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

The challenge is to figure out what matters. The volume of data at our disposal is already dizzying and, as more things get connected to the internet, that flow of information could become a flood. You have to learn to distinguish between what Nate Silver calls the signal and the noise. He’s the statistician who famously predicted the results of the 2008 presidential election in all but one state. Silver said he just looked at the data and the answers were right there. It probably helped that, unlike some pollsters, he wasn’t invested in the outcome. All of us can come up with examples of the age-old art of lying with statistics. It’s easy to find facts that tell a story that isn’t true. It doesn’t have to be deliberate; data can be deceiving, especially when you’re looking for “proof” that supports your point of view or protects your business model.

I learned early on that people can see the same events differently, especially during a crisis. When I was around 11, I saw a girl fall off the 10-foot diving board at our community pool. I just happened to be looking as she slipped and grabbed the right side of the handrail with her right hand, which made her body swing under the board as she lost her footing and landed on her back with her feet facing the pool. I remember those details like it was yesterday, in part because I was alone in recalling them. I listened to at least a dozen other people explain what happened, and none of them saw it the same way. One witness said she slid through the steps, which seemed physically impossible. Another remembered her falling to the ground and then rolling in pain underneath the diving board. Everyone was talking over each other to explain what had happened, and none of it sounded like what I’d seen, or even possible. You can’t slide through the steps of a diving board. She couldn’t have hit her head from the angle that she fell. When I turned to my dad to complain that everyone else had it wrong, he said I was probably right because I was in a good spot to see everything and wasn’t caught up in the emotion of the moment. “That’s why you’ve got to stay calm in a crisis.”

It’s also why you want to seek multiple perspectives, especially from customers, and cross-reference them as new facts come in. The best filter for judging is to look at the source. I always put a premium on data that I get from customers because they’re on the front lines and are critical partners in deciding where to place our bets. Of the 180 acquisitions we did at Cisco and the dozen startups and young CEOs that I’m investing in and mentoring now, I can tell you what one or two customers said that convinced me to make the decisions I made.

That’s why the second component of thinking like a dyslexic is to be curious. That sounds easy, doesn’t it? A lot of leaders would say they’re curious. I can tell you from personal experience that most leaders are not. They don’t ask a lot of questions, rarely challenge conventional wisdom, stick with what they know, and often turn to sources that reinforce their existing point of view. Maybe that’s why I notice the people who are genuinely curious about the world around them. This isn’t some rare trait that you either possess or you don’t. Everyone is capable of cultivating their curiosity. We all used to be curious. As kids, we’re brimming with curiosity. We explore new places, get lost, try new things, climb trees, fall down, accept dares. It never stops. We ask questions and we don’t always care who gives us the answer. We just want to know it, then we file it away, and go off to do something else.

As we get older, though, curiosity starts to diminish. All of a sudden, we’re the ones who are supposed to have the answers. We worry about looking dumb or ill-informed. We don’t want to offend people or step on any toes. We seek expertise in a form that feels familiar to us and are taught to impress each other rather than learn from each other. Sometimes, we don’t even want to know what someone else thinks in case we don’t like what they’ll say. We’re not seeking feedback. We’re looking for reinforcement. You don’t become enlightened that way, and you miss most new opportunities.

I encourage all types of leaders—CEOs of multinational corporations, young entrepreneurs starting their first company, or global government leaders—to ask customers and citizens how they feel about their products or platform but also to go one step further. Get to know customers as people and find out what’s on their minds. What are they keeping an eye on? Where are they investing their time and resources? Who’s on their radar and why? What keeps them up at night? Talk to colleagues and friends and even people you meet on the street. Listen. If you can’t think of a follow-up question, then there’s a good chance that you weren’t listening. Have an agenda. When I’m in other countries, I’m often curious to see how people are using technology and what kinds of businesses they’re starting. I constantly ask people for advice on what I can be doing better. One question I ask of the leaders I meet is what’s the most important lesson they’ve learned during their career. For Shimon Peres, who was one of the most optimistic and social leaders I’ve ever met, it was realizing that leadership is lonely, especially in tough times. You have to have the courage to stand alone.

