thriving startup environment is critical to every country, and that tomorrow’s leaders will be those who nurture a healthy set of disruptors to move us forward. Over the coming pages, I will lay out a set of lessons—based on a lot of scars, moments of genius, and episodes of failure—that apply to any individual and leader in business today. If the lessons of my last few decades help even a few leaders, pioneers, dreamers, and change agents more successfully navigate the digital world in front of us, this book has served its purpose.

LESSONS/REPLICABLE INNOVATION PLAYBOOK

Disrupt, or be disrupted. Embrace digitization and new technologies that are transforming how you live, work, and do business. The pace and scale of disruption are increasing. Look for industry innovators, startups, new technologies, and—most important—shifts in customer behavior. You can’t plan for a world ahead if you are not investing in imagining it.

Keep learning. Education is the great equalizer. Make time to update your skills as well as your technology prowess by learning about innovations in your industry and beyond. If you are an employer, create opportunities for people at all levels to learn and innovate in the digital world.

Change before you have to. The worst mistake is to do the right thing for too long. The time to pivot is when your business is still healthy and you’ve earned customers’ trust. Try out new technologies, and embrace a philosophy of constant change.

Take risks and move fast. Better to stumble first than arrive last. First movers face the biggest risks but get more attention, opportunity, and leeway to make mistakes.

Be a magnet for talent. As an individual, be the person who’s known for embracing innovation and promoting change. And remember the adage, “People won’t remember what you say, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.”

Seek diversity in colleagues, neighbors, customers, and local industries. Company towns can die when the company goes away and like-minded people tend to reinforce existing points of view. Diversity breeds resilience and innovation.

Anchor on your core values and strengths, even as you question conventional wisdom. You can disrupt what you do and what you know, but always stick to who you are and what you value. Build on what you know, and use your expertise to guide you into new areas.

Anticipate failure. At times you will fail. Get up, dust yourself off, learn from your mistakes, and move on. How you handle setbacks is as important as how you handle success.

Chapter Two (#u619fc447-1b55-5315-b003-e71858c6f92f)

ACT LIKE A TEENAGER AND THINK LIKE A DYSLEXIC (#u619fc447-1b55-5315-b003-e71858c6f92f)

(How to Spot Market Transitions) (#u619fc447-1b55-5315-b003-e71858c6f92f)

One of the advantages of being a CEO in Silicon Valley for 20 years is that I got to see a lot of leaders when they were just starting out. Their businesses and their personalities are all quite different, but they share some common characteristics with a lot of the startup founders that I’m betting on today. If you think that they all came in with an impressive track record or flawless communications skills, you’re wrong. In fact, some of them were so green and lacking in those areas that it was easy for critics and competitors to write them off as inarticulate, naive, or even immature. What struck me was not their inexperience, but rather their insatiable curiosity and ability to handle multiple random data points at once. Along with possessing a bold, almost dreamlike vison for where they want to go, they have this distinct talent for moving from one topic to another with lightning speed, and possessing a bold, almost dreamlike view for their company. It’s the kind of nonlinear thinking that someone who is dyslexic, like myself, will find familiar. The most consistent similarity across every age and area of expertise was the mindset of these entrepreneurs: They came across as fearless, curious, and hungry for new ideas, with a desire to disrupt a segment of the industry. They were all about the future and determined to do things differently from the people who were in charge. Some seemed almost too impatient to stand still and none of them were satisfied with the present. In short, they acted and thought like teenagers—with all the enthusiasm, bold dreams, and ambition that most of us had at that age. Teenagers don’t believe in incremental change and the best leaders don’t either. They want to disrupt the status quo and are frankly audacious in believing they can change the world. I’ve seen that quality in startup founders who are not far removed from their teens and also in leaders who are well into their nineties.

