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

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      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, СКАЧАТЬ