Look at the data. While customers are usually your best sources for understanding what’s happening, don’t just rely on your gut or go with what everyone is telling you to do. Analyze the data. We collect and analyze data across different markets and industries to look for patterns and aberrations that might suggest something is going on. The more you can standardize the process, the more you can cross-reference what you find and make accurate comparisons. Data might not tell you why something is happening, but it does tell you what’s going on. When Cisco was knocked flat by the dot-com crash, the first warning signal came from the data. Within days, orders suddenly dried up. At the same time, though, the data had been telling us that everything was okay just weeks before. The reason was that our customers had been acting like everything was okay, placing orders and making projections that were at odds with the reality of what was going on.

That’s why you can never use data alone in making decisions. You need to run it by the experts who see this stuff and live it every day. They use the equipment. They know what’s normal and what’s not. If you want a broad view on what it all means, bring in people with broader cross-functional roles, perspectives, and networks. While they might not have specific subject expertise, they often have an edge in finding insights because it’s their job to look at the big picture. If you want a reality check on what you’re seeing, though, go with the experts: your customers.

Let me give you two examples that have nothing to do with business. The first comes from Paul Guzzi, a former colleague at Wang Laboratories and a strong Democrat who’d spent the first part of his career in Massachusetts state politics, including four years as Secretary of the Commonwealth. During the 1988 presidential election, Paul and I were at a customer meeting in Chicago and started talking with a hotel doorman about the various candidates. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis had a double-digit lead in the polls at that point, but the doorman told the two of us that he planned to vote for George Bush. As we were leaving, Paul turned to me and said, “Bush is going to win.” It seemed like a bold prediction to make off a sample size of one. But Paul viewed this man as what I’d consider to be a subject expert: a lifelong Democrat who clearly cared about the issues that were the foundation of Dukakis’s campaign. The doorman was also African American, and black voters traditionally vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. If he felt that the governor was not effective on those policies, the odds were high that many of his peers felt the same way. For Paul, who had probably talked to thousands of voters over his career, the doorman’s comments were telling and signaled a profound shift in the big picture. He’d been seeing other data that suggested a pattern of vulnerability for Dukakis and this clinched it. While the early polls may have considered Dukakis a shoo-in, Bush won. While the doorman might or might not have predicted Bush’s win, Paul did. He connected the dots and knew what to look for.

Many years later, Elaine and I were in a limousine and started talking politics with our driver, who was African American. Donald Trump had recently become the Republican candidate and I was curious to know what the driver thought of him. It turned out he was planning to vote for Trump. He knew about Trump’s record on race relations and wasn’t sure if Trump’s policies were as likely to hurt him as help, but he was fed up with the establishment in Washington and was willing to take a risk. Much like the doorman in Massachusetts, his support was a powerful data point that conventional wisdom might turn out to be wrong. As I talked to more people on my travels, it became clear to me that Trump was winning support across party lines, which was not yet showing up in the polls. So when former Bloomberg TV anchor Cory Johnson asked me to pick the likely winner at a summit in May 2016, I said, “If you had to bet on momentum right now, candidly it’s going to be Trump.” Hillary Clinton was leading in most polls and I ended up breaking my own record as a Republican to vote for her on election night, but I could see that the pattern pointed to a victory for Trump. Whether that would be good for the country was beside the point. This was the reality of what was going on, and many people didn’t see it coming.

You might think that it’s easier to spot data and connect the patterns today. After all, we have a world of information and artificial intelligence at our fingertips. I think it’s actually becoming much more difficult. Greater access to content has made it easier for people to seek out news that reinforces their existing point of view. Instead of using technology to connect with other cultures, we increasingly connect with people who remind us of ourselves and reinforce what we already know. We filter the world through our “friends” and lose faith in our institutions. It’s easy to see why. Elections that could be more transparent and democratic in the digital age instead seem more vulnerable to manipulation and even hacking. Journalists can be as partisan as the people they cover and, even when they’re not, get accused of peddling unreliable news. Leaders whose countries could be hubs of innovation instead give in to fear and resentment, worsening the problems they promised to fix. More information doesn’t make us more informed.

That’s why it’s so important to get outside your comfort zone and talk to people who don’t cross your path every day—at the end of the day, we all need to remain as curious as we were as teenagers. That might sound like strange advice in a business book but I can tell you that my curiosity about things I don’t understand has been a critical factor in my success as a leader. It’s easier to spot opportunities and changes when you’re on the outside. That’s why teenagers can be so effective at spotting the next big thing. They have very limited power so they’re more inclined to look beyond the people in charge. Your product looks different through the eyes of different consumers. Sometimes, you get the best advice from people who aren’t your friends and, in fact, might actually be your rivals. I always listen to my critics and pay attention to the people who are trying to disrupt my industry. If you never feel uncomfortable or out of your element, you’re not likely to innovate in a meaningful way. There has to be some discomfort to be creative.