What differentiated the ultimate winners from the losers in Silicon Valley wasn’t their ability to “mature,” but their ability to hold on to that teenage mindset and “dyslexic” ability to connect the dots while adopting the practices to scale and continuously innovate their businesses. Today, many of those impatient, curious, and bold founders are leading some of the biggest tech companies in the world. The qualities that made others write them off were essential, I believe, in fueling their success. What is so exciting—and makes me feel so positive about the future of startups on a global basis—is that I see the same combination of factors in the next generation of leaders. The difference is that, this time, I’m seeing those leaders emerge in every part of the world. Three of the startups I am involved in have CEOs who have won multiple awards and recognition as leaders under the age of 30. They are all similar when it comes to their vision, curiosity, impatience, competitiveness, and bold aspirations to change their segment of the industry. The age of the average CEO I am meeting with nowadays is actually getting younger. The reason, I think, is that the need to solve hard problems with a digital native’s enthusiasm for new technologies and a desire to disrupt the status quo have never been greater. That’s not enough to win in the long term, as I’ll explain later on, but that mindset is a prerequisite to being in the game.

In the last chapter, I talked about the lessons of West Virginia to show how any place can become a market leader at a point in time, and lose that status when it fails to get ahead of market shifts. In this chapter, I want to bring the focus back to the individual. Everyone has their own definition of leadership. For some of you, it might involve starting a company that will change the world. For others, it might mean becoming a decision maker in a major company that needs to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Some might want to build a career in politics or create momentum around a cause that really matters to them. No matter what your ambition, the foundation for success is not only your skills but your mindset. If you are curious, hungry to learn, audacious, and eager to seek out change, I’d bet on you before I’d bet on someone with a great set of skills but no vision for what’s possible, no appetite for what’s next, and no willingness to take bold moves.

Why am I so optimistic about the role digital natives will play in leading us through the next waves of disruption? They are prewired to seek out change and dare to get ahead of it. If you’re a CEO or the leader of any organization, you have four key responsibilities: (1) to set the vision and strategy of the organization; (2) to develop, recruit, retain, and replace the management team to execute that vision and strategy; (3) to create the culture; and (4) to communicate all of the above. How you fulfill those responsibilities will depend on everything from your industry to your personality, but it’s hard to succeed in any of them if you don’t start with the right mindset. You have to develop a capacity for filtering and evaluating the facts, the fears, the fiction, and the feedback that bombard you every day. When you see an opportunity, you act fast to figure out where the world is really going. Standing still is riskier than moving forward. If you wait until the trend is obvious, you’re already too late.

The next generation of leaders are more than just tech-savvy; they are brave and curious and hungry for new ideas. They’re too impatient to stand still. I’ve talked to a lot of teenagers over my career and I’ve never met one who is satisfied with the present. They’re all about the future and it can’t come fast enough for them. They want to do things differently from the people who are currently in charge. In fact, it’s their job to disrupt. Teenagers don’t seek incremental change. They want to turn the world upside down and make it their own. They’ll shake things up while juggling a dozen other things: doing homework, listening to music, texting friends, eating over their computer (even though you’ve told them not to), posting a video on YouTube, and then finding something funny to share while they’re at it. In a teenager, such instincts can be reckless and impulsive at times. Leaders can channel that mindset into a more structured framework and it can become a powerful predictor of success. If you’re looking for signs of disruption and change, you’re more likely to find them. If you want to tackle big problems, you have to take big risks and accept that there will be setbacks along the way.

It doesn’t matter how old you are. In fact, the first person who comes to mind when I think of a boundless curiosity and impatient mindset is the late Israeli leader Shimon Peres. He was inspiring, fearless, and even brash about solving big problems. He was also well into his 70s when we first met at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, 18 years ago. I thought he wandered into my session by mistake. I was used to seeing global leaders onstage, not in the audience. He was there to learn about new technologies and came up after the session to introduce himself and ask more questions. After we talked, he didn’t just move on to the next session. He wanted to follow up and start working together on a plan to bring the internet to every person in Israel. I couldn’t believe he was serious. Normally, these issues are discussed at the 30,000-foot level, especially in a place like Davos. Here was a man who liked what he heard and wanted to act on it as soon as possible. I came to realize that this was typical behavior for Shimon Peres: No matter how senior the position or how sensitive the topic, he always had an incredible thirst to learn, enthusiasm for what’s next, and a willingness to take risks. I think that’s why he was so good at sensing shifts in technologies and markets as well as in the public mood around key issues. It’s why Shimon Peres was a man who not only reinvented himself throughout his career but also played a key role in reinventing Israel. As he put it, “Through creativity and innovation, we transformed barren deserts into flourishing fields and pioneered new frontiers in science and technology.” In short, he transformed Israel into a startup nation. He taught me that the wisdom of experience and a teenage mindset are not mutually exclusive. Together, they can be incredibly powerful in driving and scaling innovation. We developed a friendship and a partnership that would last right up to his death at the age of 93.

I’ll never forget the night that Shimon came to dinner at my home in Palo Alto. (He never let me address him by anything other than his first name.) It was 2012 and he was the president of Israel. There had been an outbreak of violence along the Gaza Strip around that time, as well as speculation that Israel might attack a nuclear facility in Iran. So you can imagine the security concerns around having the Israeli president attend a dinner with CEOs, startup founders, venture capitalists, and other tech leaders at a home on the edge of a 1,400-acre public park. One evening a few days before his visit, Elaine and I looked out the window of our kitchen to see the foothills behind our house come alive with multiple lights going every which way. It was like a scene from E.T., complete with UFOs and military officials with flashlights, scouring the land for signs of life. Earlier, we had spotted a man jog past a clump of trees in short shorts and sneakers. I knew he had to be Israeli security. Nobody in Palo Alto would dress like that to go jogging at night. And yet if anyone felt tense at the sight of SWAT teams—not to mention security personnel from the state, local, and national governments of two countries—surrounding my property and snipers sitting on my roof, Shimon’s enthusiasm brushed that away. At 88, he was like a kid in a candy store, hungry to learn about new technologies and thrilled to be in Silicon Valley, which he described as “the brain of our time.” Within five minutes, every person at the table was taking notes.

When Shimon learned that I had an electric car, he immediately asked if he could drive it. I said yes, of course, though I mentioned to him that his security team had told me to keep him in one area of the house. Shimon’s response: “John, I’m the president and I want to drive the car.” As a group of us headed down to the garage to see the car, one of his aides came up and quietly informed me that he didn’t have a driver’s license. I immediately laughed and thought, well, this is really going to be interesting. And it was. Of all the threat scenarios that the Israeli secret service had prepared for, watching their president drive my electric car wasn’t one of them. For Shimon Peres, a man driven by curiosity and immune to fear, the real risk would have been to pass up a chance to be part of the future and to dream together with many of the current and future leaders of Silicon Valley.

This wasn’t a leader who was nostalgic about the past or worried about protecting what he’d built in the present. Shimon Peres was a dreamer who helped build Israel and devoted his life to promoting peace and prosperity throughout the Middle East. He once took me to visit upper Nazareth and lower Nazareth in a single day, meeting with Jews, Arabs, and Christians in each of these communities to talk about how technology could be an equalizer in life. People of all religions loved this man and, at times, disliked him for taking a bold stance. He had this baritone voice and easy humor that made him a memorable speaker, yet the thing that made him so compelling wasn’t how he communicated but what he communicated. He never missed an opportunity to bring people back to the big picture, to remind them of a bold ambition or a vision that was bigger than themselves. He once told me that leadership was lonely and he was right. When you’re willing to make big bets, play by different rules, and talk about dreams that seem unlikely to come true, you’re acting like a teenager. You could fall on your face. If you can then make those predictions come true, though, you have a chance to make history.

My empathy for the teenage mindset that Shimon embodied so well may stem from the fact that I consume data in a similar way, though for a very different reason. Growing up in the 1950s, it was clear early on that my brain was wired a little differently from other kids’ brains. I didn’t digest information in a linear way; I took in everything at once. I could go from A to B to Z with incredible speed, but going from A to B to C to D to E…to Z was almost painful. That became obvious when I was learning to read. I’d scroll through a page in reverse order, from right to left. I’d transpose letters and lose my place midway through a paragraph. I’d often mispronounce words. It didn’t matter that I was good at math or strong in sports. It didn’t matter how many evenings I spent reading with my mom and dad, or how many days I spent memorizing lines in class. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t get it.