Being dyslexic probably gave me a head start. I was not comfortable in school. In fact, I found it to be really tough in the early years. Learning to cope with a learning disability is hard work. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking otherwise. I graduated from high school toward the top of my class, but it wasn’t because the words looked less jumbled on a page. I had to work through it and around it to learn what I needed to know. I was lucky to have my parents and Mrs. Anderson in my corner. Even so, I faced hours and hours of frustration, trying different techniques until something stuck. I love Mrs. Anderson but I do not look back on those years of tutoring with fondness. I hated going to those sessions. They were hard, but they did help me to develop a work ethic that’s stuck with me to this day. If you read about others who’ve reached their goals with dyslexia, whether it’s Virgin founder Richard Branson or Charles Schwab, you see that same drive and willingness to put in the hours. Once you’ve faced dyslexia, conquering other challenges can seem more manageable. You learn that you can achieve tough goals if you persevere. You understand your own limitations and learn to tap the talents of others to complement the areas in which you’re weak. That kind of persistence can come from having to overcome any number of challenges in life. What it does is make you realize that there are no easy answers. When one customer tells me that they like a company, it’s one data point to consider. If I rushed out to buy the company based on one recommendation, I’d probably be a fool. Sometimes you have to dig and be patient and go back again and again to get the right result.

When you visualize networks in your head, you often end up creating similar networks on the ground. If you can make sense of seemingly chaotic data points to create understanding, you will be rewarded. The network is more powerful than any one part. At Cisco, we created open platforms and networks of products that we organized into “architectures” to help people achieve certain solutions. We had networks of suppliers to build and take those products to customers, as well as networks of partners to achieve common goals that we couldn’t reach alone.

The power of your network is not just the number of people or devices connected to it, but also the strength that you create and derive from that network that gives you all those data points in a way that lets you make better decisions. A lot of what you see on LinkedIn or Facebook are fragile networks in which many of the connections are between relative strangers. Convincing hundreds of people to accept your LinkedIn request doesn’t indicate a deep network, and neither does the number of Twitter followers, especially now that we know that kind of volume can be bought. You can really only see the strength of a network when it’s put to the test. Do people come through on requests? Can you mobilize the network to take action on a shared goal? Are there multiple links between people within the network or are they all linked through you? The most resilient networks are bound together by a tremendous sense of trust. When I go to talk about a new product concept to a major customer in the Middle East and he cuts me short to say, “John, I believe in your vision because I believe in you,” that’s trust. When a stranger asks to connect on LinkedIn or someone adds you as their 4,743rd “friend” on Facebook, I suspect the bond is very loose, if it even exists at all.

How do you walk into an unfamiliar situation and connect the dots? The short answer is that you prepare. I’ve been very lucky in my career and I’ve found that the more prepared I am, the luckier I seem to get. The more I know about the people I’m about to meet, the better questions I’m able to ask and the better the products we’re able to build or buy. I use the same strategy for every trip, every event, and every customer meeting that I’ve done over the last 25 years. It’s based on a playbook developed by my assistant Debbie Gross, which is another reason I couldn’t have run the company without her. She or another member of the communications team created a briefing book organized to follow the flow of each day and each event or meeting. It contained bios of every person I was scheduled to meet, data on what Cisco was doing for that client or their community, background clips related to our presence in that community, and observations from the local team, as well as a summary of our objectives for every meeting, and any other context I might need. To this day, if I’m going to speak, my briefing notes are in the playbook, too. It’s organized in such a way that I can dive into the specifics of each person and event while tying that data back to the big-picture objectives. Think of it as a replicable innovation playbook for meetings that’s enabled me to get dramatically more value out of each interaction. What it does is allow me to better tailor my insights to connect with whomever I’m talking with.

I hadn’t realized how ingrained that habit had become until Elaine pointed it out. She’s not just my wife but also my most trusted friend and my toughest critic, so when she gives me a compliment, I rarely forget it. After one dinner several years ago, she remarked on how much effort I had put into finding an area of interest to connect with each person at the dinner that night. She was right. I wanted to arrive, armed with stories and contacts and strategies to connect with everyone I was about to meet. Not only did it make for a better evening, but I also walked away with new ideas and connections I’ve maintained to this day.