Sixty years later, my hands still sweat when I think about what it was like to sit there in second or third grade as we went around the class, taking turns at reading aloud. When my turn came, I’d inevitably stumble and a few kids would laugh. I was a pretty good sport so I tried not to show how much it stung. But the memory stuck with me. Maybe that’s why some people consider me to be one of the “nice guys” in Silicon Valley. While I’ve been known to tease close friends, I don’t ridicule people. It doesn’t matter if they’re my fiercest competitor or my closest friend. No one deserves to be mocked or have negative things said about them. I remember the pain of feeling ridiculed. For a while, I even questioned my ability to learn. When I was diagnosed with a learning disability (later diagnosed as dyslexia), one teacher warned my parents that I might not make it through high school, let alone go to college. Luckily, my mom and dad didn’t share that bleak outlook. The message they gave me was that I was a bright kid who just needed to learn a different way. Even so, I understood that this was a disability I had to fight to overcome. In a linear environment, going from A to B to Z would hold you back.

It was only later that I recognized the unique strengths that came with being wired this way. While I’ve made plenty of mistakes over the years—and I’ll talk about some of them in this book—I’ve had a good track record at spotting the big trends in technology. Sometimes, I’ve moved too early. Sometimes, I’ve tried to do too much. At Cisco, I was able to navigate multiple market shifts that killed our competitors because we sensed shifts in markets and technologies long before our competitors. Those aren’t my words. That’s what Bronwyn Fryer and Thomas A. Stewart wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2008. The same piece described me as having a “nearly uncanny ability to survive downturns, see long-term trends, and identify market transitions.” Hey, I’ll take that! (Let’s just say that I’ve been called worse!) What I learned—that anyone can learn—is how to gather lots of data, step back, and connect the dots to see trends. In short, there is an advantage to a dyslexic way of thinking, which tends to make you think less in words than in pictures and graphs that take all the information in at once.

I’ve always had a knack for spotting patterns and then figuring out what’s likely to come next. I also happen to enjoy it. I love making bets. Just ask anyone who’s lost a dollar to me in Liar’s Poker or by betting on which elevator comes next. (I’m not invincible. Those elevators can be unpredictable!) The little bets are for fun: a toss of the coin or a dare to get the juices flowing. The big bets can make or break a company, reshape an economy, define a career. We made a lot of big bets at Cisco. You don’t acquire 180 companies and go from selling one product to 18 different product lines if you don’t have an appetite for risk. The difference with the Cisco bets is that I never felt I was defying the odds. In fact, it was just the opposite: In every move, I had a clear sense of where the market was going, what our competitors were doing, and what our customers wanted. Everyone else on my team did, too. What might have looked like a shot in the dark or an illogical move to others soon became a well-lit path for us. It’s not because we hired only dyslexics into leadership roles.

What differentiated Cisco’s approach was certainly a level of experience and maturity, though we sometimes hid that well. The bigger difference was that we had a shared mindset, a shared process if you will. More specifically, we developed a replicable innovation process that helped us find new ideas, try new things, move fast, and even break some glass—and then we synthesized that data to generate insights that helped us make smarter decisions. To be clear, this is about cultivating the right mindset and risk appetite for success. The No. 1 driver in how we developed products and grew our business was—and always should be—our customers. If we didn’t give them what they wanted or needed, plenty of competitors would have happily stepped in to serve their needs instead. I can share a lot of stories about how we developed products and talent and disrupted industries by working with customers in different ways, but our successes all hinged on trying to understand where the market was going and working with our customers to get there. You compete against market transitions, not against other companies. If you don’t stay focused on figuring out what’s happening in the market, it doesn’t matter if you win a few battles here or there. A new technology or business model will come along, and you’ll be left behind. Disruption can quickly lead to self-destruction if you misread the market and end up fighting the current.

The first step is to make sure that you’re truly taking a wide-angle view, collecting data from multiple players, and connecting those disparate data points to get a picture of how the market is shifting. Without really being aware of it, I’ve been crowdsourcing, pattern thinking, and beta testing my whole life. I seek insights and feedback from everyone, especially customers. I don’t pretend to be an expert in figuring out tomorrow’s needs in aviation and city design and food production but I know where to find them. I coach new leaders to collect data from customers, study competitors, seek out disrupters, and look at pertinent factors to get a sense of the big picture. Then, I zoom in on a few points to see what’s really moving the needle, pick some options to explore, and check in with customers again. It’s like a map. As more data comes in—customer feedback, engineering data, sales, the arrival of new players—the connections and trends become clearer. Once you understand how the market is changing, you can develop the right product and strategy for where the world’s going to be. That’s not a bet but a way to turn pattern thinking into a playbook. The facts are usually all there to let you figure out the big picture, if you know the right places to look. The issue is that people don’t always like what they see and feel threatened by it or even try to deny it.

I was ridiculed in 1997 for predicting that “voice will be free.” Not only were telephone calls the main source of profits and revenue for telecom companies—many of whom were my key customers—but government regulation and the amount of capital you’d needed to build a telecom infrastructure made it hard for any startup to compete. I wasn’t really looking at that space, however, because I felt the real competition was elsewhere: the internet. In the mid-1990s, it became possible to break down voice signals and transfer them like any other data from one computer to another. To me, this challenged the fundamental business model of every telecom company on the planet. Why use copper telephone wires if you could use Voice over Internet Protocol, aka VoIP? The technology was sure to improve and the cost difference was, to say the least, compelling. On the web, it costs about the same to send data across the street as it does to send it across the planet. Frankly, the same could be said of phone lines, too. Much like the internet, phone lines are a fixed cost. Whether you make a single call or 100 calls doesn’t really matter. The cost to the phone company is the same. There wasn’t really a technical reason to charge as much as a few dollars a minute for long-distance calls. Phone companies had been charging such prices because they could. There had been no meaningful alternative. With the internet, that was no longer true. To me, it was inevitable that voice calls would move to the web and be treated like any other form of data. As technology evolved, networks expanded, and consumer behavior changed, the trend became clear. The business model of long-distance carriers was about to be disrupted. The question was only how soon it would happen, and how the carriers would respond to losing their main source of profits and revenues.

These lessons are just as true at the government level as they are in business. The same process helped me to see a path for Emmanuel Macron to become the president of France long before he announced his run in late 2016. Most people considered him a long shot. The first time I met him, when he was economy minister for President François Hollande, I called up Elaine to say that I’d just met a future president of France. (By the way, he won the election, 65 percent to 35 percent.) My instincts had nothing to do with French party politics: Macron was, in my opinion, an economic and social reformer in a socialist government who ran as an independent. I was struck by what I was seeing in communities across France: a hunger for the kind of innovation that Macron had helped to stoke under Hollande, business leaders talking about inclusive growth, entrepreneurs lobbying to compete with the rest of the world instead of turning away from it, and media pundits arguing for the need to create inclusive wealth, not redistribute it. The people I met were dissatisfied with the status quo, but not in a way that made them fearful of outsiders or nostalgic for some romanticized view of the past. Macron was speaking the language of entrepreneurship and innovation in a nation that was becoming more entrepreneurial. If you only saw the restlessness, the threat of a nationalist victory might loom large. When you connected it to what people were saying and doing across France, it was hard for me to imagine a victory for anyone but Macron.

I don’t want to diminish the challenges. What the Harvard editors identified as one of my greatest strengths grew out of a weakness that I’ve struggled with my whole life. As I mentioned before, I was diagnosed with a learning disability at the age of eight. While researchers were starting to pay more attention to learning disabilities and how they affected kids’ brains in the 1950s, they didn’t understand dyslexia the way they do now. There was no support system in my public school to help me. Instead, my parents hired a “reading coach” named Lorene Anderson who worked with me after school for a couple of years to teach me new strategies. I owe a lot to Mrs. Anderson. In addition to being amazingly patient, she helped me identify my own learning style and develop strategies to compensate for my weaknesses. Like my parents, she made sure I knew that dyslexia had nothing to do with my intelligence or capacity to learn. I just had to tackle the information differently. She taught me to treat how I process letters as a curve ball that breaks the same way every time. Along with demystifying the problem, Mrs. Anderson found solutions that played to my strengths. Once I recognized the pattern, I could map out a strategy to use again and again.