One final thought I’d offer if you want to really learn to look at the world like a dyslexic is to let down your guard and be humble. As a general rule, leaders are not a humble bunch. It takes confidence to lead people and a certain degree of cockiness to make tough decisions when there are smarter people in the room who disagree. (Believe me, there almost always are.) You have to connect with them on an emotional level. You don’t do that by dazzling them with your talents. You share a part of who you are. Talking about dyslexia made me more relatable for a lot of people, as did my willingness to make fun of myself—whether it was being the brunt of my own jokes onstage or a voice of comfort in a crisis.

As a leader, you might not think that you’re intimidating to people. Believe me, to many out there, you are. You might be intimidating to the people you hire, or to the ones who hired you. If you’re young, you may be intimidating to older people and vice versa. You can intimidate people because of your gender, your skin color, your accent, your clothing, your title, and any number of other factors that might seem ridiculous. That doesn’t mean you have to change who you are. But it does means you need to connect on more than just a superficial level if you want to get honest answers. You must be willing to emotionally connect with people—to really listen to their challenges and share your stories, too. If you only ask questions and don’t give any answers, you’re not enriching the other person.

One of the leaders who really convinced me of the importance of letting down my guard was Sheryl Sandberg. We were at a conference, shortly after she had written her groundbreaking book Lean In. As chief operating officer at Facebook, Sheryl could have written several books on her successes. Instead, she wrote about the roadblocks she faced as a woman trying to build a career while having a family. At Cisco, we’d done a very good job, especially versus our peers, on promoting gender equality in our workforce, senior management team, and board of directors. However, Lean In reminded me that we could do so much more. I required everyone on our leadership team (our top 3,000 leaders) to read the book before having Sheryl come over to speak. Our challenge was getting the men to lean in, not the women. It’s easy to talk about diversity in the abstract. Once you bring it down to a personal level, attitudes change, and it has to start at the top. In 2015, Sheryl’s husband, Dave Goldberg, died suddenly while they were on vacation. She could have retreated into her grief but instead opened up about the impact of Dave’s death on her and their two young children, once again helping many others facing similar tragedies in their lives.

It reinforced the power of sharing our stories, strategies, challenges, and fears and in recognizing how our own behavior is influenced by our life experience. Will that ultimately make it easier to get the kinds of insights to see where the world’s going and connect on both an intellectual and emotional level with your team? I believe the answer is absolutely yes, and great cultures create healthy conversations on strategic issues for your company and the world.

LESSONS/REPLICABLE INNOVATION PLAYBOOK

Focus on the big picture. Pay attention to broader shifts in technology and the market, especially when they occur at the same time. As you learn to connect the dots, pattern recognition becomes easier.

Be curious. Look for ways to data-mine across multiple industries and people. Seek out reliable sources for what’s happening in different markets and adjacent industries.

Get outside your comfort zone. Think like a teenager. Your goal is to shake things up and see what others have missed. Try to shed preconceived notions that lead you to familiar conclusions.

Treat every customer and every encounter as an opportunity to gather data and learn. Where are they investing and what are they worried about?

Look for industry disruptors to understand the market gaps they’ve identified, the threats that are emerging, and the opportunities to disrupt in other areas.

Compare and contrast. Are common themes bubbling up? Align what you’re hearing with the data that you see and then make a bold bet.

Have the courage to share your concerns and have healthy debates. Open up to your team on both a business and a personal emotional level.

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

DREAM BIG AND BE BOLD…FOCUS ON THE OUTCOME (#u619fc447-1b55-5315-b003-e71858c6f92f)

(Play out the Entire Chess Game Before You Make the First Move) (#u619fc447-1b55-5315-b003-e71858c6f92f)

I’ve been criticized at numerous times in my career for being too big a dreamer, moving too fast, or being too ambitious in describing what could be achieved. I would argue the opposite. Almost every mistake I’ve made was because I didn’t move fast enough or dream big enough. I have zero regrets about my bold moves, even the ones that failed. My only wish is that I’d made even more and bolder bets, which is what I’m doing now in working with startups and helping their leaders to grow and scale their businesses. As Carlos Dominguez, my former colleague and president of Sprinklr once put it: “You can’t dip your toe in the water with John. You either jump in or you stay out.” He’s right. I don’t believe in half measures. That’s not how you win. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make in business is that they don’t dare to imagine a bold outcome and understand what they need to do to achieve it. Whether you run a coal mine in West Virginia or own a taxicab in New York, you do not get ahead of disruption by making a few iterative moves. You start by disrupting yourself. You establish a bold and inspiring outcome and both anticipate and maximize the conditions to achieve that outcome. It’s a process that I still use today, whether I’m betting on robotic cricket farming to create a versatile mass-market protein to help solve world hunger or investing in technology that provides perimeter protection from drones and other unmanned vehicles.