Even so, it was a slow and painstaking process. There was no magic pill that could change the way my brain worked. I read backward and in reverse order. I had to figure out other ways to learn and find ways to work around the areas in which I was weak. I’ve learned to become a more active listener and more adept at communicating verbally, using voice, video, and texts to get my ideas across. When giving speeches, I don’t use notes. I accept that there are some things I will never be good at, which has made me a world-class delegator (and talent scout!) when it comes to tasks like preparing written material and translating concepts into a detailed step-by-step process. If I hadn’t learned to accept my weaknesses and complement my strengths early on, I would not have gone very far.

While I learned to deal with my dyslexia, I rarely talked about it. How many CEOs really want to admit that they struggle to read? I certainly didn’t view it as a strength. That changed about two decades ago when I spoke at an event for Cisco’s Take Your Children to Work Day. One little girl raised her hand to ask me a question but was unable to get out the words. As I listened to her struggle to make herself understood, I was immediately transported back to that classroom in West Virginia. My heart went out to her. When she tearfully stammered that she had a learning disability, I told her that I did, too. I walked her through all the things that Mrs. Anderson had taught me: slow down, take your time, don’t worry about what anyone else is thinking, just sound it out and focus on the concepts, realize that everyone else in the room has strengths and weaknesses, too. As I talked about my own strategies, I could see that I was helping her relax. Then I notice that the room was oddly silent. I paused for a second, realizing I’d just shared an intimate and little-known detail about my own life in front of 500 employees and their kids. Now, it was me who felt a bit nervous and embarrassed. I continued taking questions but, inside, I wondered if I might have shared too much.

When I got home that evening, there were several dozen messages from employees. Many just wanted to thank me for talking about my dyslexia. Some were employees who’d struggled with it themselves but had never shared that fact with their colleagues. Others were parents, trying to figure out what they could do to help a child. A lot of them were people who might have otherwise felt too intimidated to reach out to the CEO of Cisco. Here I was worried that my colleagues might think less of me for having a learning disability, and instead I found that they were complimenting me for my courage and my candor. I realized then the power of admitting my vulnerabilities and sharing my own story. Among other things, it demonstrated the power of surrounding yourself with a team that balances your weaknesses and complements your strengths.

As I grew more comfortable with talking about my dyslexic way of thinking, it became clear that the way I processed data had actually helped me as a business leader. My brain is naturally wired to visualize vast amounts of data and draw connections at a fast pace. I can absorb the details of what’s going on around me—the chatter, the personalities, the activity on the sidelines—and still remain focused on the task at hand. I’m constantly asking questions to fill in gaps and find out more. It’s more like plotting a graph than plotting a story. The concept of “information overload” is something I’ve never experienced. What I see kids buy in Silicon Valley might bring to mind what a political leader told me in Jordan a month earlier, and one of our sales leaders reinforced. Each anecdote becomes a point of comparison in the broader landscape, creating a visual map. When I came across research that suggests dyslexics are often better able to detect patterns in complex sets of data, it didn’t surprise me. I’d always been good at connecting the dots and at the same time very aware of my weaknesses.

After years of encouraging people to develop expertise in a particular subject, we’re starting to recognize the benefits of teaching people to be agile learners who can connect the dots. It’s a particularly important trait to develop if you aspire to leadership. The impact of trends and technologies is a puzzle that’s hard for anyone to figure out. An ability to grasp the big picture and see how different trends intersect is a key skill in picking the right path to pursue. Maybe that’s why more than a fifth of CEOs are dyslexic. To create brands like Virgin, Charles Schwab, JetBlue, Ikea, CNN, Ford, or The Body Shop, you need to spot opportunities that others don’t see, pay attention to what’s around you, and think outside of the box.

It’s hard to connect the dots if you don’t know where to look or whom to trust. The first step is to focus on the big picture and the possible end result. Instead of trying to synthesize facts and organize your argument like you’re going to present it in a written report, try to visualize everything as pictures or a graph. Where are the clusters? Are common themes emerging? What matters is the trend and the links that you find. Pay attention to broader shifts in the market, especially where two or more are related, and seek out data or experts to fill in the gaps. As new information comes in, step back and try to put it in the context of the bigger picture.