The ability to imagine a bold outcome and set audacious goals to achieve it is not so much a personality trait as a mind-set. Two of the most visionary thinkers I know are John Doerr and Marc Andreessen. Both are legendary venture capitalists: John was an early investor in Amazon and Google, while Marc took a bet on startups likes Facebook and Instagram. Their personalities are quite different. Among other things, Marc is a technologist at heart while John tends to focus more on business outcomes. However, both are big-picture thinkers who want to empower innovators and change the world. They care about issues bigger than their own interests and constantly play out the long-term impact of current trends to figure out what matters most right now—and why.

I’ve had an opportunity to watch both of them in action over the years. I started working with John more than 20 years ago when we jointly founded TechNet as a national, bipartisan network of tech leaders to promote policies and initiatives that foster innovation. Both of us realized that Silicon Valley was disorganized when it came to dealing with Washington, which meant we were punching below our weight in terms of having a voice there. Flying in once a year to complain about the various ways in which government is screwing up was not a winning strategy. We needed to engage on a more meaningful long-term level. It’s how John operates with all his portfolio managers, helping them to stay focused on the audacious and achievable goals.

Marc takes a similar approach. He is a bold visionary who is not afraid to take on conventional wisdom and even rattle people from time to time. He reached out many years ago during the early days of Netscape. Cisco actually owned the trademark Netscape name at that point, and I gave it to them for free. We had no use for it, and I believe in being generous when I can. Among other things, generosity might one day open the door to a deeper relationship, which it did. (We also owned the iPhone and IOS trademark names but I didn’t just give those away to Steve Jobs at Apple, in part because we were already using them.)

I’m now working with both John and Marc through JC2 Ventures, where I can tap their expertise as investors, and they have asked me to help in coaching their CEOs. The goal isn’t to help them set more achievable goals but instead to dream bigger—and then make it happen.

Mario Mazzola, one of the greatest entrepreneurs and engineering leaders I have ever known, likes to tease me sometimes by leaning over and, in his baritone Sicilian accent, solemnly offering up a piece of wisdom like, “You know, John, vision and strategy are for the amateurs. Execution is for the professionals.”

He’s kidding, of course, or at least half kidding. Mario is one of the most visionary thinkers I’ve met, not to mention one of the most effective in bringing that vision to life. He illustrates what I’m talking about. Not only does Mario think 5 or 10 years ahead when it comes to developing products, he takes a similar long-term view when hiring and managing people. Any time Mario has come to me with a game-changing product idea, he’s already mapped out the resources and timeline needed to get it done, a plan for how to launch and scale it, and an often prescient assessment of the impact it will have on not just the company but the industry as a whole. He’s part of a team that has generated unprecedented innovation for Cisco, creating eight product families across multiple business lines that each generate more than $1 billion in revenue a year. Crescendo Communications, the company that he cofounded with fellow engineers Prem Jain and Luca Cafiero, was Cisco’s first acquisition in 1993. It took the company from selling a single product, the router, into a new line of network devices called switches that became Cisco’s largest business and transformed how we sold to customers. Mario, Prem, Luca, and a brilliant engineer and marketer named Soni Jiandani collectively became known simply as “MPLS”—a play on their first names and a popular networking technique that we helped to develop.

The team became legendary for its ability to attract Silicon Valley’s top talent to work on projects that disrupted and then dominated an industry segment. In terms of speed, disruption, and the ability to transform audacious goals into profitable products, MPLS was unbeatable. To compare them to NBA champions is to do them a disservice. When you create products that become market leaders in areas as diverse as switching, storage, servers, and software-defined networking, that’s more like moving between the NBA, NFL, NHL, and Major League Baseball without missing a beat. If we had not acquired Crescendo in 1993, Cisco might not have become the world’s leading network and internet company. We passed up a chance to merge with a bigger, stronger, and better-known company and instead agreed to pay almost $95 million for one that was barely selling $10 million a year. It was a bold bet. Cisco stock took a hit. Many of the board members didn’t like it, either, and I put my job on the line to make it happen. If the deal had fallen through, as it nearly did, I almost certainly would not have stayed on to become Cisco’s next CEO, as planned.

I don’t bring this up as proof of my skills in spotting winners, though I’m happy to pretend I have a sixth sense for this stuff. I bet my career on four people I didn’t know and a technology I hadn’t tried because we shared a bold vision for how together we could transform an industry, and I could see they had the talent, brain power, and audacity to achieve those goals. While Mario and I may have different strengths, both of us focus relentlessly on outcomes and try to maximize the conditions for achieving those outcomes. When I take bold bets, I never make rash moves or think in individual transactions. Everything is connected. It’s how my brain works. It also happens to be effective.

To me, vision, strategy, and execution are like a chess game—a multidimensional, multiplayer chess game that’s being played with tremendous speed and interdependencies. Before I make a move, I play out the entire game in my head, and then I replay it under different scenarios, forward and backward, in order to anticipate not only my moves but the moves of others in the game. If you do that, you learn to anticipate the hurdles and see different ways to achieve the outcome you want. You also learn to recognize when an outcome is no longer achievable and make a decision to either change your strategy or even to concede the game and move on to another opportunity. To do that, you need to have first played out the game to the end, learn as much as you can about the other possible players to anticipate their actions—your possible countermoves—and build your strategy around the outcome you desire.

For Mario and the Crescendo team, this approach also inspired an unusual concept known as the “spin-in.” That’s an independent startup, launched with seed money from Cisco, that would enable the MPLS team to recruit and incentivize top talent to work on a breakthrough technology and turn it into a developed product that would be sold back to Cisco, assuming it was successful. We did this three times, the first one delivering a billion-dollar-a-year product and subsequent ones each delivering multibillion-dollar-a-year products that were transformative for our portfolio and enabled entrance into adjacent markets. Could these products have been developed through the usual research and development channels? Maybe, but I don’t believe the pace would have been as fast or the ambitions as bold. Could Mario, Prem, Luca, and Soni have left to launch their own startup and made much more money? Definitely. Then we might not have had technology focused on filling our needs or first dibs on the results. What mattered to all of us was the outcome. To achieve big dreams, you have to take bold bets and focus on clear outcomes.

In the previous chapter, I talked about the power of crowdsourcing multiple data points to get a better picture of patterns and trends. The most powerful source of data for me is always my customers. Further, the most powerful incentive for taking any bet is the customer. If my customer is interested in something new, I immediately become interested, too. Crescendo wasn’t even on my radar until Ford Motor Company started talking about how this little company had developed a “Fast Ethernet” technology that let you send large amounts of data over copper telephone wires at really high speeds. I had never heard of Fast Ethernet, but I knew about switches. These were the devices that connected computers, printers, and servers into a local area network that our more complex routers would then connect to the internet. As technology was evolving and networks became more interconnected, I felt the two product lines would either become more integrated or one would displace the other.

A few weeks later, I was with a customer at Boeing who started to talk about the switching technology of the future. “Let me guess,” I said. “Fast Ethernet.” My customer was surprised that I was already aware of the new technology. As with any good sales call, I then asked what we had to do to secure a $10 million order that we were trying to get. It could be mine, the Boeing executive said, if Cisco bought Crescendo and included their technology in the deal. Now, I was really motivated to find out more—and fast.

As the signals of a market transition increase, the need to take action becomes more urgent. As I thought about how this race to get scale would end up—essentially writing our own press release on the desired outcome—it became clear to me that acquiring Crescendo would not only break us away from the pack but also serve as the foundation for Cisco’s growth for the next decade. This was a market transition that, if we executed right, would allow us to leave our competitors and even our peers behind, and represented potentially a once-in-a-lifetime chance to lead the industry for the foreseeable future. As networks were becoming more complex, customers were struggling to connect a large number of vendors with different strategies and products that were not designed to work together. Suddenly, we would be able to provide the best router and the best switches, both designed to work together from one vendor. If we did this the right way, it was truly game over, although it clearly would require solid execution to make this vision and strategy work. This was clearly my decision with strong input from other members of the leadership team, one that, if it worked, would make the CEO position a given. If it didn’t, I would be held accountable for the results, as I should be. While this was clearly risky in most people’s opinion, once I’d played out the chess game in my mind, I had no doubt that it would work and was committed to making it happen and leading the industry.